Mothers Before System

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 12, 1916

Mothers Before System

Too much system hurts little babies. Dr. Joseph E. Winters of Cornell University says so, and he is a high authority on children’s complaints. It will comfort many persons to hear this man speak out. It is not only the bodies of babies which are starved. Too often another precious thing is quite destroyed. Babies and mothers were invented a long time before doctors and nurses. Centuries before modern science took to weighing infants before and after meals, there grew up, from the dependence of the child on the mother, a marvelous bond of sympathy. It is the helpless babe’s only source of comfort, and it survives as the one consolation of many a woman in her old age. But too much “system” in raising babies destroys this fine product.

If a baby is always and forever to be left alone to “cry it out,” according to the directions of the trained nurse, the seed of this sympathy is never sown. Wrapping a child’s finger in antiseptic gauze is a safe and sane process, but it is the kiss that really cures. It is mother’s understanding of “how it hurts” that makes wee Billy a brave boy. And just that way, even as little children, grown men sometimes want their mothers.

There is no substitute for this normal sympathy between mother and child, and it is sure to be stunted, or may never grow at all, if orphan asylum methods—too much system—are permitted to interfere with their intimate personal relations.—Selected.