p. 11 | ADVICE ABOUT YOUR BABY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 19, 1902

ADVICE ABOUT YOUR BABY.

This Advice Is Just as Important to You as It Is to the Baby.

In the proper bringing up of a child there is nothing absolutely more important than this one thing—to teach it to eat slowly. Every groom knows and observes the rule, in the care of a horse, that rapid eating is fatal to digestion.

There are all sorts of patent mangers to prevent the horse swallowing his oats too quickly. The man who has no patent manger knows enough, when necessary, to put a stone in the manger, scattering the oats around it, so that the horse may be compelled to eat slowly. If the horse's inclination is to gulp down water too fast, the careful man will put a big sponge in the water, compelling slow drinking.

A child's appetite—when he is allowed to eat rapidly—is always in excess of his actual needs unless the child is in bad health. The reason for this is extremely simple. The child craves food because his body requires to manufacture new tissue. He is growing, and he must not only replace the used-up tissues that his daily life destroys, but he must make new flesh, new muscles, new bone, and new blood every day, adding to his weight and size.

The sensation of hunger is not the craving of an empty stomach, satisfied as soon as the stomach is filled. It is a craving that is felt by the nerves all over the body. This craving can not possibly be satisfied until the stomach has begun the work of transforming the food into blood, flesh, muscles, etc. Consequently the sensation which we call hunger persists long after the child or grown person has rapidly absorbed as much food as it really needs—hence the almost universal practice of overeating.

A million foolish parents urge their children to eat a great deal, and always let them eat as much as they want to. Yet all of these know that a famished man taken off a wreck will eat himself to death if allowed to do so. The very hungry child goes to the same excess only in a lesser degree. The great safeguard against that excess in eating which kills ninety per cent of men before their time, and which accounts for ninety-nine per cent of children's diseases, is slow eating.

Nearly all children eat too rapidly. They do so by nature. Slow eating is a matter of education. But too often the mother or the nurse teaches the child the habit of eating fast. When the baby is little, it is fed one spoonful at a time. Before it has time to half chew or even gulp down the first teaspoonful of food, another is held to its lips. Of course it swallows what it has in its mouth, and seizes upon the next mouthful. The habit thus inculcated by foolish adults often ruins the child permanently.

Four factors count in the healthy assimilation of food, factors which parents and nurses should remember. Assuming the food to be properly prepared, thoroughly cooked, and wisely selected, there comes: First, the work of the teeth, which prepares the food for easy digestion.

Second, the action of the saliva, with which the food must be thoroughly mixed in order to minimize the necessary work of the gastric juices in the stomach.

Third, the work of the stomach itself.

Fourth, and most important, a proper supply of blood and of heat.

Force your child to chew slowly and thoroughly every mouthful. If nothing else will do, compel him, at frequent intervals, to lay down his knife and fork that the importance of prolonged chewing may be impressed upon him. Incidentally you may tell him that Gladstone, who was a very great man, and could chop down trees at eighty years of age, chewed every mouthful at least twenty-five times.

Don't allow your child to gulp down water or any other liquid with his solid food. If you allow him to drink while he eats, the salivary glands will not act. They will not need to act; for he will be able to swallow his food easily when it is made moist by water.

You can't do anything to help along the unconscious process which goes on in the stomach. But you can do everything to help that process by attending to the fourth necessity, which demands blood and the heat of the blood in the stomach.

Allow no child after eating to take violent exercise, to study, or even to read an exciting book: The brain has first call upon the service of the heart, and as soon as the brain is excited, the blood leaves the stomach and goes to the head. The muscles also, when too violently exerted, draw the blood away from the stomach. It is absolutely impossible for a child or a grown person to digest properly, or to get strength and vitality from what he eats, unless, for at least a half hour after eating, the stomach be allowed to monopolize the blood supply.

Children should be kept quiet in some way, especially very young children, after they have eaten. In the case of very young babies, nature attends to this mercifully by making them go to sleep as soon as they have absorbed their milk. Older children ought not to go to sleep directly after eating, for physiological reasons which may be explained at some other time. But they ought to be quiet and calm.

Every word that is said here applies to grown-up people, of whom not one in a hundred has ever been taught to apply to himself such common-sense care as is bestowed on a second-class horse.—San Francisco Examiner.