boy could be
left out of the reckoning.

The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to
that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree
that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him
about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a
chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms
of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on
whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of
unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be
responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does
regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services
which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his
training for the larger citizenship and society of service.[36]

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