onflict comes,
and, though not consciously, is fought for and against possession.

Briefly, adolescence brings with it an insistence upon the end of the
relative and the beginning of absolute, that is unrelated, existence.
Somehow and for the most part unhappily, the child's insistence upon
absolute self-possession and self-existence comes at a time,--it may
be evocative rather than synchronous--when parents most desire or feel
the need to be parents. This craving for a maximum of parenthood, not
in the interest of filial possession, is evoked by the normal,
adolescent child, as it begins to find its main interests and
absorptions outside of the home, with the consequent loosening of what
seemed to be irrefragably close and intimate ties. And the parental
sense of proprietary supervision is not lessened by the circumstance
that the child now faces those problems the rightful solution of
which means so much to its future.

Thus does the conflict arise. Children, though they know it not or know
it only in part, face the great tests and challenges of life, rejoicing
that these are to be their experiences, their problems, their tests.
Parents view these self-same challenges and are deeply concerned lest
these prove too much for children and leave them broken and blighted
upon life's way. It is really fairer to say that what is viewed as the
parental instinct of possession is really nothing more than the
eagerness of parents somehow to bestow upon children the unearned fruits
of experience. It is the primary and inalienable right of children to
blunder, to falter upon the altar-steps, and blundering is a teacher
wiser though costlier than parents. Reckoning and rueing the price they
have paid for the lessons of experience, parents, whose good-will is
greater than their wisdom, insist upon the right to transmit to children
through teaching these lessons of experience. But they fail to realize
that certain things are unteachable and intransmissible.

Confounding the classroom with the school of life, it is assumed that
certain truths are orally teachable. Children, building better than
they know, insist that the wisdom of experience cannot be orally
communicated, that it is not to be acquired through parental bestowal
or teaching or insistence, but solely through personal effort, and,
though at first they know it not, through hardship and suffering.
Wisdom cannot be imparted to children by parents under an anaesthesia
that