Our Youth: Apathy, Rebellion and Growth: A Symposium

In this Symposium on “Youth: Apathy, Rebellion and Growth,” a spectrum of problems is being confronted as they affect children and adolescents. Adolescence may not end before the age of twenty-five and being disadvantaged (Dr. M. Symonds) and having learning problems (Dr. H. Boigon) may begin from birth. Growth can be spontaneous and straight at all age levels, just as potentialities can be stunted and distorted.

The rates, forms and possibilities for growing are determined by the organism's inborn maturational phases. Children are not immature by virtue of being young and adults mature because of chronology. Each is as mature as their maturational phase makes possible within their given heredity, constitution and natural endowment as they relate to their capacities, talents and gifts, trained and developed, with the addition of acquired, learned skills.

Children are born into, grow and mature in a social process constituted of expanding groups extending from the family, to the community, to the nation, to the world. The problems of children and of the parents rearing them have been compounded by the rapidity of change in our social structures, each with their inherent value systems, of which the family is carrier and communicator.

Being reared in a small, rural, agrarian community, continuously residing and growing up in the same area, in the context of a three-generation extended family, is quite different from being brought up in a succession of large cities and impersonal apartments and being looked after by a number of different maids, while seeing little of both parents who are occupied with their careers.

In addition the schools and the classes in them will be larger. This is what happens to a child of the average urban middle-income family. The difficulties do not necessarily become less with affluence and are aggravated by poverty. All income groups have special problems created by their monetary situation. What they all have in comm