Abusing the Baby | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 7, 1879

Abusing the Baby.

It is a subject of marvel to most people that so many children die in infancy; but to an observing mind the wonder is that any children live to maturity. When you and I feel miserable we want to be left in quiet. Repose is the sweetest remedy for nervousness or other ills; but baby is trotted, bounced, toted, “ketchie-ketchied,” chucked under the chin, poked in its cheek, or somebody’s thumb is thrust into its toothless mouth, irrespective of a need of ablution, and then if a baby isn’t happy it is reputed very irritable. Tickling the baby’s feet, creeping the fingers like the motion of a mouse across its breast, and up into its fat, sensitive neck-wrinkles, is another mode of abusing baby. Of course the child laughs, and the idiots who torment it forget that it is the same expression with which they reply to a similar process from the hand of some mischievous but torturing friend; and yet we all know that this laugh from a man is a hysterical outcry of nervous irritability. When the laugh ceases, weariness brings weeping, or perhaps a restless and unrefreshing sleep, followed by depression, and probably by indigestion and colic. Nothing should ever be done to startle a child—even a too frequent playing of bopeep, if violent, has been known to bring on St. Vitus’s dance. All surprises are dangerous to the nervous system, just as all sudden atmospheric or dietetic changes are very unhealthy, and sometimes fatal. If music is selected to please the young child’s ears, it should be gentle and soothing.—Sanitarian.