Are the children restive or boisterous? Do they talk incessantly and nonsensically? A little imagination will suggest what should be done with them. They are steam engines under full head of steam. If you do not wish to starve them into lassitude, set their activity to work in some direction that will not be troublesome. Has one of the children pinched his hand in the door or bumped his head? Summon up your imagination. He is a man who has met with an accident; call the ambulance, which comes in the form of a two-legged creature, to carry him to the hospital, which to grown-up eyes looks amazingly like the couch in the sewing-room; give him some medicine out of a bottle, which has the appearance of a shoe-horn. Is there an altercation in the nursery? Let there be a court established, and the issue heard and decided in due form. No retinue of servants can work such wonders as a moderately alert imagination.
If we parents have allowed our own imaginations to become atrophied through disuse, so that we are incapacitated from sharing in the most vivid part of our children's world, there is at least one thing we can do; we can restrain our natural impulse to interfere with our children's imagination. For a generous portion of every day we can leave our children alone. We are, of course, useful to them in emergencies, but ordinarily we prosy folk are in their way. What a nuisance we are when we impose upon an imaginative child that horror known as a mechanical toy! The nodding mandarin is so insistently a mandarin that no child with a healthy imagination can respect it. Off with its head! it then can conceivably be the pillar of a house, or a chimney for a steamboat. Large flat wooden dolls that come in a game-set have been known to serve admirably as roofs for block houses. Shall we allow the children to abuse their toys in this wise? exclaims the prosaic adult. The children might well reply, Must we be forced to lose our real world and to live in a commonplace, unreal world like yours? Elaborate dolls, complicated mechanisms, elegant playthings, may gratify the vanity of an adult, and even whet the curiosity of the growing boy and girl, but will not take the place of real toys like blocks of wood and spools and marbles. If we must nag him at other times, at least in his play let us leave the child alone with his imagination and the materials which his imagination can best use. If we are nonplussed by the enjoyment which a child finds in such simple things, it is because we have not the imagination to perceive that these very same simple things are the most capable of varied transformation.
Like those complicated toys which are made merely because the adults, who have the money, buy them, some kindergartens are engines of destruction. The play instinct, which psychologists kindly explain is simply the instinct for self-directed activity, is in mortal peril from people who are always for supervising children's games. Controlling the play of children is really attempting the impossible. As soon as it is controlled from the outside, play ceases to be play. If some one else directs the child, he ceases to be self-directed. Play is not mere recreation; it is sometimes very serious business. What makes it play is that it is not done under orders. And real play requires imagination. We parents can spoil our children by confining them to the artificial things we enjoy in lieu of our own minds. If we wish to amuse ourselves, we can do so for a time by spoiling our children. But if we wish them to enjoy life, as well as to grow strong in body and mind and character, we will not tempt them by the spices, the mechanisms, the artifices of our world, but will leave them as much as possible to wander and play and work unmolested in the world of simple things. Simple food, simple occupations, simple toys, simple surroundings—at least such we call them; in fact, there are no riches like them to the child—or the adult for that matter—who has not been robbed of his imagination. If we have lost ours, and must go about our task of instruction and discipline in the unreal way of the dry-as-dust, we can at least leave the child his. That is possible for the dullest of us.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] By Jacob Abbott. (Harper and Brothers.)
IV PEACE AT A PRICE
Advice to wives usually begins with this sort of exhortation: When your husband returns from the office, greet him smilingly; exile from your face the traitorous lines of care, imprison in the silences of your mind the petty vexing trials of the day, dismiss to their own quarters the evidences of housework. Your husband's home is his castle; when he takes refuge there in flight from his enemies, the cares of his vocation, do not confront him with your own. We are all familiar with this strain. It sounds well. But, after all, the lord's castle is his lady's battlefield. If she is a very fine lady indeed, she may not have engaged in any personal encounters. If her resources and disposition permit, she may hire mercenaries to do her fighting for her. In that case her battles have been sham battles, and she has no relic of carnage to hide. If, however, she is not one of those who regard one child as a nuisance and two as an intolerable burden, and therefore prefers to conduct the campaign of their training herself, she can hardly be sure of turning nightly the battlefield of that home into the semblance of an impregnable castle. The fact is, any woman who regards motherhood as a vocation quite as worthy of respect as yelling on the Stock Exchange (and that I believe is a very, very respectable vocation indeed) will find it a serious drain on her physical and nervous resources.