Blame For Immaturity

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31116, 20 July 1966, Page 19

Blame For Immaturity

The tendency of the welfare state to rob a man of the development of his own initiative was in part responsible for the large amount of emotional immaturity found in young people today, Brigadier D. Scott, social case counsellor for the Salvation Army in New Zealand, said in Christchurch yesterday. Brigadier Scott is conducting a two-day seminar in case counselling for Salvation Army field officers of the Can-terbury-Westland division. The seminar is part of a dominion-wide programme to instruct officers in psychology and its application to their work. Although such instruction has been given for the last three years, this is the first time that a course has been available in Christchurch.

Previously, officers from the city had attended similar inservice training courses at Temuka.

There was more emotional illness today than at any previous time and many of its victims were unaware that they were ill or what was wrong with them, Brigadier Scott said. The immaturity bringing about this illness was due in part to the lack of initiative caused by the welfare state, children being forced into

adulthood rather than initiated into it and the free access to adult pleasures that young people had. Some people were so emotionally disturbed that they found all aspects of life, inchiding worship, difficult. Young people were inheriting emotional insecurity along with social security. They were given free access to adult things without any indication of how to use them. They were “living as they see” and “behaving in the expected Way,” Brigadier Scott said. If we could fix one generation we could change this, he said. The two-day school for officers was designed to present

them with up-to-date instruments to help the people who came to them, Brigadier Scott said.' There had been an increase in training ministers in the social sciences over the last 10 years that was aimed at training clergy to handle people as “complete persons.” The training called for a body of knowledge beyond that offered in theological training and further equipped officers for the doublepronged spiritual-social work of the Salvation Army. Brigadier Scott said that the drift away from church membership was a drift away from the obligations of moral restraints and he believed that even though imperfect, the church was the best organisation to give a guide as to how to live in a whole way.