The girl in her teens does think. She has been called careless, thoughtless, inattentive and a day-dreamer. Though these things are often true of her, she is on the whole a thinker. Her day-dreams are thoughtful. In building her air castles she uses memory and imagination, and sometimes one wonders if these factors to which we owe so much do not get as valuable training from “dreams” as from algebra. Certain it is that many women who have helped make the world a more comfortable place in which to live laid plans for their future work on sweet spring days, or long autumn afternoons when Latin grammar faded away in the distance, and things vital, near, and real came to take its place.

When Lucy Larcom stood by the noisy loom in the rush and whirl of the big factory, day-dreaming while her busy hands fulfilled their task, memory and imagination were being trained, and one morning the world read the day-dream. At first it was a picture of flowers and fields and cloudless skies, then it came back to the tenements on the narrow streets and said:

“IfIwereasunbeam,
IknowwhereI’dgo,
Intolowliesthovels,
Darkwithwantandwoe.
Tillsadheartslookedupward,
Iwouldshineandshine.
Thenthey’dthinkofheaven,
Theirsweethomeandmine.”

This and many another gem the imagination of the factory girl wrought out beside the loom.

The day-dreams, the “castles” reared by the imagination of girlhood, must find expression, and they do—in diaries, “literary productions” and poems at which we sometimes smile.

But who shall say that the mental side of the girl in her teens does not get as much valuable training through the closely written journal pages, or the carefully wrought poem which perhaps no one may ever see, as through the “daily theme” or the essay written according to an elaborate outline, carefully criticized by the teacher. The ambitions of the adolescent girl along literary lines often receive a rude shock when her essay is returned with red lines drawn through what, to her, are the most effective adjectives and most beautiful descriptions.

Many a literary genius has been destroyed by the red lines of an unimaginative instructor. But there are some wise enough to allow the girl to express herself in true adolescent fashion, criticizing only when errors in punctuation, sentence formation or spelling occur, and letting her gradually outgrow the glaring wealth of imagery that is the right of every girl in her teens.

But the adolescent girl does not think in “dreams” alone. She thinks in the hard terms of the practical and the every day. Her mental life, expanding and enlarging, is stirred to unusual activity, as is her physical nature, and she makes so many discoveries absolutely new to her that she thinks them new to all. She gives information of all sorts to her family and expects respectful attention. She knows more than her mother, criticizes her father, gives advice to her grandmother, and is willing to decide all questions for the younger members of the family. She has a new idea of her own importance, and sees herself magnified.

It seems but yesterday since she was just a little girl, willing to be guided, directed, ruled by her elders. Now she resents the direct command, persists in asking “why,” and is not satisfied with “because I think best.” She chafes under strict discipline, rebels openly, sulks, or yields with an air of desperate resignation when her dearest desires are denied. She thinks she knows best. That is her chief trouble. The things she wants to do seem best to her,—she thinks they will mean her real happiness, therefore she chooses them. That were she allowed to follow her own choice, ten years from now she would sadly regret it does not influence her much, for the now is so near and so desirable.

I was calling one evening in the home of a friend who has a sixteen-year-old daughter. A few moments after I was seated she came into the room wearing a simple evening gown of pale blue silk, her hair arranged in the latest fashion, and her eyes dancing with excitement and anticipation. I could easily pardon the look of satisfied pride upon the faces of both her father and mother. After greeting me cordially she said, “Mother, I may do it just this time, mayn’t I? Please, mother!” “Do what?” said the mother. “You know, the carriage. Harry’s father gave him the money, and it’s so much nicer than the crowded car.”

“I told you this afternoon what I thought about it,” said the mother, “but you may ask your father.”

She referred the matter to him. “Harry” wanted to have a carriage and drive home after the party, his father was willing and had given him the money. And now mother objected! All the nicest girls were going to do it, but mother preferred a crowded street-car! Supreme disgust and a sense of injustice showed in voice and manner. Her father smiled, as he said, “Well, I think your mother is about right.” Still the girl persisted until her father said sternly, “Mildred, you may do as we wish or remain at home.” Sullen silence followed, while she made preparations to go. As her mother helped her on with her wrap, she said kindly, “I’m so sorry, Mildred. It is hard for us to deny you, but a few years from now you will understand and be grateful.”

