The Importance of Play in a Child's Life

Opinions and theories have multiplied, and we have seen them agree that a child's play has many benefits: it develops his personality and his body, sharpens his wits, and gives expression to what stirs within him. And here, Madam, is an example: Salma, aged five years, disliked one of her mother's visitors; so she made play a stage for acting out her feelings, taking with a friend of hers the role of the mother, while the other took the role of the disliked visitor, at whose visits she grumbled. This little drama she performed represented Salma's real dislike for her mother's friend.

Grown people can widen the horizon of their understanding by many means. But the child... what has he for widening the horizon of his understanding except play, whether by himself or with a band of sensitive little ones like him? So beware, Madam, of the nightmare of that barren notion which has settled in the minds of most of our ladies — that play is for the child a waste of his time, and that buying him toys is a graveyard for money. If you tried to watch your children's play at close hand, the opposite would become plain to you. Here is a knot that confronts the child in the course of his play, and he strains his mental powers to untie it; and there a situation that teaches him to share, since his monopolizing of certain toys the whole time rouses his companions' fierce anger — to say nothing of the discord it leads to among them.

As for the bodily benefits the child reaps from play, above all when the play is in the open air, they are beyond telling: every movement he makes in the course of his fun helps to strengthen his muscles. There are the doctors, Madam — ask them how many benefits to health the child reaps from it.

It usually delights children to lend one another a hand during play. How beautiful is the cooperative spirit they show when they join together in building a house of wooden blocks or the like; for nothing develops the spirit of cooperation in them so much as accustoming them to it from their tenderest years.

And since play has so great an effect upon the child's inner life, the modern nursery schools have taken it as a starting point in his instruction. Thus we see colored pieces of wood of round shape, for instance, taking the place of figures in teaching the child arithmetic — and so on through other endeavors aimed at making learning dear to him. May we never be deprived of wise men and social reformers, nor of mothers who accept counsel and guidance and act upon the valuable modern theories whose purpose is to rear the rising generation soundly.