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Child
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kept in for fear of the cold. But if children are well clothed, it will
benefit them to exercise freely in the open air, summer or winter.
Mothers who desire their boys and girls to possess the vigor
of health should dress them properly and encourage them in all
reasonable weather to be much in the open air. It may require effort
to ignore custom and to dress and educate the children with reference
to health, but the result will amply repay the effort.
The Child’s Diet
The best food for the infant is breast milk, the food that nature
provides. Of this it should not be needlessly deprived. It is a heartless
thing for a mother, for the sake of convenience or social enjoyment,
to free herself from the tender office of nursing her little one.
The mother who permits her child to be nourished by another
should consider well what the result may be. To a greater or less
degree the nurse imparts her own temper and temperament to the
nursing child.
The importance of training children to right habits of diet can
hardly be overestimated. The little ones need to learn that they eat
to live, not live to eat. The training should begin with the infant in
its mother’s arms. The child
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should be given food only at regular intervals, and less frequently
as it grows older. It should not be given sweets, or the food of older
persons, which it is unable to digest. Care and regularity in the
feeding of infants will not only promote health, and thus tend to
make them quiet and sweet-tempered, it will lay the foundation of
habits that will be a blessing to them in after years.
As children emerge from babyhood, great care should still be
taken in educating their tastes and appetite. Often they are permitted
to eat what they choose and when they choose, without reference to
health. The pains and money so often lavished upon unwholesome
delicacies lead the young to think that the highest object in life, and
that which yields the greatest amount of happiness, is to be able
to indulge the appetite. The result of this training is gluttony, then
comes sickness, which is usually followed by dosing with poisonous
drugs.