FEEDING CHILDREN.

The first year of the baby’s existence is the most trying and hazardous period of its life. The frightful fatality among children the first year after birth furnishes ample evidence that something is wrong. The average mother or nurse knows but little about the few simple laws that nature has framed to govern infant life. The greatest of all errors are made in reference to feeding. The nurse or mother seems to think that the least outcry or expression of disturbance is a demand or evidence that baby must be fed, and straightway the place is searched for something—something sweet—anything that will temporarily give employment or divert the mind of the child from its trouble, while in the great majority of cases it is caused by too much or the wrong kind of food being given.

For the first twelve months, or until all the molar teeth have appeared, a child should take nothing but liquid food. Mother’s milk if possible. If this cannot be supplied, then whole, unsterilized cow’s milk is the best substitute. The practice of boiling or sterilizing milk is positively mischievous. This subject is treated at some length in our chapter on milk.

Dried or powdered milk and all kinds of “infant foods” should be religiously avoided. Putting milk through the drying process destroys the cellular tissues of the fat globules, and the butter fat is set free and becomes very difficult of digestion. Every mother should read Dr. Fischer’s “Infant Feeding,” which treats this subject at great length in the most frank and scientific manner. Dr. Fischer gives the analysis of “Nestle’s Food,” which he terms “a farinaceous, dried milk food.” He shows that this food has not quite one-sixth the amount of fat, and only one-third the amount of proteids that is to be found in mother’s milk. Over one-half of the proteid matter has been made insoluble by the drying process. Dr. Fischer refers to “Horlick’s Malted Milk” and a preparation called “Milkine,” both of which he shows to be about the same in food value or more properly speaking, in lack of food value as that of “Nestle’s.”

By the exercise of reasonable thought and intelligence a child might be raised without ever giving but few expressions or cries of disturbance or illness. To begin with, the mother-to-be should surround herself only with that which is the most pleasant and agreeable. Her diet should be selected with great care. It should not be composed of too much calcareous matter or starchy foods such as cereals, potatoes and legumes which go to construct bone and cartilage. Moderate exercise and deep breathing should be the most conspicuous part of the daily duties. She should read the best books, write and compose the best literature of which her mind is capable, she should endeavor to create something, think the best and loftiest thoughts, hear the best music, look upon the best works of art, and commune closely with nature in all its solemnity, poetry and grandeur. This will endow her child with a vivid and active imagination without which no great thing has ever been accomplished. She should live as near as possible in the æsthetic and keep her thoughts as near as possible to the domain of ethics. She should endeavor to be all that she would have her child become in character. If the unsatisfied want of a strawberry will in some strange way, through the mind, leave its impression upon the body of her child, how much more certain are the higher, nobler, grander thoughts to leave their indelible impression upon the embryotic mind and heart.

When baby comes, the first thing done is to bundle it up in three feet of foolish rags, putting its little limbs in a strait-jacket, depriving it of its liberty and right to exercise which nature so strenuously demands. When it is taken out into the air it is bundled and wrapped and rolled into more and more wool, caps and cloaks, the air only being allowed to touch a part of its face. It is propped up with pillows, and when its little spine begins to ache and curve from the unnatural weight it bears and it cries and weeps in anguish, telling in the only language it has learned of the pain affectionate ignorance is inflicting, it is given a dose of Lydia Killem’s Soothing Syrup, until from the effect of the powerful drug and sheer exhaustion it falls into slumber awakening only to suffer the same torture inflicted in the same way again and again, day after day, until from want of natural nourishment, fresh air, sunshine and exercise, its cheeks grow pale and wan, its vitality is lowered from week to week, and it passes into the great unknown from which it has just emerged—passes away like a drop of dew that reflected for an hour the prismatic colors of a morning sun, and faded forever from those who loved it most. Who is to blame? Who is responsible for the tens of thousands of little ones who come unbidden into a world and are thrust out of it by ignorance and stupidity through a veil of sorrow and tears?

Mother’s milk is preferable to all foods for a baby, and upon it often depends the question of life or death. Mother’s milk, upon which so much depends, necessarily involves the question of the mother’s diet. Good milk—good baby food, the thing upon which baby’s health, maybe its life, depends, cannot be made out of such things as tea and toast, coffee, vinegar, pickles and pastries, gravies and condiments, canned foods, greasy meats, fermented bread, wines and beer.

There is no period in life when diet is so important as when it is taken second-hand in the form of mother’s milk. The diet of the mother should consist of pure, clean, wholesome, nourishing foods such as fresh, unsterilized milk, cream, nuts, fresh ripe fruits, fresh green vegetables, and newly laid eggs, all of which can be taken without cooking, without devitalizing them with fire.

If the above foods are partaken of by the mother, it will stimulate the secretions of the breast and purify its contents so that baby ills, especially such ailments as “three months’ baby colic,” would never be known.

A mother should never nurse her baby when she is in the least over-heated or chilled with cold or laboring under any great emotion, such as grief, sympathy or anger. Fear and anger change the milk of the mother to a poison. Children have been thrown into spasms and known to die from nursing just after the mother had undergone these conditions.

It is customary to begin feeding children at the age of nine months such things as oatmeal, crackers, and white bread. It would be very difficult to select anything in the food line more mischievous than these articles. They are composed very largely of starch, which the infant stomach cannot digest, and none of its intestinal organs can assimilate.

The making and selling of penny confections ought to be prohibited by law. The man who makes the all-day sucker and other cheap filthy candies and confections to give to innocent children for their pennies is a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his liberty, and put out of business. It is not uncommon for children at the age of ten, especially in cities, to be afflicted with well-developed cases of acute indigestion, which stunts the growth of both body and brain, from the baneful effects of which they never can recover.

It looks incredible indeed that from the great faculties of teachers, in no institution of learning in this land has there ever come one suggestion—one hint, as to what kind of material would make the best blood, build the best body and brain. It seems as if the thought would sometimes come to these instructors of the youth of the land that the brain of the children with which they are so industriously laboring depends entirely for its size, quality and activity upon the body, and the body depends entirely upon the material out of which it is constructed. Some day the professors will begin to think along these lines, and the food question will become a part of the school and college curriculum.