Kindergarten the sense of social responsibility is
borne in upon him. Perhaps it comes to him first when he is chosen
to lead the march and finds that he must be careful not to squeeze
through too narrow places, lest someone get into trouble. In dealing
out pencils, worsted, and other materials he must be careful to
show strict impartiality, and give no preference to his own personal
friends. In a hundred small ways he is helped to regulate his own
conduct, so that it may conduce to the welfare of the whole school.

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