226 AMERICAN ebsites AND GARDENS 
HELPS TO. fia 
BOL Se 
THE MOTHER’S PART IN ATHLETICS 
By Elizabeth Atwood 
AM sure that helps to the housewife may be 
found in suggestions relating to other things 
than the table. Believing that athletics 
should form a great part of the lives of our 
boys and girls, it seems to me a mother’s 
part to be actively interested in developing 
the athletic spirit. She must sacrifice her fears, and take an 
interest in the games—not hinder them. 
Play is as natural to boys and girls as is the running of 
the dog who doubles and trebles the distance when you 
take him for a walk. This same spirit continues through 
life unless perverted, but at no period is it more pronounced 
than through school and college. Dr. Henry S. Curtis, 
Secretary of the Playground 
Association of America, who 
must know well what is good 
for boys and girls, believes that 
what we want is more of joy and 
fun. Who ever raised a family 
of children without knowing just 
that? I claim that children need 
a mother’s interest in their fun 
as in their work. 
Because of this very influence 
for happiness and added interest 
in school and its requirements, 
I am a friend to school athletics. 
I fully believe in their power for 
good, from the days of “Crack 
the Whip” and “Tag,” with all 
the trying accompaniments for 
the mother, of worn knees of the 
stockings and torn trousers, to 
the days of baseball and foot- 
ball, with its worn clothes and 
torn flesh to be mended. This 
is what mothers are for. 
Class spirit, team spirit, merg- 
ing into town spirit, is the re- 
sult, and is for good. The need 
for high scholarship to qualify a boy for his membership of 
the team gives a happy impetus to his school work, under 
which the necessary grind loses much of its pain. It is all 
well enough to say that we send our children to school to 
study, but the world moves, and educators know that play 
must and should be provided for, as well as the study. I 
am forced to admit that boys have much more conscience 
about athletics than they have about study, but this is only 
another reason why they are bound to be helped by their 
association with athletics. A fun-loving boy, not meaning 
TABLE AND HOUSEHOLD SUGGESTIONS OF JNTER- 
EST TO EVERY HOUSEKEEPER AND HOUSEWIFE 
A novelty for the table-—Grape-fruit holder 
Pa IgI2 
to be a shirk, drifts along in the easiest way, laughing at 
his parents’ anxiety over his work, content to just squeak 
through, and loses no sleep over a failure. But just let a 
chance of joining the “team” appear, and presto! all 
changes. 
It does not make a student or a grind out of him, but 
the actual stimulus does lift him out of his careless ways. 
His marks begin to improve, and his habits have to, 
if he has been given to smoking or to drinking too many 
sodas. 
This in turn helps the physical condition and produces 
the healthy body. Boys must be doing something, so give 
them the right thing to do and encourage them in it. A 
great moral education may be conveyed through this very 
play. A place where boys may run off, as in baseball or 
football, some of their boiling, surging energy, is just what 
they need. This same energy 
is what will make them efficient 
citizens; and to direct and help 
it along in healthful lines is a 
mother’s contribution—as much 
her duty, as to feed thiem 
properly. 
Another moral effect is in the 
guiding of the mind along 
healthful lines; and in this in- 
spiring, active out-of-doors ex- 
ercise working off morbid 
thoughts, or better still, leaving 
no room for them to come. We 
cannot quietly set this possibility 
of danger aside, and if there is 
no cause for fear for our boy, 
his example will be helpful to 
the one in danger. I always feel 
that the active boys on the field 
are safer than the looker-on 
who pays more attention to his 
girl-comrade than he does to the 
game. 
There are mothers unwise 
enough to forbid all rough play. 
When my children were small, 
they had a great contempt for some children whose mothers 
would not allow them to play any games where their clothes 
would suffer. With merciless candor they expressed them- 
selves, these relentless, active school children, and dubbed 
the nice, clean boys “‘sissies.”” What insupportable anguish 
that mother inflicted upon her children! They were pale 
and puny, generally ailing, and practically ostracized. My 
boy said, when I remonstrated, ‘‘Oh, yes, Harry always 
knows his lessons, but he’s no good, ’cause he can’t play.” 
Later on in life I have seen the really terrible effects pro-- 
