We and our children

Front matter

ihifllbhTOOD

WOODS HUTCHINSON

Class

Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

Introduction vii

I. Before the Little One Comes 3

Introduction

THIS world is a nursery, not merely for immortal souls, but for flesh and blood babies. Growth is its business, growth the only thing that it insists upon. After we have done our own growing, our chief excuse for further existence is to make our babies grow. Grown-ups could get along in tree-tops and in caves, but for the shelter of the child houses had to be invented. There was only one room in the primitive house and that was the nursery. And the modern one ought to be run on the same plan. Cities, on the other hand, were made to huddle in for shelter against enemies, or to do business in. Now the most urgent demand of thoughtful lovers of their kind is that they should be made places to grow children in. And the community would profit just as much by such a change as the children would. Any place which is not fit to rear a child in is not fit for a man or a woman to live in.

The more thoughtfully we consider our children the more deeply we will benefit ourselves. That one phrase, "and a little child shall lead them," sums up the millennium. The child not only has

vii viii INTRODUCTION

a right to the best that is in us, but will bring out the best that is in us. The race has made us what we are — the child is the embodiment of the race, and the debt that we owe to the race we pay to him. The highest debt, the most sacred obligation that any community owes, is to its children. If business interests must suffer in order that the child may be provided with pure food, then they must suffer. If the growth of our cities will be interfered with by insistence upon playgrounds and breathing spaces and well-lighted houses and homes, then it must be interfered with. No matter what tax upon property is necessary to provide schoolhouses and parks and playgrounds, and a fair start in life for every child, it must bear it.

After all, these things are but the small dust of the balance compared with the child. It was the child, in fact, and his care, that started us upward from savagery and has kept us from falling back into it ever since. Only in educating and training and improving its children can the race educate and train itself. All honour to old age and to authority, but it is the honour paid the child and the mother that stamps the rank of a civilization! Not only what the race will be in the next generation, but what it is in the present, depends upon its treatment of its children. Run your house in the interests of your children, run your business and see that every-

INTRODUCTION ix

body else runs his business in the interests of your children. Run your politics and your government in the interests of your children, and the world will become a Utopia within three generations. No sacrifice is too great to make, no sum too large to demand, for the proper and intelligent care of children. That class of investments will return fifty per cent, every year, good or bad.

The supreme test of a civilization is the sort of men and women it breeds, and the time to influence men and women for better or for worse is in childhood. It costs far more to raise and educate a child

i

than it used to; but if we are getting a better child for our money, it is money well spent. What else are we here for?

And we must spend more than money on our children — we must spend ourselves and our time. It is not enough simply to provide a good house and plenty of food and substantial clothing.

It is a particularly good thing for a child to have two parents, one of each kind. We fathers are too apt to echo piously the Hindu proverb: "God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers," and consider that we have done our duty when we have provided a place and means for our wives to take care of our children. Not only do we regard it as a waste of time to take an hour or a half day from our Sacred Business and devote it to the personal care of our children, but we have even come to feel x INTRODUCTION

that it is undignified, almost unmanly, to play nurse maid to our own children in public.

By common consent we place the defence of our country and the call of her needs above all personal and financial interests, no matter how weighty and grave. We ought equally to recognize our duty to the race, as embodied in our children, as taking precedence over anything and everything else. Of course we work and slave largely that we may be able to give certain advantages and a good start to our children. But in so doing we may be easily robbing them of things far more valuable than anything that can be bought with money. We should plan our engagements so as to devote a part of every day and a day or more out of every week to our children as regularly and as religiously as we do to our business, our committees, or our clubs. If this should involve a complete recasting and rearranging of our hours of work and days of work in the week, so much the better. It would profit business and the business man, work and the worker, almost as much as it would the child. A child has just as much right to and need of his father's companionship and help and influence as his mother's.

