Where there are no Kindergartens, the task becomes a more difficult one for the mother, for it becomes necessary, then, that she herself should undertake the social training of her child, and this means that she must know his playmates, not only through his report of them, but through her own observation of them, and that they must be sufficiently at home with her to betray their true characters in her presence.  And this means, of course, that she must become her child’s playmate.  There are few women who think that they have time for this, but there are also few who would not be benefited by it.  If anywhere there is a fountain of youth, it gushes up invisibly wherever playing children are, and she who plays with them gets sprinkled by it.

[Sidenote:  Sharing the Child’s Play]

If there be no time during the busy day when she can justly enter into the children’s free play, at least there is a little while in the late afternoon or in the early evening when she can do so, if she will.  An hour or two a week spent in active association with children at their games will make her intimately acquainted with all their playmates, and, moreover, constitute her a power of first magnitude among them.  Her motherhood thus extends itself, and she blesses not only her own children, but all those who come near her children.  In this respect no Kindergarten can take the place of the mother’s own companionship with the child in his social life.

[Sidenote:  The Children’s Hour]

In an ideal condition the child has his Kindergarten in the morning; his quiet hours, one of them entirely solitary, in the afternoon; his social time, when he, his brothers and sisters and mother, are joined with the other children and mothers in the neighborhood, in the late afternoon, and his family time, with both father and mother, in the evening before going to bed.

In thus sharing her child’s social life the mother admits the claim upon her of social responsibility; she sees that her duty is not to her own home alone, but to the other homes with which hers is linked—­not to her own child alone, but to all children whose lives touch her child’s life.  Her own nature widens with the perception, and she enhances her direct teaching with the force of a beautiful example.

STUDIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

[Sidenote:  Abstract Studies]

There may easily be too many studies and too many accomplishments in the life of any child.  As our schools are constituted there are certainly too many studies of the wrong kind being carried on every day.  But there are also too few studies of the right kind.  In one of our large cities a test was once made as to how much the children who left school at the fifth grade, as 70 per cent of them do, had actually learned in a way that would be of practical value to them, and the results were most discouraging.  These city children who could recite their tables