Page:The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble (1924).pdf/25

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ment. If the parents draw the bonds of authority closer, if they place walls about the home, youth rebels, sometimes to yield to sullenness or to an irritable discontent, sometimes to break away from the life of the family altogether and to replace it with unstable and unsatisfactory friendships. If, however, mother and father recognize the right of the children to their own lives, the reason for conflict will disappear. Best of all is that attitude of the parents toward both daughter and son which fosters a gradual unfolding and increasing of the girl's and the boy's responsibility, so that this phase of the adjustment to adolescence and independence never becomes critical or even conscious, but takes place as part of the evolution from childhood to youth and from youth to adult life.

The adjustment to marriage involves an institution that, ever changing, is yet ever the same. It varies as human beings vary. In the homes of neighbors it may exist in the tradition of one hundred years ago and as a prophecy of what it may be to-morrow.

The twentieth century finds it a more democratic and a more spiritual relationship than ever it has been before. Man is now an integral part of