Chapter I Before The Little One Comes

WHEN the new life has begun there follows a period of brooding and expectancy which is one of the most sacred in the life of woman. Superstition and stupidity have done their best to fill this time, naturally and normally one of the safest and happiest in nature, with fears and forebodings, but nowhere is nature more absolutely to be trusted. So great is her tenderness for the new life that the older life becomes of secondary importance. Short of absolute starvation, serious infectious disease, or severe accident, little or nothing that happens to the mother will have any serious effect in disturbing the growth of the child. The extent to which nature can keep the coming life in a watertight compartment, as it were, shut off from the rest of the body fluids and tissues, is something marvellous. Even in such an extreme case as that of a mother in an advanced stage of consumption, not only will the child be born in surprisingly good condition, but the progress of the dread disease in the mother will be temporarily arrested — only to rush on, however, with cataractlike headway after birth has occurred. It is a commonplace of vital statistics that expectant mothers have a distinct and noticeably lower susceptibility to the attack of infectious diseases, with the single exception perhaps of small pox, than have other women in the community of their age and class, and that when they are attacked 'they resist them exceedingly well, unless violent enough to cause the death of the new life.

Of course with the double strain thrown upon her blood-purifying organs comes a slightly greater liability to disturbances of the liver and kidneys, but this is more than offset by the lessened susceptibility to infectious diseases, and in the decided majority of instances maternity is accompanied by improved nutrition and a lower death and disease rate.

Due probably to this overloading of the blood with waste poisons there is in mothers of either excitable or depressed nervous temperaments some tendency to an exaggeration of these mental states, but even this is far less common than is popularly supposed. While the bearing of a new life is a grave and weighty undertaking, which should be by no means entered into lightly and recklessly, involving serious, and often distressing, strains upon patience and endurance, much suffering, and some risk of life, so that every woman who goes through it has placed the race under a lasting debt of grat-

BEFORE THE LITTLE ONE COMES 5

itude to her, yet so perfectly has nature surrounded it with safeguards that the chances are at least twenty to one in favour of a happy issue for all parties concerned, and the actual mortality of married women during the childbearing period is no higher than that of spinsters of the same age.

The only thing necessary for the most anxious and conscientious mother to do is to lead a healthy, normal, happy life with as little departure as possible from her former habits, unless these were unwholesome or unsanitary. At no time is it more desirable that as much of the day and night should be spent in the open air as possible, and instead of neglecting her exercise she should be most scrupulous to keep all her muscular activities at a high level, and maintain that level just as long as circumstances will permit. It is well, of course, to avoid exercises or sports involving severe physical strains, or risk of falls and such injuries, but it is far better and safer to err on the side of too much open air life and exercise than too little, for it will mean a happier and more normal ending, and a healthier and more vigorous child.

Many women seriously impair their health, and add to the discomforts and distresses of the situation, by shutting themselves up too much indoors and taking little or no exercise. Above all, no woman should be for a moment deterred from going about with absolute freedom and without hesitancy wherever she wishes, and wherever the needs of her health, or her family duties, or social affairs require, by any fear of possible comment or from a false sense of modesty. The growth of a new life is far too high and serious and important a matter to society and to the race to be interfered with for a moment by ridiculous and, indeed, immoral and indecent conventions and trivialities of this sort. Motherhood has undisputed right of way over anything and everything else in this world, and every true man, every true woman, will gladly recognize that right wherever exercised.

As for the popular fears that the child may possibly be affected or "marked" in some way by anything that the mother may see at this period, or any unpleasant impressions which are made upon her mind, these are nothing but the purest superstitions and fairy tales, which belong in the same mental ash barrel with the Headless Horseman and the Hundred League Boots. Of course every Wise Woman, every ancient Mother in Israel, can tell you of a dozen instances where such portentous calamities have happened, but to every one who has given them the slightest serious investigation they are simply a laughing stock. All the so-called marks and imitative deformities are now known to be due to natural causes, arrests of development from causes working in the child's own body, and having absolutely no connection with anything

BEFORE THE LITTLE ONE COMES 7

outside of it. They occur just as frequently in the children of women who have never been frightened or shocked or " impressed" as in those who have; and now that we are able to tell with precision from our knowledge of prenatal development, the month, and even, in many cases, the week in which they took place, in every case investigated this has been found to be anywhere from three to six months before the shock or the fright which is alleged to have caused them. In fact we know now that ninety per cent, of all these changes occur before the end of the third month, while the shocks and frights seldom occur before the fifth to the eighth.

