The anthropologist, Margaret Mead, pointed out ten years ago the similarity between the experience of first-generation immigrant parents in America, early in this century, and parents in rapidly developing societies today. The immigrant parents clung to their old language, and to the values of their old country but their children grew up speaking English (with American accents) and feeling at home in American society. As a result, in many spheres of life the children were better informed than their parents, and in others the advice and instruction which they should have received from their parents could not be given, because the latter only knew the tasks and values of their former society. Today, parents all over the world find their children growing up in societies which have changed radically within a generation: we are all immigrants in this new world. One of the great discontinuities in the post-war years, together with technological innovations such as air travel, television, transistors and automation has been the erosion of parental authority because of the rapid changes in access to education, and to new forms of employment, and most of all because of the decline of traditional skills, beliefs and codes of conduct. We are aware of this in our Western cities, probably even more strongly than are parents in newly developing countries becaus~ there, although dramatic changes are in progress~ often transforming the previous way of life, their ageold customs are resistant to change: and parents are still the guides to 'proper' behaviour. It remains true that every society is taking part in this rapid transition into the New World of global communication, of mass production of similar goods, of involvement in similar technologies, and of an increasingly uniform global culture. A common characteristic of this culture is that its mass media offer the prospect of participation in a high material standard of living to everyone, only to disappoint millions of young people who are denied the means of entry into this earthly paradise -and who are correspondingly frustrated. As a result, young people today -and not only young people -need counselling more than ever, just when their elders are less able than before to exercise the authority with which their knowledge of the old ways used to endow them.