Description
Familiarity with playing cards and card games can be of tremendous educational and psychological benefit to children, and offers them immediate pleasure as well as lasting advantages. Child psychologists recognize the importance of bringing parents and children together in terms of equality, and this is most easily accomplished when they play card games together. An interest in playing cards stimulates a child's recognition of letters, forms and numbers, and later helps teach him to count. Children who have learned to amuse themselves with card games become more self-sufficient. In later years, of course, this same familiarity with card games will be a social asset to them.
Children are naturally attracted to the bright colors and pretty designs on playing cards. That adults, too, like to play with the cards is a gratifying discovery: it gives the child a sense of maturity. Card games are the foremost indoor recreation where parents and children can meet on a common ground of interest, without a feeling on the part of the children that parents are merely pretending interest in the juvenile toys. Many parents have found that card games, with their rules and their etiquette, are a powerful force in weaning children away from the "Me first!" and "That's mine!" and "I want it all!" of infancy.
