8
I did my best, your Honour, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!
A word to fathers. Dont frighten away daughters friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys shes charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an executives office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Janes school books. Remember? Dont you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Dont you want them to have wholesome fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.
If she breaks the rules dont explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel shes the daughter of an old ogre.
First of all, the old ogre drew up a list under absolutely forbidden and another under reluctantly allowed. Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triple the next step being, of course, mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially accceptable group in Butlers Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first formal (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teenagers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.
8
I did my best, your Honour, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!
A word to fathers. Dont frighten away daughters friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys shes charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an executives office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Janes school books. Remember? Dont you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Dont you want them to have wholesome fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.
If she breaks the rules dont explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel shes the daughter of an old ogre.
First of all, the old ogre drew up a list under absolutely forbidden and another under reluctantly allowed. Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triple the next step being, of course, mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially accceptable group in Butlers Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first formal (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teenagers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.
Lo was enraged by all this called me a lousy crook and worse and I would probably have lost my temper had I not soon discovered, to my sweetest relief, that what really angered her was my depriving her not of a specific satisfaction but of a general right. I was impinging, you see, on the conventional programme, the stock pastimes, the things that are done, the routine of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than a child, especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most mythopoeic nymphet in Octobers orchard-haze.