Waywardness results not so much from the effects of heredity as from lack of training. Wrong training, lack of training, and bad environment are the great, compelling influences toward delinquency, which overshadow all other causes of juvenile waywardness; and for such causes parents are directly and primarily responsible. This is a severe indictment of parents, but not more severe than the consequences of their neglect of duty warrant. Many parents act on the presumption that their obligation is fulfilled by supplying the child with food, clothing, shelter, and school, forgetting the equally important duty of developing his moral and spiritual nature. Such conditions are usually the result of indifference, a sin of omission, and only rarely do they result from bad precept and example. In the larger number of cases, the wayward parent is such because of ignorance of the scope of his duty, or because of his delegation of moral and religious training to the school or some other agency not fully equipped for the task. It is seldom that a parent does not earnestly desire high moral character in his offspring. He hopes in a blind, inchoate way that his son will become a well-rounded man--physically, mentally, morally, socially, spiritually. By what means that hope is to fructify he does not know. He is groping in the dark, hoping against hope that the miracle of evolution will result in perfection, without the employment of the methods and agencies at his command which will assist to that end. The first step, then, in the training of the boy is the training of the parent. And what applies to the father usually applies, with less force, to the mother. When we reclaim wayward parents, we shall reclaim wayward boys. The first step toward reclamation is the awakening of their sense of responsibility--the driving home of the consciousness of stewardship. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” has still stronger application to the father and the mother of a son. Yours is the responsibility for the child’s presence in the world; yours is the responsibility for supplying the conventional comforts on which physical life depends; but still more emphatically yours is the responsibility of furnishing the guiding hand which will pilot the frail bark of youth through the storm and stress of adolescence. During infancy he is anchored in the harbor of home, surrounded by love and physical comfort; during early boyhood his bark is drifting on the current toward the sea; while the dawn of adolescence plunges him into an unknown and uncharted ocean, without rudder or compass by which to avoid the sunken reefs of danger and the rocks which wreck the development of character. The morally obligatory duty of child-culture must be encouraged, revived, trained, and put into operation.