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When the children were old enough to begin walking, they were helped out by a colonial version of a gocart. They were also put in a "standing stool," a small playpen of sorts. Bathing, as we practice it, was unknown. The bowl and pitcher were available, but children were not constantly washed and covered with powder or oil. As for play, some of the sterner, Puritanical parents were suspicious of games—especially so in New England —and indeed of anything that prompted laughter and enjoyment. Nevertheless, children were permitted to play sports, receive toys and in general behave at times rather like our own children do today. In colonial America girls had dolls, crude or simple ones, elaborately dressed and expensive ones. Boys rolled marbles and obtained jackknives as they became older. Both boys and girls had drums and hobbyhorses, tops and small animals carved out of wood, and alphabet blocks, not unlike the kind our own children still use. And colonial children played the same games some 20th century American children do: hopscotch, tag, blindman's buff, dominoes, cards. Slowly, as with our own boys and girls, hobbies, diversions or games became unintentionally educational in nature, as children copied adult activities, learning their "position" in society, a position then as now connected to one's sex, race and "background." Boys went fishing or hunting; girls played "house" and not incidentally learned to cook. The children of slaves learned to wait on other (white) children, as well as assist their parents in various menial tasks. Children of the rich were given dancing lessons, learned how to eat, dress, walk, talk in the proper way and, not least, how to give orders and receive the lavish attention and regard of others. There were sleigh riding and ice skating in the Northern colonies, and in the South cockfighting, which was not considered unfit for the eyes of children. In fact, children all over the colonies were taken to watch the public execution of criminals —another "educational" diversion.
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As for education proper, the variations were wide. Of course, there was no widespread, relatively uniform public school system. In the rural areas and on the frontier, children were apprenticed early or simply worked alongside their parents at farming or housekeeping. Most city children in the North went to schools—but for varying lengths of time. Tutors were often an alternative in the South where distances between plantations made public schools impractical. Private schools were founded to serve the interests of those who wanted their children taught intensively and maybe with a particular religious point of view. In New England, parents had several options: keep the child at home, apprentice him, tutor him or her—or send him off to school. The schools were not, by and large, free. Nor were they compulsory in the sense that every child in a certain area had to attend them. Some fortunate boys were educated in grammar schools with college in mind: they studied the Bible, Erasmus, Aesop, Ovid, Cicero, Vergil, Homer, Hesiod; Latin and Greek. Above all, there was what might be called a strongly moral education. Such an education for the colonists was by definition religious—God's will made known to the child.