Improvement Era, August 1928

Improvement Era Vol. XXXI AUGUST, 1928 No. 10 When Fathers and Sons are Comrades By a Grandfather of Today FATHERS, can you work, play, study, camp out, with your boys? When father and son work together, play together, study the same subjects, fish, hunt, hike, and camp out to- gether, then it follows, as experience has shown, that: I. The Father's Ideas of Punishment Change. There is at least one feature in scout work and in what is taught in Bee-Hive work, boyology, and similar courses, that must appeal to all believers in the essential soundness of human nature. This work tends to prove that boys who go wrong are simply the unadjusted boys. Our failure to hold or to reclaim these errant wanderers means only, in the light of scientific investigations of the tendencies of the teens, not that the boy is sinful, but that we do not know what to do with him. Studies of adolescents show that punishment, if it is to serve any purpose at all, must be directed against the cause of undesirable acts, not against the boy who com- mits them, scarcely knowing what he does. It is now an accepted maxim among students of boy life that perhaps the best, if not the only way that is sure to correct faults, is by processes of training and practice, to replace bad habits with good habits. Retributive justice, as the due penalty for wrong- doing, is found in the large majority of cases to be a mere mistake that should not enter at all into the matter of dealing with youth. Experimental studies have given to investigators a new esti- mate of the harm that is done by any sort of punishment that the child considers unjust; and that, it has been ascertained, includes the great bulk of any sort of penalties and practically all punish- ment of children below eight or nine years of age. II. Fathers Get Refreshing Views of the Gospel of Work. Companionship with his sons in their enterprises as distin-