There is a great interest among boys at this time in such toys as Meccano and the American Model Builder, in which materials are furnished for making miniature bridges and structures and machines. The great outdoor and cooperative games of baseball and football, which are intensely dramatic, are now played by boys, while both boys and girls enjoy more elaborate joint impersonations than ever before, in acting charades and playing Dumb Crambo.
The years beyond thirteen introduce a second period of imitation. The boy now thinks he is a man and the girl wishes to be a woman. This play-adultism manifests itself, of course, in the insistence upon wearing adult clothes and entering into adult experiences. Now is the time for the den or the clubhouse or the workshop, in which the maturing boy or girl entertains his friends and executes his craftsmanship projects. The would-be athlete now constructs his rude outdoor gymnasium. Indoors the amateur magician performs tricks to his more or less astonished family.
A valuable device, which is far more than a toy, for this period is the stereoscope. If supplied with stereoscopic photographs carefully selected and explained, the sense of perspective, size, and life which this optical instrument gives enables the imaginative youth, or adult even, to enter so vividly into foreign experiences and customs as to constitute, if but briefly, actual experiences of travel.
There is no material or device which has been mentioned above that is not available to the most modest household. The majority of them consist of articles already in the house and the others of tools or materials which are inexpensive and of permanent value.
Serial Dramatic Play
By serial dramatic play is meant a dramatic game which is taken up day after day for a considerable period, until it becomes a continued story. The children who engage in this sort of play are, of course, getting a much finer intellectual stimulus than those who play entirely in a desultory and disconnected fashion. Not all children have the capacity to sustain games of this sort. Here comes one of the great fellowship opportunities of parenthood.
A good illustration of this sort of play is the war game which Robert Louis Stevenson used to play with his step-son, Lloyd Osbourne. Owing to the tireless resourcefulness of the older play-mate, the two utilized nearly the whole house for a series of sieges and strategies, and went so far even as to publish bulletins from the field of war, which they printed upon a small press.
Mr. H. G. Wells, the novelist, has played with his two small children by means of blocks, Noah’s Ark people, twigs and miscellaneous objects, several series of games of war and peace, which he has described most delightfully in his book, Floor Games. The parent who tells a continued story to his children, which they illustrate together by crude drawings, is engaged in an operation which is fully as much a game as a story, and which often results in the children acting out the story after it has been told or adding chapters to it of their own composition. So keenly do they visualize the characters of such a story that upon being suddenly called upon to relate what happened in their favorite hero’s life after some particular incident they will often reminisce as vividly as if they were telling their own histories. A method of doing this by handicraft is suggested on a previous page.
A description is given in another monograph (Table Talk in the Home) of a method by which a mother secured beautiful behavior at table by naming the children for real personages and teaching them to regard each other as distinguished guests. This device lasted successfully for a considerable time. It is a pleasant custom to relate certain cooperative games and enjoyments of parents and children to the home festivals.
It is most enjoyable for families, at their reunions, to act out together the family history. This dramatic commemoration of proud events in the family history stimulates the younger generation with the desire for achievement, and instills a wholesome pride and self-respect which will often prevent them, through the temptations of youth, from acting in a manner unworthy of their ancestors.