The boy is a playing animal.  Not all homes can be fully equipped with play apparatus.  But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as though children needed nothing but meals and beds.  The shame of the modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive adults.  To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to force him out to the life of the streets.  The thoughtless self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.[37]

But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation.  For the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary, and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof.  If possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.[38]

A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the street.  Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the purpose of a salon.[39]

Sec. 2.  RELIGIOUS SERVICE

In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to one form of participation in the religious life.  Whatever the family gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world.  The form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the means of determining his share in such extension.  The child’s gifts to the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own account—­partly his own direct earnings—­appropriated for this or for other purposes by himself and with the advice of his parents.  Family councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.[40]