Page:The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble (1924).pdf/24

 'mays' and 'may nots,' all the more so because with the burgeoning of a new physique he is conscious of aspirations and emotions that he thinks the apparently staid and settled middle years cannot appreciate. He demands emancipation. He wants to be himself.

This spiritual emergence from the confines of the home does not often occur in a girl until she goes to work or to college. It then becomes a struggle for independence. Up to this time her goings and comings have been more closely supervised than those of her brother. In many households she is more her mother's daughter than she is herself. And now a greater freedom is opened to her. Going to work gives her the power of earned money and the broadened horizon of new companions. Going away to college brings her new associates and removes her from the immediate oversight of her parents. The result of either experience is to face her and her parents with much the same adjustment that her brother met in adolescence. The children seek self-expression and a larger control over themselves. The parents, regarding them still as children, want to continue to protect and direct them. Therein lies the possibility of conflict and the difficulty of the adjust-