p. 346 | SOMETHING FOR PARENTS by Baltimore Sun

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 3, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 22.

SOMETHING FOR PARENTS.

By Baltimore Sun

In well-ordered families there is a time and opportunity for the moral training, but the physical is usually neglected or left to chance. If the child is fond of outdoor sports, he may, through his own disposition to play, get sufficient exercise to keep him in good health and develop his physical powers as they should be developed. If, however, he is frail and in special need of physical exercise and training, he will be indisposed to exert himself, indifferent to sports, and in danger of being allowed to grow up without that foundation of physical health and strength essential not only to his success, but to his happiness—perhaps to his continued life. No honors won at school can compensate for an enfeebled body, and where the school itself neglects the educational duty of providing for the physical as well as the intellectual development of its pupils, parents must undertake the task, as they do that of caring for the moral education of their children where this also is neglected by the school authorities.

The pressure put upon children during the school term makes it difficult to pursue any systematic course of physical training likely to prove effective, especially with those who are indisposed to rough outdoor sports. During the summer vacation, however, they should be built up and strengthened to withstand the trials of the next ten months. An outdoor life, in a changed environment, free from all intellectual cares or labors, will often give even the frail a store of vitality that will last them through the next season of bodily activity and mental worry. If, therefore, parents cannot do much during the school season toward supplementing the work of the schools in the line that is now most neglected, they can at least during the summer season give special attention to the physical well-being of their children. The ideal training would be harmonious on all lines, carried on simultaneously; in the absence of that ideal, ten months of the year having been given over to intellectual culture, two months should be allowed for physical training and development.

These are precious days for the strengthening of the physical man. They are felt as such by grown men and women who expend in business or in gayeties during the other seasons of the year the energies they have stored up during the restful summer outing.

An eminent English physician who, at the age of eighty-four, published a delightful book of reminiscences, ascribed his health and intellectual vigor at this advanced age to the fact that for fifty years he had not allowed anything to interfere with an annual vacation of eight or nine weeks, which he spent away from his ordinary surroundings. If such restful change is needed by the matured man or woman, it is needed much more by those who have not yet developed the full measure of their physical powers. It is not, of course, possible for all people to drop their school studies or their work and take this needed rest in a changed environment, but they should come as near to this ideal method of recruiting their strength as their circumstances will permit.

It is particularly desirable that city children shall be permitted and encouraged to take outdoor exercise when free from school; that they shall be given large latitude in the matter of ball playing, fishing, or other outdoor recreations that will insensibly serve to develop their physical powers and strengthen their constitutions. Some boys and girls are ready enough to take this prescription, but it is especially needed by their weaker brothers and sisters who are languid and indifferent, and whose fondness for books is sometimes mistaken for literary taste or talent, when it is in reality nothing more than an abnormal development of the mental at the expense of the physical powers. Now is the time to look after the physical well-being of the children. The schools attend to the intellectual during ten months of the year; the good father and mother look after the moral training at all times; the two months of vacation should be given up to physical training and development, so that boys and girls may come back to their studies in the fall in a high state of health.—Baltimore Sun.