I n A few weeks , thousands of American young people all over the nation will be returning to classrooms. The facts we are going to present concern you now as a young person as well as your future. The crisis in moral ity facing our beloved nation does not fail to point its devastating finger at our Christian youth. Recently, the following letter was received. It is frank and blunt, but it certainly tells the story. I feel compelled to share it with you. A broken hearted girl writes: “ I am 17 years old and thought I was pretty smart. I have no father, but I have a good mother. One night I lied to her and told her I was going to a certain place with a girl friend. We went to a party instead. I had a few drinks. I am not used to drinking. I got into trouble. My mother is heart-broken. She warned me many times not to keep bad company, but I told her she was old-fashioned. Thank God she is going to stand by me in this terrible tragedy. For God’s sake, tell the teenagers to listen to their parents. They know best and they love them. I would work my fingers to the bone; I would do anything to be able to go back to that night and really be going to the place I said I was going instead of to the place I went. It was suppose to be a nice party, but there was drinking. This is the terrible part. I do not even know who the boy was. If only I had listened to my mother! Please forgive me for not sign ing my name. But I had to tell my story, hoping that it might help someone else.” The question comes, “What, as Christian parents, and as workers in the church, are we doing to curb this growing trend of immorality in our young people?” The pressures will be increased doubly as young people re turn to the schools and to the associations that are so often detrimental to their moral lives. Early dating and “ going steady” have been blamed by Denver College professor George M. Tipton for a rapid incerase in promiscuity and in illegitimate births in the mile-high city. He holds parents largely responsible for a change in dating patterns tibat have made it acceptable for 12, 13 and 14-year-olds to have dates and to “ go steady.” He declared, “ Some parents seem to ignore the psychologi cal and even biological consequences of the sexual devel opment of their children. Over-ambitious mothers push their children into the social whirl long before they are ready, because they want their children to be acceptable and accepted. “ I know of one small town,” Professor Tipton goes on to say, “ where fifty percent of the girls in the senior class had become pregnant. When parents permit very early dating and ‘going steady,’ they must be awfully naive or very, very thoughtless if they don’t expect things to happen. I don’t say that all youngsters who go steady are necessarily engaging in sinful activi ties, but they will unquestionably be faced with ex tremely serious temptations.” These remarks were print ed in a recent edition of the Denver Post. A Stanford University sociologist warns that child bom in the United States has ten times the chance of becoming a murderer as does one bom in England. William Maxwell McCord, assistant dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, recently told authorities of the California Youth Authority that the
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