p. 7 | What Would You Do?

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 24, 1910

What Would You Do?

“WHAT would you do,” a mother asked me lately, “if your two-year-old child refused to eat the cereal he has always had for breakfast? I can’t coax or force my little boy to take it.”

In the first place, I would help him forget as fast as I could that that particular cereal was ever invented. I should look about for a totally different variety of breakfast food, and I would even go so far as to serve it in a different little bowl, as gay as could be found. First, I would have seen to the cooking of it myself, to make sure that it had steamed long enough, that it was free from lumps, and not scorched. And I would bring it to him with a smiling face, and a voice as free from wheedling as from any suggestion of force. The idea of cramming food into a child against his will and expecting it to do him good is highly humorous if one stops to regard it.

When a child suddenly and violently deviates from a given routine, there’s a reason. One dish of lumpy, badly cooked cereal is sufficient to prejudice a little stomach against it for months to come. Or if the selfsame food is served without variation for weeks, a child’s appetite becomes as hopelessly dulled as our own would be. “Always” is a long time to be eating one kind of food. It sounds to me as if this particular small boy were “just plain tired” of the monotonous round. The key-note of scientific feeding is now conceded to be variety, and the mother who wants to be sure of the best nurture for the small body must have frequent recourse to the grocer.—American Baby.