Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships.  The social nature must have its food.  This young man has discovered that the world consists of something besides things; it is full of people.  He is just learning that they are all persons like himself.  He enters the era of conscious personal relationships.  He would explore the realm of personality.  He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are opened to him.  It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality, with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.

Sec. 3.  MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH

Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their friendship?  They will never tell us, for this world is too new and strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us.  We imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden from them.  We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend, not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means.  Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here.  They recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the children.  Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give these youths the very bread of our own inner selves?  Or do we, when they ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the tastes?

One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked:  it will often happen that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental aversion.  There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition, and even hatred of parents.  This is no occasion for despair.  It is a stage of development.  It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has hitherto directed it.  To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in.  It may be easily made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things:  first, adjust themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth, and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true selves now fully understandable by these men and women.

But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of youth.  Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will feed.  Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere.  If they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere.  You can scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth.  If you are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but you will lose a life or lives.  Here is the opportunity of the home to enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many lives.