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Your boy and his training

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By Edwin Seward Puller
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About This Book

The work offers practical guidance for parents and teachers on raising boys, combining observations of childhood and adolescent psychology with concrete training methods. It explains developmental stages from early childhood through adolescence, noting physical, mental, and moral changes; emphasizes parental responsibility, the formation of obedience, and the need for just, consistent discipline; contrasts repressive and constructive approaches; highlights play, hero-worship, will development, and the boy’s present-focused viewpoint; and recommends home-centered character cultivation, reasoned commands, and sympathetic understanding to guide boys toward responsible adulthood.

PREFACE

The average boy is not understood by the average parent. This misunderstanding produces not only indifferent training of the boy but also soul-stress for the parent and his son. Intelligent training will improve the quality of the man into whom your son will develop. To be able to give such training, the parent must first know how. The education of the parent in the subject of boy-training is the pretentious purpose of this volume, which I approach with full consciousness of my own limitations.

This book is the result of my association with and study of large numbers of boys from ten to twenty years of age, and in it have been embodied, consciously or unconsciously, some ideas of other writers on this subject.

I have endeavored to present in elementary form a brief, practical study in adolescent psychology and its application to boy-training, written in language which the average parent, guardian or teacher can readily understand. With this end in view, there has been an elimination of technical terms, as far as may be—even at possible risk of scientific inaccuracy of statement. It will not be necessary for the average reader to peruse these pages with a dictionary at hand. They were written not for psychologists, but for parents, in the hope that a work both readable and comprehensible will acquaint the average reader with the laws governing boy-life and their application to his training with greater clarity than a work abounding in abstruse phraseology and scientific nomenclature.

The pages which follow will be devoted to a discussion of the problems of the normal boy—the same red-blooded, harum-scarum youngster who occupies such a large place in your life—and not especially to the delinquent boy. I indulge the hope that this volume may aid you, in some degree, to a better understanding of your boy, his problems and their solution.

Edwin Puller.