How would you answer these questions?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of play?
At what age would you wish your child to stop playing?
What would be the physical and moral consequences to a child who practically stopped playing at or before the age of ten years?
At what age would you advise that a child begin to work for commercial profit?
If it is good for the children in whom you are interested to have time and opportunity for play, how far would the same rule hold good for other children in America? For children of other countries?
Name the countries in which defective and dependent children may be neglected or overworked without danger to world-welfare.
Reversing the stereotyped text-book arrangement, we place our questions at the beginning rather than at the end of this chapter. Every thoughtful woman is begged to stop and answer these questions,—in writing, if feasible,—as fully and as honestly as possible, and then, after carefully studying the subject, to see if her opinions have altered in any particulars.
Two great movements.
Two of the great movements that are sweeping over our land,—the Playground movement and the movement to create and enforce proper laws concerning Child Labor,—are engrossing the attention of some of our greatest and wisest men and women. The abundance of literature on these subjects, the time devoted to them in great conventions and in lesser gatherings, the very opposition encountered in the ranks of those who profit by the exploitation of America’s growing children,—all go to prove that they belong to the living issues of the day. Our grandmothers would doubtless have been shocked beyond words to be told that the subject of their children’s play belonged to the “Child Problems” studied by the country at large through its Juvenile Commission, and had become a matter for legislation and financial appropriation by state and municipality! But so it is, and Hygiene and Psychology and various other learned sciences each claim a voice in the subject of the play and the work of the nation’s children.