The trend of the teens

Front matter

aass_LBM£

The Parent's Library

Nine Volumes, Uniformly Bound. 12 mo. Cloth. Per Volume, $1.50

Foreword

Tko anthor of this volume has served for many years as educational director of M other ^s Magazine and Home Life and also as chairman of the department of education of the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations. During these years he has discussed a large number of problems of child training with parents and teachers whom he has addressed, and who have taken advantage of the opportunity offered by the Personal Service Bureau of Mother's Magazine and Home Life to seek counsel and assistance in the rearing of their children. They have freely sought the author's advice and they have given him their experiences in employing various methods in the instruction and discipline of their children. It has been his custom to select the more fundamental and important questions asked by parents and teachers and submit them for investigation to groups of advanced students engaged in the study of child nature and education. It has generally turned out that the author has made practical suggestions to those who have consulted him, and they have in most cases made a trial of these suggestions and have

8 FOREWORD

reported the results to the author. In this way a great many concrete instances illustrating characteristic traits of childhood and youth have been accumulated, and the outcome of different methods of dealing with them has been accurately recorded. In the preparation of this volume the author has chosen for discussion the more vital of the problems which have been treated in the manner indicated, and he has suggested how these may best be solved under the conditions existing in different types of homes, schools and communities.

The author has kept constantly in mind that most parents and teachers are neither familiar with nor interested in technical psychology, biology, or hygiene. They are concerned with the immediate and pressing problems of guiding children in their intellectual, physical, ethical and temperamental development. They wish to understand why children act in certain ways and how they can most effectively divert them from wrong action. Parents and teachers are so engrossed with the concrete activities of childhood and youth that they have little time to consider academic questions pertaining either to the nature of children or to their training; and consequently the author has avoided practically all merely theoretical exposition in this volume. He has confined the discussion throughout to typical situations which confront most parents continually

FOREWORD 9

in the upbringing of their children. He has used terms which can be understood by those who have had little or no study of psychology, physiology and related sciences, though the suggestions for child training given herein are based upon data derived from these sciences.

The author has not allowed himself to forget at any time that this book is designed for practitioners who are every hour face to face with childhood and youth in the concrete, and who are training their children in some way whether right or wrong. He has undertaken the difficult task of applying science to practice without leading the practitioner over the technical ground upon which the practice is based. It would have been a simpler matter to have dwelt principally in the realm of theory and only occasionally to have made practical application of scientific principles.

This is one of a series of four volumes prepared for the Parent's Library. These volumes supplement one another and are published simultaneously. The title of each indicates that? it deals with particular phases of the training of childhood and youth but it has been written with relation to the others in the series. The titles of the four volumes are: ''First Steps in Child Training"; ''Faults of Childhood and Youth"; ' ' The Trend of the Teens " ; " Every-day Problems in Child Training."

The reader should bear in mind that the aim

10 FOREWORD

throughout eaxjh and all of these books has been to make the discussion intelligible and practical by presenting typical traits of childhood as exhibited in the ordinary situations of daily life, and then endeavoring to explain these traits and to indicate how they should be dealt with when they are not in accord with the requirements of life in the home, in the school and in the community.

M. V. O'Shba.

The University of Wisconsin.

TABLE OF CONTBNTS

CHAPTER

PA6E

I The Ceucial Age 13

II Boy Problems 38

III Girl Problems 65

IV When the Tender Passion Appears 95

V Distractions in American Life 141

VI The Role op the Father in the Training

OP Youth 1^^

VII The Government of Youth 189

VIII Questions Frequently Asked by Parents

AND Teachers 220

IX Books for Parents • -264

Chapter I

The Seven Ages of Man. — Of the seven ages of man, youth is without doubt the most important, the most significant, the most difficult to comprehend and to handle. So men must have always felt, for the literature of the world is burdened with the story of this epoch, reciting its excesses, its passions, its madnesses, as well as its glories and its posibilities. The very term *' youth" is for many of us synonymous with joy, gladness, exhilaration, courage, hope, endurance — all that makes life fresh and enjoyable and promising, as well as unstable and erratic. ** Youth holds no society with grief," says Euripides. The artist who wishes to portray lightheartedness or optimism or daring chooses youth as his symbol. The reformer, too, realizes that if he would get his cause adopted he must appeal to youth, for then all is plastic and possible. Then vision is turned forward and upward. The youth longs for a new order of things — for novel experiences. The old and familiar are too tame and commonplace to interest him. The blood of youth is fired with the desire for discovery in every field of interest and action. But the mature man dislikes a changing world, because this requires him continually to readjust himself, which comes hard when the bones have got their set, so to speak. As Bacon puts it, — "Young men are fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business. ' ' So, too, with Shakespeare:

