Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, HeredityGruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Science
Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, Heredity
Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Children
In organizing clubs, or rather in presenting opportunities for the
organization of clubs, we must recognize that bodily activity,
taking the form of athletics, or of workshop effort, or of camping,
hunting, etc., is a fundamental condition of healthy growth for the
boys and girls. As every group must have its meeting place, this
should be first provided, and it should be of a nature that allows
gymnastics and hammering and boxing to go on without any
restrictions beyond those required by the nature of the little
animals. That is, there is need for sleep and rest and meals--and
perhaps certain definite hours for school and church--but beyond
such disagreeable though necessary interruptions the meeting place
of the club should be a busy place at all decent hours. We are
tempted to force literature and debating upon our clubs; these
things usually come later, and appeal at best to but relatively few
boys. Literature and debating are good, but they can never take the
place of parallel bars and boxing gloves and hammer and saw.
We are also tempted to pick out the boys for the clubs that we are
interested in. This is a serious mistake. It is this sort of thing
that causes the failure of so many well-meaning attempts to redeem
the children of the "slums" or of the street. We must let the groups
form spontaneously; the boys' instincts are keener in detecting the
sneak and the coward and the traitor than yours are, and if the club
has the right start, the undesirable citizen will either adopt the
morals of the club or be squeezed out. And the right start is
chiefly a good meeting place. It is here that the church and the
school and the home can cooperate. In the larger cities the
settlement has pointed the way by carrying on practically all of the
work with children through the medium of clubs.
It is not necessary for every parent to furnish a suitable meeting
place; indeed, each club needs only one meeting place. But every
home can contribute something. If you have not the suitable garret
or barn or shed, you can supply the baseball outfit, or the Indian
clubs, or the work-bench, or some of the tools. You can lend your
homes for those not very frequent occasions when the boys are quite
satisfied to have a quiet evening of table games or theatricals, or
imitation camp-fire with chestnuts to roast and songs to sing. You
can make up lunch-baskets for fishing or tramping trips, or you can
sew tapes on the old pants for "uniforms."
It does not matter so much _what_ you do, so long as you do as
much as you can, and, above all, if you show an "interest." The bond
of sympathy and intimacy that comes from such an understanding and
from the hearty cooperation of the home with these natural instincts
of the children is an immense gain to the individual parent, as well
as to the individual child. Instead of friction and opposition of
forces, there results a cooperation of forces that all make for
good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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