adolescence.
The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight and nine,[3]
and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may persist. Children can give no
better reason why they stop playing with dolls than because other things are
liked better, or they are too old, ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl,
when ripe for marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to
Venus. Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a
four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido, after
speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife by way of Tyrian
sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly realized that dolls are not real,
because they have no inner life or feeling, yet many continue to play with them
with great pleasure, in secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally
single women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those
who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student concluded that the
girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent years were usually those who
had the fewest number, that they played with them in the most realistic manner,
kept them because actually most fond of them, and were likely to be more
scientific, steady, and less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But
the instinct that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle
points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls are more
likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always children or babies. There
is no longer a struggle between doubt and reality in the doll cosmos, no more
abandon to the doll illusion; but where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment,
and just as at the height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives
of future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is probably false.
Nor are doll and child comparable to first and second dentition, and it is doubtful
if children who play with dolls as children with too great abandonment are those
who make the best mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise
of motherhood. The number of motor activities that are both inspired and unified
by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome direction is almost
incredible, and has been too long neglected both by psychologists and teachers.
Few purer types of the rehearsal by the individual of the history of the race can
probably be found even though we can not yet analyze the many elements
involved and assign to each its phyletic correlate.
In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish periods,
separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to characterize the plays of
early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and of later adolescence from