Article April 26, 1975 Issue

Getting Along

Daisy M. Smith

Have you met people who believe that to be mature they must be allowed to do whatever they want, and then if it turns out to be wrong, well, they've just chalked up one more experience? When I reached college age I believed I shouldn't have to follow parental advice. Being a Christian Scientist, I knew that my Father-Mother God would always lead me. So I thought that it naturally followed that my own parents' advice was a bit superfluous. After all, they had made mistakes too.

I lived at home and commuted to college. I wanted the pleasures of being at home coupled with the privileges of being away at college with little parental guidance. Peers were pressuring me to move into my own apartment so that I could have more freedom, stand on my own two feet, and grow up faster. For a while I fully believed this was the solution. I wasn't specially happy at home anyway because I was feeling a great deal of self-righteousness and felt that my parents were unbending, nosy, bossy.

I talked it over with one of my college instructors. He was a man whose opinion I respected, and I admired him as a person. After hearing what I had to say, he replied, "Now listen, don't leave home until you've worked out your problem with your parents. Get along with them first."

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