Nothing that a woman says or hears, no mental or emotional impression that she receives, can affect the unborn child in any appreciable way — nothing, in fact, that she can experience, except the serious physical injuries, starvation, infections or accidents which we have already mentioned. Although arrests of development, and congenital defects, have attracted an immense amount of attention on account of their strangeness, and of the eager way in which rumour and fairy tale have been busy with them, yet in point of actual frequency they are among the rarest curiosities of medicine, and occur only once or twice in a thousand births.

With the double demand upon her powers of nutrition the appetitie of the mother usually increases, and while in nine cases out of ten this increase is along perfectly wholesome and healthful lines, occasionally it will take the form of curious and somewhat unusual cravings for particular articles of food. There is very seldom any dietetic harm in any of these whims, in fact in many instances they tend to fill a gap in the dietary, or redress an imperfectly balanced ration, and unless they call for something positively injurious it is usually best to gratify them. But imagination has been busy again with these trifling and rare eccentricities and magnified them into factors of most baleful influence upon the future of the child. This was perhaps natural enough for primitive man, who never could understand the mystery of birth and consequently surrounded it with an atmosphere of legend and myth, much of which survives at the present day. These are, however, as arrant fairy tales as were ever crooned over camp fires, or are told with bated breath by children round the nursery hearth, before the lamps are lit, to-day. No maternal cravings, whether gratified or ungratified, have the slightest effect upon the child.

The diet of the mother should be abundant, nutritious, varied and well cooked. The greatest, I had almost said the only, fault which it can have is to be too scanty. There is neither any kind of food nor class of food which has any injurious effect upon the new life, or is there any other which is

BEFORE THE LITTLE ONE COMES 9

peculiarly good for either mother or child. Anyabundant diet which will keep the mother in good health and comfort will provide well for the new life.

Only one factor should be watched with special care, but that only slightly greater than at all other times in life, and that is the scrupulous regularity and fullest activity of all the processes by which waste is eliminated from the body. This will be largely insured by the methods already considered — an abundant and well varied dietary, and plenty of life and exercise in the open air. But it is well at this period to see that the diet is even richer than usual in fresh fruits and fresh vegetables, and that an abundance of liquids — milk, water, lemonade, etc., — is taken, and to promote the activity of the skin by means of exercise to the point of perspiration and by hot baths. The impression occasionally met with that any particular form of diet, for instance, an avoidance of meat, or a large amount of fruit acids, assures an easier culmination of the process, is a pure delusion.

Chapter II

WHAT is a baby for if not to be played with? Everybody loves a baby, but he certainly needs to be protected from his friends at times. We have been studying the child most industriously and enthusiastically for a decade or two, and have discovered that, assiduous and sleepless as the care is that he requires at times, at certain stages and at frequent intervals what he most needs is wholesome neglect. Give him a little chance to live his own life; to fulfil his destiny. Our earliest attitude toward babies is and always has been a singularly mixed one, alternating between states of delighted astonishment and absolute panic. At one moment we treat them as if they were the most amusing playthings, the most ingenious dollies in the world. We joggle them, tickle them, and booh at them, and interpret their signs of astonishment as marks of enjoyment. We show off all their little tricks to every admiring visitor. We do everything short of taking them to pieces to "see how the wheels go wound." At other times we are firmly convinced that unless we

BABIES AS BULBS n

are strictly "on the job" day and night they will stop growing. Unless we keep them properly dressed, bandaged and packed, they will grow crooked or lop-sided.