''For youth no less becomes The light and careless livery that it wears. Than settled age his sables, and his weeds Importing health and graveness." Again, the corrupter of youth, the flatterer, as Plutarch calls him, is also aware that youth is the time for him to make his appeal. Now the com and the weeds, the wheat and the tares are springing up together. All sorts of seeds are sown in the soul, and when the warmth and moisture of adolescence comes they are ready to start into life. If the weeds and tares are nourished they will thrive, and the corn and wheat will be choked out, and the flatterer knows this. He understands that if the weeds do not get a start now they can not gain much strength when the springtime is past, and the heat of the summer is reached.

Youth Among Primitive People. — Not only have the seers of all times appreciated that youth is a period of regeneration, the epoch when the spirit is bom, but nature men have appreciated the same fact, as their ceremonials show. They have observed that there is an age when the boy is being transformed into a man and the girl into a woman with extraordinary rapidity, and they must be given some serious lessons which will make them ready for their new duties. Savage life is above all else a life of physical hardship; it is in unceasing conflict with crude nature. The savage is like an animal among other animals, hunting and being hunted, and there are certain special qualities which he must possess if he would succeed in the struggle. He must endure physical pain without a murmur. He must go for long periods without food. He must face danger without flinching. Eastman in his ''Indian Boyhood" tells us very vividly how when the Indian boy shows the first symptoms of adolescent upheaval he is subjected to severe treatment to test his staying qualities, and to impress upon him the fundamental ideals of his race. The boy's teeth are knocked out, blood is drawn from his skin, long fasting is required, and grave dangers must be faced.

Familiar Adolescent Phenomena. — Any one who has lived with children passing through this epoch must have observed the rapid outward changes that take place, — the remodeling of the features, the expansion of the chest, the alteration of the voice, and the like. Recent investigation is in a way confirming what people have casually observed in their dealing with adolescent boys and girls. To begin with, hundreds of thousands of children in our own country and abroad have been carefully weighed and measured from infancy to maturity, and the results show markedly accelerated growth during two or three years at the onset of . adolescence. The bones often feel the impetus of growth first, and spring forward more rapidly than the muscles which are attached to them, and this sometimes produces uneasiness in the individual, or even pains," — ''growing" pains. The heart soon responds and its working power is increased, so that the needs of the rapidly expanding organism may be properly attended to. The lungs increase rapidly; the digestive system is affected; and indeed every vital process seems to feel the stir of new life, as it were. The brain could not, of course, remain dormant while all the other organs were undergoing metamorphosis. It is the last to receive the adolescent stimulus, but the change is most profound when it does come. The cerebral tissues are more plastic at this time than they were before or will be afterward, due to the fact, possibly, that there is an unusually large proportion of water in the composition of brain cells. Cerebral areas that have lain dormant up until this time now make ready for functioning. So there are other profound changes which really

THE CRUCIAI. AGE 17

make adolescence a kind of second birth spiritually.

The First Effect of Adolescent Development. — We should expect that the effect of this influx of new life would manifest itself in heightened activity in every direction. If we may trust the testimony of poets and ordinary observers, this is generally the case; yet there is a certain sense in which quite the opposite seems to be true. Present-day conceptions of the physical organism as a device for generating and expending energy leads us to the view that activity and growth are under certain conditions antagonistic processes. When an organ is expanding with extraordinary rapidity it cannot expend as relatively large an amount of energy in action as under normal conditions. It may become more responsive to stimulation, but it cannot endure so long in any activity making heavy drafts on vital force. Energy may be expended in building the organism, or in repairing it, or in warming it; or it may be utilized in the accomplishment of work of some kind. When it is largely drawn upon at one point, however, as for constructive purposes, the amount which can be employed at other points must be decreased.

Adolescent Moodiness. — Maudsley, Clouston, Starr, Marro, Christopher, and other physicians tell us that the nervous system is frequently so disturbed at adolescence that insanity results.

Melancholia often overtakes the adolescent, and so does hysteria and kindred maladies. LaFetra says that during this period ^'morbid introspection into the physical or mental life may lead to hypochondriasis or melancholia. If the normal emotions are overactive at the same time, the 'New England conscience' may be developed, making the individual utterly miserable for months or years. There may be a religious type of melancholia, with dread of having committed the unpardonable sin. Conversions are apt to take place at this time, or calls to enter the ministry, convent, or sisterhood. At times the melancholia may be so profound that a suicidal tendency is observed. Every year, for trivial causes students of both sexes commit suicide. Fear of some terrible disease or of early decay is one type (hypochondriasis), and this is exaggerated through the agency of quack advertisements and pamphlets read by the apprehensive boy or girl."

