Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/134

 who moves to a college town simply to look after her son is usually not doing him a real service. She may give herself satisfaction and him pleasure, but the result is usually of no real advantage to either. It is often a matter of convenience or necessity or economy that a son lives at home while going to college, and when this condition exists, it should be accepted and made the best of; but my experience has been that it is more often a handicap than otherwise to the boy in that it prevents him from looking after himself, from making his own decisions, from solving his own problems, from correcting his own mistakes. When he is at home he learns to depend on mother to call him up in the morning, and father to call him down at night, and he knows as he did in the high school that if he is going wrong some one will detect it, and call his attention to the fact. If any trouble arises in the college, father or mother—usually mother—is right on the job to probe into the difficulty, and to correct it before son has had a chance to know that he is in trouble or has had an opportunity to grow stronger by getting himself out.

All these things that I have discussed are of importance to the fraternity which is considering for membership the young fellow who lives at home. At first thought many of them may seem trifling, but they influence the character of these