[Illustration:  Games form an important part of the adolescent girl’s life]

When this sort of school and this sort of parent happen to be the joint guardians of a girl’s social training, it usually happens that the girl discovers some things by a painful if not heartbreaking trial-and-error method, and other things she quite fails to discover at all.  Most of all, she needs her mother at this time—­a wise, interested, companionable mother, who knows much about what goes on at school parties and at school generally, but who never forces confidences and, indeed, who never needs to; an elder sister sort of mother, who helps.  And she needs also teachers who supervise and chaperon social affairs with a full realization that social training is in progress and that lives are being made or marred.

There are schools and there are mothers who look upon every phase of school life as contributing to the educative process, and these find in the social affairs of the school their opportunities to teach some vital lessons.  Some schools are lengthening the free time between periods, merely for the purpose of adding to the informal social intercourse between pupils.

Wise teachers as well as wise mothers will see that the social phase of school life, especially in the evening, is not overdone.  Not only health but future usefulness and happiness suffer if the girl “goes out” so much that going out becomes the rule and staying at home the exception.  It is not usually, however, the social affairs of the school alone which cause the girl to develop the habit of too many evenings away from home.  It is the school party plus the church social, plus the moving pictures, plus the girls’ club, plus the theater, plus choir practice, plus the informal evening at her chum’s, plus a dozen other dissipations, that in the course of a few years change a quiet, home-loving little schoolgirl into a gadding, overwrought, uneasy woman.

Unless one has tried it, it is perhaps hard to realize how difficult it is for an individual mother to regulate social custom in her community even for her own daughter without causing the girl unhappiness and possibly destroying her delight in her home.  No girl enjoys leaving the party at ten when “the other girls” stay until twelve.  Nor does she enjoy declining invitations when the other girls all go.  But what the individual mother finds difficult, community sentiment can easily accomplish.  The woman’s club or the mothers’ club or the parent-teacher association, or better yet all three, may profitably discuss the question, and may set about the creation of the sentiment required.

Quite as important as “How often shall she go?” is the question “With whom is she going?” There are two ways of approaching the problem here involved.  One requires more knowledge for the girl herself, that she may better judge what constitutes a worthy companion.  The other is reached by the better training of boys, that more of them may develop into the sort of young men with whom we may trust our daughters.