The Care of Growing Children
In an article on “The Growing Child,” in the Youth’s Companion, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi gives some information and sensible advice to parents on the natural development and training of children, which she prefaces with the words of Rousseau, that the “return to nature” is the only way of escape from “the innumerable evils engendered by the artificial luxury of civilization.” Of the imperative necessity for pure air, especially for infants, she says:— “It is not the sentimental fact of living near to nature which enables so many country children to triumph over the hardships of their environment, but their exposure to abundance of fresh air. “They run about all day in scanty clothing, wherefore the light and air can reach their limbs and brown their skin. They sleep at night in houses unsupplied with furnaces, where the wind whistles through the cracks. The air comes to them free from the dust and unspeakable impurities of the city, laden, on the contrary, with oxygen from the breathing of forests and meadows. It is literally the breath of life. Rushing into the lungs, it distends their delicate cells, passes its oxygen across the diaphanous walls of these into the blood stream, by which it is carried to every tissue of the body, and contributes to the nutrition of every cell. “The ingestion of oxygen into the blood is the first step in the long and intricate series of chemical processes by which the child’s body is built up to maturity. The need of air is proportionately greater while the tissues are more immature. Gardeners place glass over many young plants to concentrate upon them a greater force of sunlight during the first moments of their growth above ground. So during the first weeks and months and years of a child’s life he is more dependent upon air and light than at any other time, and in his almost vegetative existence, more dependent upon air than upon almost anything else. He is as yet incapable of the muscular exercise by which, later in life, he will be able to quicken his circulation and increase the depth of his respiration. Air must be supplied to his passive reception.” Pure Air an Aid to Digestion
“The first infantile function to attract attention through its unfortunately frequent disorders, is not respiration, but digestion. The digestive organs, the stomach, liver, and intestines, are at birth, and during infancy, normally larger in proportion than at any other time of life. That is, they should be so, for the act of feeding is proportionately of more importance during the period of growth, when nutriment is required not only to sustain the present life of the body, but to provide for its rapid increase. “Often, however, the digestive organs do not attain the development proper to the age. Relative deficiency in their mass, or defect in the elaboration of their structure, is probably an immediate cause of much infantile malnutrition, of rickets, of dyspeptic conditions which persist through life. It is impossible directly to overcome these defects; impossible to make the alimentary canal develop better and digest more by forcing more food upon it. We can stimulate the growth and work of muscles, even that of the heart, by stimulating them to work; but with digestive glands we must evade the difficulty. Food easy of digestion must be supplied to the feeble digestive organs. “But after regulation of its natural or substitute food, the great remedy for the indigestions arising from a feeble development of the child is again, air. The air, which stimulates the nutrition of all tissues, is the most powerful agent to stimulate the development of the digestive organs, which are, for the moment, chiefly appropriating the developmental forces to themselves. “Many a dyspeptic city-bred baby first knows freedom from the torments of indigestion when it has been removed from its city prison, and placed on the sand at the seashore, or on the slope of a mountain, or on the dandelions of any dry, sunny grass-plot, where it may for the first time fully breathe.” Importance of Cold Bathing
“After air and food, the third natural necessity for the child is cold water, which is more easily obtainable than the other two, but far more apt to be neglected, or even deliberately repudiated. Mothers dread cold bathing for young children, and can with difficulty be convinced that the children’s cries do not prove that the bath is doing harm. “A child should be accustomed to bathing from its birth; the temperature of the plunge being at eighty degrees until the age of six months, but from that time on steadily graded downward, until a temperature of sixty-five degrees, or even sixty degrees, is reached in early childhood. “With the first opportunity the child should be taught how to swim. The prejudice, wide-spread among city people, against fresh-water bathing, is as unfounded as the correlative prejudice against daily cold baths in winter at home. “The advantages of swimming are twofold. The shock of the cold water on the surface of the body offers a powerful stimulus to the network of nerves spread over the skin, a stimulus conveyed directly to the nerve centers. This first advantage is shared by home bathing or by swimming in the tanks of city gymnasiums. But in addition to this first effect the complex muscular exercise involved initiates the system of muscular training, on which, from the age of three years, must be placed our chief reliance for the invigoration of children.”