Well--I got hold recently of a human document which answered these questions quite in the affirmative. It was a rather startling thing because, while it offered nothing new on the theory side of the matter, it showed the theory in thoughtful action--which, for all the talk on the subject, is still rare. It was a letter of some twenty pages written by a girl to her mother at the time of a domestic climax when all the bonds of family affection, family idealism and obligation were tending to smother the human truth of the situation, as the girl put it. She was in her early twenties; she had a sister two or three years younger, and both of them had reached at least a sort of economic independence. She had come to the conclusion, after a good many years of rebellion, that the whole fabric of their family life was wrong; and since it was impossible to talk the thing out sensibly--because, as in all families where the children grow up without being given the necessary revaluations, real talk is no more possible than it is between uncongenial strangers--she had decided to discuss it in a letter. That medium does away with the patronage of the parents' refusal to listen seriously:--that "Oh, come now, what do you know about these things?" If the child has anything interesting to say, if he puts any of his rebellion into his writing, the chances are that the parent will read the letter through; and the result is that he'll know more about his child than he has learned in all the years they've been trying to talk with each other and not succeeding. I'm enthusiastic about this kind of family correspondence; it's good training in expression and it clears the air--jolts the "heads" of the family into realizing that the thinking and planning are not all on one side. I once did it myself to my father--put ten pages of closely-written argument on his office desk (so that he'd open it with the same impersonality given to a business communication), in which I explained why I wanted to go away from home and learn to _work_, and why I thought such a course was an intelligent one. The letter accomplished what no amount of talking would have done, because in our talk we rarely got beyond the "Oh, now, you're just a little excited, it will look different in the morning" stage. Father said it was rather a shock to him because he didn't know I had ever figured things out to that extent; but we always understood each other better after that. However--not to get lost in personalities--this is the letter the girl showed me and which she allows me to quote from partially: