Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish
periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to
characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and
of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two
periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously,
but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to
twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive,
but in early adolescence "two elements predominate--first, the plays are
predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less
sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in
which there is coöperation among a number for a given end, in which play
has a program and an end. The second characteristic of the period is
with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage
out-of-door life--hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing,
fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This
characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "The plays of
adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage,
endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."
Croswell[6] found that among 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of
amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all
others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were
represented as almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among
boys as four to one." The age of the greatest number of different
amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but
for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number,
and progressive specialisation occurs. The games of chase, which are
suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in
boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and
at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original
make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily
and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily
from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys.
"A third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their
teens are games of contest--games in which the end is in one way or
another to gain an advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n
the struggle between peers." "As children approach the teens, a
tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no
longer makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents and
society must, therefore, provide the most favorable conditions for the
kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the child grows older,
society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements, and from
the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative and
competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the
accomplishments of some definite aim.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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