ABSTRACT
We have seen that the children of the Centre have been growing up in families which are themselves embedded in a society constantly increasing in richness and diversity. Here where tastes may be shared in the pursuit of varied activities, each family has been able to create a home-circle with its outer layer of casual contacts and acquaintances and its inner core of friends. Outside this wide circle there is the more general, and for the family alien, amorphous and unpatterned life of the great world, soon to act as a magnet for the child now coming to adolescence. As, step by step, the parents have penetrated the society that surrounds them, the child has little by little shared in their experience, not unlike the way in which as an infant when he began to be weaned from the breast he shared in the food of the family table. So now, again already equipped with familiar experience for a new exploratory journey, he stands on the threshold of adolescence. Eager for exploration and for the taste of more diverse and distant experience, he begins to reach out for new forms of nutriment. So we shall find that the chief sociological characteristic of adolescent development is rapid movement of the boy or girl towards the unexplored field that lies at and beyond the periphery of the home circle.