The daughter’s answer came quickly: “That is what you always say, but I know I’m missing all the pleasures the other girls have.”

The mother was discouraged. “I don’t know what to do with Mildred,” she said, after her daughter had gone, “she seems to have lost all confidence in us.”

“No,” I said, “she hasn’t. She has supreme confidence in herself. If you had frankly told her your reason for refusing her request, or simply said that it was not the proper thing, since you could not furnish her with a chaperon, it might have helped. But if you treat her as patiently for the next few years as you have done to-night, she will come out all right.”

I am sure she will. The rapid development of her mental life is showing through her will. The years are coming when she will need to choose for herself. The power to choose is being developed now. Inexperience leads her to make unwise choices, and so the experience of older and wiser people must guide her, and if necessary decide for her. But wherever it is possible for her to choose for herself, whenever the issue at stake is not too great, the wise parent and teacher will allow her to choose, yes, even require her to do so, that the power of choice may be developed and the mental forces strengthened. And when she has chosen they will help her carry out her choice, that she may see the result and judge of its wisdom, thus helping her in the struggle to develop both will and judgment.

The time when parents attempted to break the will is passing. The wise parent and teacher of the girl in her teens knows that she needs, if her future is to be useful and happy, not a broken will but a trained will. Training is a slow and steady process and requires unlimited patience.

The aim of every one in any way responsible for the education of the girl in her teens is to help her to see the right and desire it. If that can be done for her, she has at least been started on the road that leads to safety. This is the time when those who teach her may help her to see the value of promptness, absolute accuracy, and dependableness. When she promises to do a thing it is the duty of all who teach her to help her keep that promise. But she must always see the value of the thing taught. The mind must be satisfied; she must know why. The girl in her teens is developing the individual moral sense, and if the years are to bring strength of character every open avenue to the mind must be used to help in constantly raising standards and impressing truth.

The awakening of the girl in her teens to new phases of mental activity reveals itself in her passion for reading. It is true that some girls before twelve read eagerly all sorts of books, but most girls develop a genuine love for reading with adolescence. They then become omnivorous readers. When one looks over lists of “Books I Have Read” prepared by high-school girls he is astonished by the number and variety.

It is most interesting to note the books designated in personal conversation as “the dearest story,” “just great,” “dandy,” “perfectly fine,” “elegant,” “beautiful,” and “the best book I have ever read.” That these books have a tremendous influence on the mental life in forming a “taste” for literature, and furnishing motives for action, ideals, and information, no one can doubt.

Who helps these girls to satisfy their hunger for a “good book to read?” Many have no help,—they read what they will. Sometimes the parent acts as guide, often the book lists gotten out by the city librarian, or graded lists of books prepared by teachers in the public school, although many times at just the period when most reading is being done the “lists” disappear from the schoolroom. Seldom does the Sunday-school teacher guide her girls in their choice of books, yet this is one of the most valuable and helpful things a woman can do for a girl.

One often wishes there were more books of the right sort for the girl in her teens. With the exception of the old standards that remain helpful to succeeding generations there are comparatively few books for girls that are interesting, fascinating, wholesome, and free from those “problems” on which few women and no girls can dwell with profit. Modern writers have given us a few fine, inspiring stories for girls, and the teacher who seeks them out, reads them, and then passes them on to her girls is helping in a real and definite way to deepen and broaden character. All teachers of girls are hoping that, now so many good books for boys have been written, our writers will turn their attention to girls and their needs.

Girls in their teens need biography and enjoy it. They need to know fine women who have actually lived. If the lives of such women could be written for girls they would find eager readers. The author of the life of Alice Freeman Palmer has presented an inspiring and helpful gift to the girls of all time, and its influence can never be estimated. We need more such books.

No one of us would return for a moment to the stories of heroines so good that in the last chapter they died and went to heaven, but we do need books in which girls and women are sane, reasonable, and good, yet live, and enjoy living to the full. The world is full of wholesome, true, womanly women, and our girls need to know about them in fact and fiction.

