One of the reasons why it now becomes more difficult for even thoughtful and considerate parents to keep in close sympathy with the boy or girl is this outburst of new and varied interests, which clamor for movement and color and quick changes. The parent has in the course of years settled down to a relatively small group of activities and interests, most of which offer no appeal to the growing individual. For instance, you would like to come close to the thoughts and feelings of your growing son or daughter; you suggest that you take a walk together. Now, it is very nice for a middle-aged person to take a walk, alone or with a companion; but the girl or boy sees no sense in taking a walk unless you wish to get somewhere. The ordinary conversation and gossip that a girl is likely to hear when you take her to visit a friend is apt to be very stupid--to the girl. Even where the parents have watched the expanding soul closely on the one hand, and have kept themselves in touch with a variety of activities rich in human interests on the other, they often find that the intimacy with their children is for a time weakened, and fully restored only after the latter have passed through these trying years. What is likely to be the greatest source of grief on the part of the parent is the apparent lapse of the growing boy or girl from standards of honesty and truthfulness with which she has so solicitously tried to imbue him or her. But this lapse during the critical growing period is so widespread, so common among boys and girls who afterward become fine men and women, that special students of the problem have come to believe that semi-criminality is quite normal, at least for boys, at this age. Now, while some children are perhaps by nature incapable of attaining to a satisfactory moral level, most children will, under suitable surroundings, grow away from this state of lying and stealing; but under adverse conditions these distressing features of their behavior may become habitual. Suitable surroundings and treatment would here consist of the presence of good models and high ideals, sympathetic help in resisting temptation, and not in a harsh denunciation of each unapproved act as evidence of turpitude and perversion. You need not assume that there _is_ perversion until that is demonstrated beyond any doubt. For, if the child is morally redeemable, he should be treated like one who is weak and who needs help until the difficulties are mastered; otherwise you are likely to encourage in him the feeling that he is hopeless, and he will relax all effort for his own self-mastery.