Professor Coe, discussing the tendency of the adolescent toward abnormal introspection says that ''the highly sensitive adolescent conscience is a special feature of the reflectiveness, introspection, and self-criticism that tends to set in somewhat preceding the advent of puberty. The absorption of the child-consciousness in objects now gives place to self-consciousness destined soon to become most intense. Heretofore the child has been to himself merely one object among others; he has taken himself objectively. But now he discovers himself and this self is a quivering mass of sensibility. The things about him also get an inner side now, and it is their ultimate principles and their hidden relations to him that interest him. He can no longer take things as they appear; nor can he take anything for granted; much less can he believe anything merely because other persons do so. Nothing short of absolute, undubitable truth, the true inwardness, the complete subjectivising of everything, will satisfy him. Nothing less than absolutely right principles of conduct can be right at all, and everything in himself that falls short of absolute demands is hateful to him. Heretofore, moral law has been an authority imposing itself upon him from outside; now he discovers that the law speaks loudest within him. Heretofore right conduct has consisted for him in obedience to formal rules; now he begins to inspect the rules themselves, and to find within himself something more exacting and terrible than rules." Adolescent Strain and Stress as Portrayed in Autobiography. — Some striking examples of adolescent strain and stress have been preserved for us in autobiography. Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal gives a vivid account of her nerve storms during this epoch; and Mary McLane's recent autobiographical sketch shows something of the same neurotic condition. Mill in his reminiscences tells of his depression at this period. A heavy weight which he could in no way throw off hung upon his spirit, and for months the oppression was so severe that he seriously contemplated putting an end to it all. In Robert Elsmere and Maggie Tulliver we have typical examples of spiritual upheaval during adolescence. Others may be found in Tolstoi's ''Childhood, Boyhood, Youth"; Loti, "The Story of a Child"; Jeffries, "The Story of My Heart," and similar autobiographies.

Criminal Tendencies in Adolescence. — The unstable condition of the nervous system at this time makes the individual specially liable to evil suggestion. It is becoming a matter of general belief that every person possesses the capacity, in a certain sense, to commit crime; or in other words, to revert to primitive modes of treating the people about him. In every person's life there are at times struggles of greater or less intensity between lower impulses and the requirements of modern civilized society. If one 's nervous mechanism is in good working order, the higher promptings will be able to hold the lower ones in check ; but in the event of serious nervous strain or excitement the lower and more firmly fixed impulses are likely to gain the right of way. This is precisely what often happens in the storm and stress of adolescence, as students of criminology well know. Professor Swift, as a result of his studies upon the inmates of the Waukesha (Wisconsin) reform school, says that ''The average age at which 225 boys were taken to the Waukesha Reform School was not quite 13.7 years. This is the time when the largest amount of energy is seeking occupation, and wise guidance is particularly needed. Yet this is exactly what these boys do not get. They are left to the chance of the street. At this period of life the nerve tissues are in a hyper-irritable state, and, as Clouston tells us, certain forms or emotional and irrational wilfulness, immorality, impulsiveness, and adolescent insanity are not uncommon. Escapades at this time do not necessarily point to a criminal nature. The excessive irritability of the nerve centers, to which the frequency of nervous disorders at this period points, makes them erratically sensitive."

Why Boys Leave School Early. — When the work of the school is formal and disciplinary, the chances are that there will be more or less conflict between the teacher and his adolescent boys. The question is being constantly asked ''Why do boys leave school so early?" and all sorts of answers are forthcoming. Perhaps the following instance will suggest one cause why some boys, at any rate, would rather be out of school than in it. In a certain high school in the middle west there are 130 pupils, 59 of whom are boys. This is a rather larger proportion of masculinity than one finds in most high schools, but the people in this community have considerable wealth, and they desire that their sons should have the advantages of an education. The superintendent of schools says that many of the boys would rather go to work, but their parents compel them to attend school.

The teachers are women, except the principal, who is also superintendent of schools, and who teaches one class in physics. The high school was built up a year at a time on the elementary school, and the teachers grew up with it, most of them coming out of the higher grades. They have been ambitious to stay in the high school, so they have dug away at the subjects they teach, until they seem able to prepare their pupils to pass examinations. But with hardly an exception, their teaching is formal, mechanical, and rigidly exact, without life or content. While the writer was observing a class in botany in this school one day, a boy of eighteen years of age, considerably larger than the teacher, became restless and inattentive, and failed to answer the teacher's questions. The work consisted in giving the technical names of the parts of plants, which had been analyzed with a view to making an herbarium. All the work of the class had been confined to the learning of technical facts. There had been no study of the life of plants.

