[45] On the problem with young children see M. Morley, The Renewal of Life; in connection with older girls see K.H.  Wayne, Building Your Girl.

CHAPTER XVI

THE NEEDS OF YOUTH

Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of childhood.  The home is for the young people as well as for the younger ones.  But the very period when they slip from church school is also the period when they are often lost to the real life of the family.  In some measure this is due to the natural development of the social life.  The youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which demand more of their free time.  They are learning the life of the larger world of which they are now a part.

Sec. 1.  THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH

But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is still the most vital educational influence for them.  Yet there is no problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership of, the higher life of youth.

It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as only for young children and old folks.  The young men and women from sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere.  In a few years they, too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they are very directly learning the art of family life.

For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than the streets and the places of commercialized amusement.  Even where the other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life, the refining and socializing power of the family group.

Sec. 2.  SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH

What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a reasonable program for their higher needs?

First, the need of sound physical health.  This is a period of physical adjustment.  Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new functions are asserting themselves.  The new demands for directed activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts on the energies.  The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this period may be due to poor health.  The moral strain of the period will need sound muscles and good health.  Parents who would sit up all night—­perhaps involuntarily—­when the baby has the colic treat with indifference sickness in youth and too readily assume that the young man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills.  But bodily maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects.  To live the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person, with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to the struggle of life.