Exploring plays and all the plays which include wigwams and war paint are such as an intelligent grown-up will be able to intensify and add backbone to--for a child's fancy will naturally outrun his performance, and though he may imagine a feather head-dress or moccasins, he will be only too pleased that a grown-up should make the things for him with that strong, unerring touch to which his small experimenting hands cannot yet attain. All such games require numbers; your only lonely child cannot play Indians to the full. Two is better than one and more than two is better than two, up to the number of six or eight. People don't seem to see how important numbers are for play. They see it fast enough when it comes to schools, but a regular association of children for the purposes of play is not encouraged. In a large family of boys and girls it just happens happily, but an association of children from various homes generally means a predatory horde of boys: girls don't associate with unrelated girls in joyous play-adventures, and boys are apt to think that little girls who are not their sisters are either angels or muffs, and neither a muff nor an angel is what you want to play games with. Parents and guardians might do a great deal to render play-association possible: I suggest that house parties of children, where the utmost possible liberty should be given, would stimulate enormously the plays which encourage daring and initiative, and would teach boys that girls are not necessarily muffs or angels, and teach girls that boys are not all brutes.
Fathers and mothers sacrifice themselves every year in August; you see them doing it, heavily, definitely, with clenched teeth and a grim determination not to be selfish, and to spend a month with the children at the seaside, however much it may cost in time, temper, and money. The Browns go to Scarborough, their friends the Robinsons go to Wales, the Smiths are in Devonshire and the Joneses at Littlehampton. They all go to the same sort of lodgings, do the same sort of things, and lucky is the mother whose nerves are not worn very thin indeed before the holiday ends. Now suppose all these worthy and self-sacrificing parents agreed to pool their families and let Mr. and Mrs. Brown take charge of them all--in some jolly big house suited to the needs of so swollen a household. Sixteen children are really, in many ways, four times easier to manage than four--and at least forty times as easy to amuse. In fact, you don't need to amuse them--they will amuse themselves and each other: Mr. and Mrs. Brown will only have to adjust ebullitions.