Not a word had been said of their economic values, or anything of the kind.

Tliis particular boy evidently had no interest in the technical names for plants, and he not only failed to give attention himself, but he distracted the attention of those next to him. Early in the recitation the teacher called him out before the class, and made him stand there during the hour. Of course he was humiliated ; and before the hour was over he was sullen and angry. He left the classroom in an extremely bad mood. It was evident that he had acquired a dislike for the teacher, which was intensified by experiences of this sort. The observer felt most uncomfortable himself.

It was really a desperate situation, for here was a teacher who knew little but technical facts, which she was trying to cram into the head of a boy who could not receive them, because nature had implanted in him an instinct to deal with things that had life and movement and significance. And this teacher, on account of the authority acquired as a result of more or less artificial relations, could discipline this boy so as to make him an object of ridicule on the part of his fellows. There is nothing that will strike deeper into a boy than this. Whether we like it or whether we do not, masculine nature is constructed on such a plan that it will resent and resist experiences of this kind. Everything mean will be aroused in a boy under these conditions, and the thing he will try to do above all else will be to free himself from such situations. He would rather work his head off outside of school than to study in a classroom and be subjected to such treatment as he received on this particular occasion. If the regimen of the school could be made more fully adapted to the needs of masculine nature, boys would wish to continue longer in the school. It is idle to talk about ways and means of keeping boys in school if they must be taught by persons who have no real grasp on the things they teach, and who do not understand masculine interests and needs.

Take the motor type of boy who strongly feels the call of things, w^hose deepest impulse is to be active, and put him in a schoolroom where there is no action whatever, and where everything, even the teacher, is static and formal, and one has a situation where a tragedy cannot be avoided. There is bound to be resistance, inattention, and disorder on the part of such a boy unless he is coerced by the teacher. One will always find strain and stress in such a situation, because it is not in accord with nature's intentions. This does not mean that our teaching must follow nature's plan precisely in detail; but when one flies straight in the face of nature, he is sure to get the worst of the conflict in the end.

The Problem of Over-work in the High School. —

Throughout the civilized world to-day there is a deepening conviction on the part of physicians, educationalists, and intelligent laymen that the school makes too heavy inroads upon the nervous energy of its pupils. In every progressive country the more observing people are aroused over what seems to be a danger to the nervous health and stability of the rising generation. Congresses of local, national, and international scope are calling upon the proper authorities to give more attention to the physical welfare of the children committed to their care. "With scarcely an exception the physicians of France, Italy, England, and America, who have expressed themselves upon the subject declare that a large proportion of children in modern life are suffering from overstrain.

Surely the danger is grave enough ; but it does not lie so much in mental application as in social and other excesses during adolescence, and the unhygienic conditions under wiiich school work is carried forward. It is likely that study does not injure the adolescent so much as unhygienic modes of living and dressing. At a time when the body is rapidly expanding, it is apparent that constriction of dress must seriously interfere with healthful development. Organs thus constricted are unable to attain complete development, and so they can not perform their proper functions in the body, and the mechanism as a whole must suffer in consequence. When the digestive system has not attained complete functional development there must, of course, result a lack of energy for the work of maturity. Again, if the eliminative organs do not fulfil their functions properly trouble will follow. The breaking down of the adolescent, physicians are coming to say, is due more largely to the incomplete development of some vital organ which throws the whole machinery out of gear, than to overstudy, although the latter is at times certainly not without serious consequences.

When the adolescent participates too actively in society functions, he is liable to waste his energies. There are few situations which lead to greater dissipation of forces than '' party ^' life. The adolescent girl is at this time extremely sensitive respecting the way in which she is regarded by others. She is exceedingly eager to secure the applause of all about her, and her mind works with intense activity to obtain the ends she so much desires. ''Slights" sink deeply, and they may give rise to broodings which are as poison to an already over-tense nervous system. Inhibitions and restraints are thrown off, and the machinery may run on until it may wear itself out.

