The hours of being together are the hours of real education.  Children cannot be with good and great people and remain the same.  Their lives need other lives.  Above all, they need us.  This should be the day for real mothering and fathering.  Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.

Sec. 3.  THE PROBLEM OF PLAY

What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday?  Is there any other kind of child?  They all want to.  It is as natural for a child to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary.  A child is a growing person learning life by play.  Because play seems trivial to us we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day devoted to the higher life.  In some families play is forbidden because children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate piety and pleasure.

Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all others?  No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that stand on other days.  Let this be the day when the barriers between father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter into the joy of living.

Play is to a child the idealization of life’s experiences and the realization of its ideals.  That is why he plays at school, idealizing the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw.  The traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood.  Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the adult.  Play is the child’s method of reaching forward into life’s meaning.  Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical review and from association with the past.  There is a sense in which the child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.[32]

We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn from them.  Indeed, we come to life through their ways.  We must become as little children.  Before we settle the question of play on Sunday we do well to be sure that we know what play means to children, that we really grasp something of its educational value and its religious potency.  Then we can proceed to a family policy in Sunday play.

Sec. 4.  A POLICY ON PLAY

Keep the day as one of family unity. Help the child to think of it as a day protected for the sake of family togetherness.  You can play that for this day the ideal is already realized of a family life uninterrupted by the demands of labor and business.