There is, however, another side to the question.  It is true that if the child is not to be over-stimulated upon the psychical side, we must see to it that his play, for the most part, is not dependent upon the participation of grown-up persons.  In practice this excessive stimulation is the common fault with which we meet.  There are few children in well-to-do homes, with loving mothers and devoted nurses, who suffer from too little mothering and nursing.  Too many show signs of too much.  To observe the opposite fault we must seek the infants and children who for a long time are inmates of institutions, orphanages, infirmaries, hospitals, and so forth.  In such surroundings the mental life of the child may languish.  His physical wants are cared for, but there the matter ends.  In a rigid routine he is washed and fed, but he may not be talked to or played with or stimulated in any way.  His day is spent passively lying in his cot, unnoticed and unnoticing.  I have seen a poor child of three years just released from such a life, and after eighteen months returned to his mother, unable to talk and almost unable to walk, crying pitifully at the novelty and strangeness of the noisy life to which he had returned, worried by contact with the other children, and without any desire or power to occupy himself in the home.  For an hour in the day mothers may devote themselves wholeheartedly to the children, and if they set them romping till they are tired out, so much the better.  In the garden or in an airy room with the windows open, a game with a ball or a toy balloon, or a game of hide-and-seek, will be all to the good, and the children may climb and be rolled over and swung about to their heart’s content.  With an only child, especially with a child whose home is in town, and whose outings are limited to a sedate airing in the park, such free play is especially necessary.  It may help more than anything else to quiet restless minds and tempers that are on edge all day long from excessive repression.

On the other hand, those forms of entertainment which are known as “children’s parties” are generally fruitful of ill results, at any rate with nervous and highly-strung children.  Sometimes they entail a postponement of the usual bedtime, and nearly always they involve over-heated and crowded rooms.  Perverse custom has decreed that these gatherings shall take place most commonly in the winter, when dark and cold add nothing to the pleasure and a great deal to the risk of infection which must always attend the crowding of susceptible children together in a confined space with faulty ventilation.  There is clearly on the score of health much less objection to summer garden parties for children, but these for some reason are less the vogue.  As a rule parties are not enjoyed by nervous children.  There is intense excitement in anticipation, and when at length the moment arrives, there is apt to be disillusion.  Either the excitement of the child may pass all bounds and end in tears and so-called naughtiness, or the unfamiliar surroundings may leave him distrait with a strange sense of unreality and unhappiness.  It is not always fair to blame the want of wisdom in his hostess’s choice of eatables, if the excited and overstimulated child fails in the work of digestion and returns to the nursery to suffer the reaction, with pains and much sickness.