The Increasing Nervous Strain in Life. — As life grows more complex with any individual, nervous strain and stress become more intense with him. This is a commonplace, but it has a bearing upon educational work which many have not appreciated. In peaceful rural communities there is probably no danger yet of our urging youth beyond a safe limit of nervous health and stability. But how is it in the city ? In a recent work of great merit, Forel, the eminent Italian alienist, has called attention to the factors in modem life that produce nervous overstrain and mental disturbance; and the school plays an important role in unsettling the nervous system of youth. Often teachers — or rather those who lay out their work for them — forget that pupils live much more intensely to-day in the home and on the street than they did a half or even a quarter of a century ago. As culture increases; as books and pictures and music become more plentiful; as the telephone brings the young together more frequently for social intercourse ; in short as the objects of interest increase in the environment, the individual must make a correspondingly greater effort to adjust himself to them. To read a book expends energy; to study a picture expends energy; to learn to play or sing expends energy; to respond to people on the streets expends energy; to participate in a ''party" expends energy. Now, multiply all these things in a child's environment, as we are doing everywhere, for this is what culture means, and you may reach the point where his nervous resources will be overtaxed. Add to all these a constantly enlarging school program which pupils must complete, and one has a situation which should receive very serious consideration from teachers as well as parents.

A Typical Case of Overstrain in the School. — In one of the leading high schools in this country, the strenuous ideal is carried to the limit. The pupils are all required to be in their seats ready for the day's work at 8:30 A. M. The first heat lasts from 8:30 until 12:30 without a break. It requires a minute or two for the classes to pass from one recitation room to another ; but otherwise the pupils hardly stand on their feet during the course of four hours. In some cases pupils sit continually for two hours. The school authorities acknowledge that this does not seem to be right from a physical standpoint ; but they say they cannot plan the day's program so as to provide for intermissions, and accomplish all that is required of them in the regular work. The school is a large one, and the machinery required to keep it running smoothly is very complex, so that it seems the welfare of individual pupils must be sacrificed to some extent.

Not Less Work but Less Waste. — Now, it is not at all certain that the typical high school is requiring more intellectual work of a pupil than he ought to do, if he could only do it in the most economical way. But to keep anyone, especially an adolescent boy or girl, continuously at Work for four hours, sitting practically all the time in poorly ventilated and lighted rooms and in ill-adjusted seats is the next thing to manslaughter. It will sound commonplace to many to say that economy and efficiency would be promoted by breaking up this four-hour stretch into four periods, with ten minute intervals of freedom. Investigations made at home and abroad warrant one in asserting that more can be accomplished with greater freshness and interest and less fatigue in relatively short periods of concentrated work than in long unbroken periods, when pupils remain seated a large part of the time. An immature organism cannot well endure a four-hour period of continuous application to anything. Young pupils certainly cannot react effectively to educative stimulation under such a regime. It is not advocated that the amount of work required of pupils be materially lessened, but only that the conditions under which this work is done be determined with due regard to the needs of high-school pupils in respect to the principles of mental economy and hygiene.

Practicable Means of Avoiding Overstrain. — In the school referred to above, there is a wellequipped gymnasium; and it would be a simple matter so to organize the school that every pupil would have twenty minutes of gymnastic exercise during the morning session. This would, in a way at least, offset the disadvantages of long sitting in such seats as are found in the typical school.

This gymnastic exercise would release the intellectual centers of the brain, and call into play the motor areas, thus tending to preserve a healthy balance in cerebral functions. If there be no gymnasium in a school building, then a period of marching, of freehand exercise in the assembly room, or of running out-of-doors should be provided. "With all its disadvantages, this will be 'better than continuous application for an entire session.

In addition to the period of physical relaxation, it is highly desirable to arrange for a ten or fifteen minute recess, when pupils may eat a sandwich if they feel hungry, as is apt to be the case when they have had breakfast before eight o'clock, and cannot have luncheon until about one o'clock. A hungry child is not in a condition to profit best by classroom instruction ; and moreover, it is not conducive to physical well-being for most pupils to go for such long periods without nutrition.

High-School Athletics. — The best safeguard of youth is a wholesome life out-of-doors in games and plays. But there are dangers here, too. Throughout the country to-day there is a growing tendency to restrain high-school students in their athletic activities. Reports have been made to the effect that a number of boards of education have adopted rules prohibiting inter-academic athletic contests. There seem to be a number of valid reasons why such action is justifiable, at least in many conmninities. Tlie chief interest in athletics in some high schools is to develop a winning team. The majority of the pupils do not engage in playing games themselves ; they simply *'root'* for the team. And when a school celebrates the glories of a winning team, the celebrants often go to excesses of various sorts in their demonstrations. Perhaps the most serious objection to present tendencies is that high-school boys are undoubtedly injured sometimes because of overstrain in athletic competition. Within the past few years there have been a number of cases, mentioned in the magazines and the press, of breakdown of boys from undue effort in athletics. At recent meetings of physical education societies and some of the departments of the National Education Association, physicians and others have called attention to the danger of athletio overstrain, especially among immature high-school boys.