Encourage The Boys

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 3, 1879

Encourage The Boys.

HALF-GROWN boys are too often treated as nuisances, and are thus encouraged to become such. No provision is made for their entertainment; they are not trained to employ their overflowing activity in useful ways; they are treated as if they possesed a peculiar kind of depravity, and as incapable of adding to the happiness of others. It is too much to expect that a boy will prefer reading a dry book to a frolic with his fellows, will enjoy being lectured nightly on his particular sinfulness, while his sister, or some sick, over-studious youth, is held up as a model of perfection.

If one-half the praise which you bestow on three and five year olds, and on "young ladies just coming out," were distributed among young men, we should see a marked decline in loaferism and rowdy conduct. To notice a boy's good intention is to make performance easy. To treat him as a social outcast is to make him, sooner or later, a professional disturber of the peace. If home be made pleasant, and pains taken to guide youthful spirits into legitimate channels, there will be less fondness for that independent, roving, selfish, existence, which marks every boy as an Ishmaelite.—Sel.