The mental activity of the girl in her teens reveals itself also in her great desire to know. During the period of her teens the girl so often appears superior to the boy mentally. Sometimes she is, but more often the seeming superiority can be explained in two ways: the hunger for knowledge and longing to understand life come to her earlier than to the boy; she desires to excel, and feels more keenly the disgrace of low rank and unsatisfactory progress in her studies, which leads her to devote more time and conscientious effort to master them. While her brother is buried deep in athletics, she is buried in dreams, romances and facts. She wants things explained. After sixteen, there dawns the period when she demands that her teacher shall know. She must have knowledge. Some teachers of girls in the later teens hold their interest through a charming personality, a knowledge of the heart of a girl, and a clever presentation of lessons. Still, such teachers are unable oftentimes to help the girl in her struggle to straighten out tangles of what she calls “faith” and “knowledge.”

She asks with a new earnestness, “Are the miracles true?” “Is the Bible different from other books?” Only last week a girl of eighteen, suffering with her dearest friend, whose brother had been sentenced to a term in prison for gross intoxication, said to me: “That man prays often when he is sober to be kept from drinking, how can God let him do it when it is just killing his mother and all the family? I don’t see how it can be true that God loves men when he lets them be so wicked, and when people suffer so, and starve and die in wrecks and fires and—it’s terrible. I know you will think I’m awful, but sometimes I don’t believe in God at all.” Her voice trembled, and I knew the hurried sentences represented months of thinking. I did not consider her “awful.” God help her—she has looked the old, old problem of evil squarely in the face for the first time, and is staggered by it. How to help her in this crisis we shall consider in our discussion of the “Spiritual Side.”

She needs now more than ever a teacher who can understand her, who has thought things out for herself, who can teach positively, who is too near life to worship creed, and too large to be dogmatic. One so often wishes, when looking into the face of some thoughtful girl, with mind keen, alert, active, but perplexed and confused by knowledge that seems to contradict itself, for some miracle by which for a moment the Great Teacher might come and speak to her the words that made his doubting pupil say, “My Lord and my God.”

The mental activity of the girl of to-day reveals itself in the later teens by a keen and deep interest in social questions, in the great problems that concern women. But a few weeks since I looked into the faces of scores of earnest college girls, many in their later teens, who were discussing at a week-end conference, “The Individual and the Social Crisis.” It was not a mere discussion. These girls had plans, they had facts, they were looking at the question on all sides. Within the month I met another group in conference. They were a “Welfare Committee” for an organization of working girls. They knew what they were talking about, they had plans, and were seeking solutions for problems that needed to be solved.

The girl in her teens is a dreamer at thirteen, seeking to realize her dreams in real life at nineteen.

During those six wonderful years of repeated crises, the mental life of the girl is being shaped and determined by environment. To some extent the teacher may influence that environment, and become a real part of it. It is her privilege to furnish the imagination, through prose and poetry, with fields in which to wander afar, broaden the vision through books of travel and information which she may put in the girl’s way, increase her love of music and pictures through occasional concerts and visits to the art galleries, and in scores of little ways open new doors to the greater realms of knowledge which, if unaided, she would have passed by.

It is a great thing to be able to help another mind to think for itself. That, the wise teacher is always striving to do. She challenges her girls to think. This is the reason why she wants the girl in her teens to know something of the history of the church; to be acquainted with the young men and women on the mission field, and know what they are doing; to know what the cities are trying or refusing to do for the housing of the poor, and for the protection of women and girls; to know the laws of home hygiene, and to use her mental faculties to help answer the question of the relation of the church and the individual under existing conditions in her own community and in the world. The girl in her teens is interested most in the very thing in which the Great Teacher was himself interested—life, the life of his own day, and he so instructed his disciples that the eyes of their understanding were opened and they began to think for themselves and of their fellow-men.

We have to-day, in the girl in her teens, who in large numbers is still in our Sunday-schools, a tremendous mental force. Were it awakened and developed, helped to see and interpret life according to the principles of Jesus, in fifty years the church would find most of its present problems solved. For hard to realize as it is when looking into the faces and training the minds of the girls in their teens of to-day, still it is true that we are looking at and training the women of to-morrow, yes, those who a few years hence holding their children in their arms, shall decide all unknowing what the next generation of men and women shall be and do.

To encourage the girl in her teens to use her mental powers to the utmost, to help her gain knowledge and self-control, to guide her in her thinking, is the task of every parent and teacher, and it is a task tremendously worth while.