A good Kindergarten is a mother's best help in this endeavor, for there her child meets with all sorts of other children. The very influence of the place, and the ever-ready help of the teacher are on his side. Every effort he makes to do right is met and welcomed. In every stand that he takes against temptation, he is unobtrusively reinforced. Moreover, the wrong-doing of his comrades is never allowed to retain the attractive glitter that it sometimes acquires on the play-ground. It is promptly held up to general obloquy, and the good child finds to his surprise that he is not the only one who thinks that teasing, for example, is mean and selfish and that a violent temper is ugly.
Responsibility to Society
Moreover, in the Kindergarten the sense of social responsibility is borne in upon him. Perhaps it comes to him first when he is chosen to lead the march and finds that he must be careful not to squeeze through too narrow places, lest someone get into trouble. In dealing out pencils, worsted, and other materials he must be careful to show strict impartiality, and give no preference to his own personal friends. In a hundred small ways he is helped to regulate his own conduct, so that it may conduce to the welfare of the whole school.
Where there are no Kindergartens, the task becomes a more difficult one for the mother, for it becomes necessary, then, that she herself should undertake the social training of her child, and this means that she must know his playmates, not only through his report of them, but through her own observation of them, and that they must be sufficiently at home with her to betray their true characters in her presence. And this means, of course, that she must become her child's playmate. There are few women who think that they have time for this, but there are also few who would not be benefited by it. If anywhere there is a fountain of youth, it gushes up invisibly wherever playing children are, and she who plays with them gets sprinkled by it.
Sharing the Child's Play
If there be no time during the busy day when she can justly enter into the children's free play, at least there is a little while in the late afternoon or in the early evening when she can do so, if she will. An hour or two a week spent in active association with children at their games will make her intimately acquainted with all their playmates, and, moreover, constitute her a power of first magnitude among them. Her motherhood thus extends itself, and she blesses not only her own children, but all those who come near her children. In this respect no Kindergarten can take the place of the mother's own companionship with the child in his social life.
The Children's Hour
In an ideal condition the child has his Kindergarten in the morning; his quiet hours, one of them entirely solitary, in the afternoon; his social time, when he, his brothers and sisters and mother, are joined with the other children and mothers in the neighborhood, in the late afternoon, and his family time, with both father and mother, in the evening before going to bed.