Dramatics in the home

by William Byron Forbush

Of the ready-made toys, toy furniture for the house, the sand pile for outdoors and the doll for both are most useful. “The doll,” as Sully tells us, “takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. The doll is an all-important comrade in that solitude à deux, of which the child, like the adult, is so fond.” The complete adaptability of the doll makes it an ideal means for the puppet play of idealism. “A good, efficient, able-bodied doll, like the American girl’s,” says Joseph Lee, “is at home in any situation in life, from princess to kitchen maid, to which she may be called. And one doll in her time plays many parts; she has to, or lose her job.” Besides this, so perfectly does the doll mingle with the child’s own personality that it produces and maintains a complete feeling of oneness.

Says Sully: “‘The dolly must do all and be all that I am;’ so the child, in his warm attachment, seems to argue. This feeling of oneness is strengthened by that of exclusive possession, the sense that the child himself is the only one who really knows dolly or can hear her cry. It is another manifestation of the same feeling of intimacy and solidarity when a child insists on dolly’s being treated by others as courteously as he himself is treated. Children will often expect the mother or nurse to kiss and say good-night to their pet or pets—for their hearts are capacious—when she says good-night to themselves.”

“The rimes of Mother Goose,” says Mrs. Herts, “were predominantingly dramatic. A great many of them associate words, song, and action. The ordinary printed collections are misleading in this respect. The words, taken alone, are not the thing. Think of printing ‘Pease porridge hot’ as a separate and independent poem without the dramatic hand-play! Indeed, it is a pity to have these rimes in books at all.”

The mother may help the development of this expressive instinct in early childhood. Even a baby ought to be treated as a play-mate, not as a plaything. There is an old-fashioned game known as “Come to see.” The little damsel with her doll, and perhaps “dressed up” in some of her mother’s wardrobe, came to call on mother. Her efforts to behave exactly as a lady should were aided and guided by the mother’s careful behavior as hostess. It is a training in manners. When the children play visit each other they use all the manners they have. They practice useful lessons without knowing it. The mother who takes these baby games seriously enough to enter into them in the child spirit is teaching her children as truly as is the kindergartner.

The child from four to seven is capable of a wide range of imagination. These years are regarded by psychologists as the most active imaginatively throughout life. Capable of imitation of the ideas as well as the acts of adults, the child uses dolls, soldiers, Noah’s arks, carts, playhouses, blocks, sand-piles, paint boxes, and stencils to act out a great variety of adult occupations. The imagination seems to engage in freer play the more incomplete are the media provided by others for its expression.

“Nothing,” says Stevenson, “can stagger a child’s faith; he accepts the clumsiest substitutions and can swallow the most staring incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day’s dinner. He can make abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes in his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavory lane.”

Joseph Lee says, “One of the most petted quadrupeds I have known consisted, to the prosaic eye, of half a barrel hoop.”

Even young children differ in the vividness and completeness with which they surrender themselves to imaginary situations. It is said that Stevenson himself was one day watching a boy who was playing that a sofa was a boat. When he had finished he climbed down and walked away. “For heaven’s sake, swim ashore!” cried out the imaginative child-lover in genuine distress. It seemed to him a pity that the lad should not carry his drama clear to its proper close.

No doubt, however, it is clumsy or blind interference by adults which most often cripples the capacity of imaginative enjoyment. Sully tells this: “A little girl of four was playing ‘shop’ with her younger sister. The elder one was shopman at the time I came into her room and kissed her. She broke out into piteous sobs; I could not understand why. At last she sobbed out: ‘Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop.’ I had with my kiss quite spoiled her illusion.”

The child soon tires of mechanical toys, talking dolls or elaborate doll-houses with which there is nothing he can do. Illustrating this point Joseph Lee says: “Toys, things of convenient size and shape to play with, are indeed essential. But it is what you can do with or imagine about them, not what they themselves can do, that is important.... It is the child’s own achievement, not that of the clever man who made the toy, that counts.”