NERVOUS CHILDREN by Uriah Smith

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 8, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 10.

NERVOUS CHILDREN.

By Uriah Smith

ALL competent observers admit there is a great increase of nervousness in city children, and many have wondered what was the cause of this condition. There is no doubt that the process of "cramming" in the city schools is responsible for a large part of the trouble. The editor of Archives of Pediatrics calls attention to this matter in his journal. He does not hesitate to say that he attributes it in part to "the present teaching in the public schools, which assumes that education is proportional to the amount of information, useful or otherwise, which can be crammed into children."

To remedy the condition, he says: "Nervous disorders must be prevented rather than cured. As far as possible, the artificiality of city life must give way, for the children at least, to a return to nature—spontaneous play in the open air, plain living, and long hours of sleep, after healthy fatigue. Parental attempts at the encouragement of precocious solemnity in children, by display, and imitation of their elders, must be firmly discountenanced. There is in the bringing up of children the one opportunity for the present-day physician to assume the important rôle of domestic confident and adviser, so long and satisfactorily held by the old-time family physician. For the sake of the rising generation there is here a place to be filled that must not be neglected, or it will prove a costly oversight."

It is almost unanimously agreed that the system of education at present employed in our public schools requires more of the children than the vast majority are able to do without injury to themselves. The nervous strain which children are constantly under during the school periods and during much of the time out of school, constantly fearing that they may fall behind their grade, is admittedly shattering their nerves, and laying the foundation for all manner of nervous disorders later in life. The nervous strain weakens the general constitution, and makes it more susceptible to the inroads of any and every disease. And yet the system goes on unmodified, doing its ruinous work. How dear is an education purchased at such a price!