All+work+and+a+Little+Play++Children+in+New+England


 * **Title** || **All Work and a Little Play: Children in Rural New England** ||   ||
 * **Author** |||| **Jack Larkin** ||

their parents kept them bus**y. **Some social commentators in the 1830s were concerned that as rural society changed, New England children might actually have less work to do than was good for them. But reminiscences of growing up during this period tell us that these alarmists had little to fear; the era of childhood leisure was still far in the future**.
 * Today, the realms of work and childhood are sharply separated. But in early rural New England, work was still seen as virtually continuous with life itself. Children's work was needed in a rural economy with few labor-saving devices, and virtually all parents believed that idleness was a source of moral evil**.
 * In the countryside, the work of the farm and the life of the family were so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. There was such a range of necessary tasks to be done that small and unskilled hands could have just as much to do as older and more knowledgeable ones. From the ages of six or seven on, farm girls and boys were indispensable members of the family labor force. Children began with simple chores like shelling corn or weeding the garden, and took on increasingly difficult tasks as they grew up. Young girls worked along-side their mothers and older sisters learning how to sew, cook, wash, and tend to the dairy. Boys labored with their fathers and brothers in the fields and around the ba**rn.
 * The pressure of work on children was greatest among poorer families, who often "hired out" their offspring to neighbors. Working for a few cents a day, boys picked stones out of fields or hauled firewood, while girls did housework and cared for children. Susan Blunt of Merrimac, New Hampshire, remembered spending a week keeping house for a neighbor when she was ten years old. She worked "like a little spider" and got 15 cents. But even among better-off families, the discipline of work was almost never absent. Center village children, whose fathers were ministers, lawyers, printers, or storekeepers, did not have a full range of farm tasks to do, but they too recalled that
 * The work experiences of early nineteenth-century children have few counterparts in today's middle-class society; but play provides a link across the decades. Over a long span of time, one generation of children has passed its games on to the next through oral traditions that have allowed plenty of room for regional, local, and neighborhood variation but have also preserved many things intact. The rules of marbles and the game of tag, for example, have changed little. Like their counterparts today, early nineteenth-century New England children played fantasy games, told scary stories, hiked, skated, sledded, and jumped rope. Some once-popular pastimes like rolling hoops or playing "The Graces" have faded from memory. Others have been dramatically reshaped over time; the New England game called "townball" or "rounders" is the ancestor of the present game of baseball**.
 * The material world of childhood, toys and other possessions, is immensely more abundant today. Toys in the early New England countryside were few and were simple, homemade contrivances; store-bought, shop-made ones were rare. An average American child's possessions today would have astonished even the wealthiest girl or boy of the 183**0s.
 * Time for children was different as well. Nowadays play is what children are expected to do; it fills the hours not spent in school or on homework. In early rural New England play was an afterthought, taking a very distant second place in adult minds to work routines and responsibilities. Children of the New England past may have enjoyed play all the more, of course, for that very reason**.