I have sometimes thought, as I have watched the unrolling from its clothes-cocoon of a very new baby, and marvelled at the layer after layer of flannel which had to be peeled off before you could get down to the baby at all, that the beliefs of the old-fashioned mother about the ability of a baby to hold its limbs together and grow them straight without assistance must be much the same as the view of the small boy upon the function of a cat's tail: "Cats have long curly tails which they wrap around their feet when they sit down. I no a cat that had no tale and it was afraid to sit down in public for fear its feet would skatter." I really do not know how else the swaddling bands and ridiculous trailing skirts of the past generation of babies could otherwise be accounted for.

These things, however, have largely now passed into history with the head-board of the papoose to flatten his forehead, and the back-board of his basket to keep his spine straight. But we are still almost as worried and as interferingly officious about his mind and his faculties as we were formerly about his body and limbs. We insist upon startling him or waving objects before his eyes to see if he will "take notice." We apply a variety of approved tests to see if he has right sense. We anxiously endeavour to get him to " recognize " us ; and are greatly distressed if we cannot get him to grin in response to our gurgles, clicks and pokings in the ribs. All these are not only of no benefit to the unfortunate scrap of humanity, but a distinct distraction from the important and absorbing business which occupies him completely — that of growing up. He would much prefer to devote himself exclusively to this if we would only let him; but we generally won't unless he is goaded to manifest his disapproval by unmistakable squalls.

A masterly inactivity is the hardest of all policies to pursue. It is far easier to do something right away quick, and to repeat the performance every ten minutes. It is really hard to believe that that tiny bundle of human possibilities which we call a baby will ever succeed in growing into a man unless we exert ourselves to the utmost during the entire process. Active and strenuous assistance from us is the only thing that can save him. Yet few impressions can be farther from the fact. Nature requires us to provide the raw materials of the process, in the shape of food, warmth, and as little clothing as possible; but she and the baby will do all the working of it into the finished product with very little assistance from us. Indeed, what she would be most grateful for is a free hand and no "butting in" at the wrong time.

The first lesson in regard to his food supply is significant and should be taken to heart. As it is now well known, he comes into the world "loaded," and needs no supply from external sources for the first three days. Indeed, he is much better off without it. He has all he can do to sleep and learn to breathe and get accustomed to that new and troublesome influence, light. If we have the self-control to refrain from forcing anything into his unwilling mouth, excepting an occasional teaspoonful of water, we have lost our best chance of starting him off as a colicky baby. For the next two or three weeks we ought not to expect any more signs of intelligence or active interest in anything than from a healthy onion. And he won't make much more noise than the latter if he is properly handled.

The idea that babies squall by nature as a matter of habit or out of pure "cussedness" is both a delusion and a base slander on the baby. Not even a pig will squeal when he gets enough to eat and at sufficiently frequent intervals. And a farmer who should hear his cherished hogs squealing in their fattening pens would promptly "call down" the hired man whose duty it was to feed them. Whenever a baby squalls, it is some grown-up's fault. He does not want very much at a time, but he does like it regularly. And when you have once, by a little careful observation, "struck his gait" as to amount and frequency — about two ounces every two hours is a fair average to begin with — then his little life will be one peaceful sequence of eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating, but all the time growing with as little fuss or disturbance as a tulip makes when it is pushing up its green pencil through the brown earth.

Joggling and rocking and jiggling up and down as provocatives of slumber are not only unnecessary but absurd. No healthy child needs to be quieted or put to sleep. If he isn't either quiet or asleep, there is something wrong with him. Most procedures that we inflict upon unfortunate infants to put them to sleep would have anything but a soothing effect if applied to us. When a baby does go to sleep under some of them, it must be in selfdefence in order to get them to stop. Certainly this would apply to many of the lullabies that are inflicted upon the helpless morsels. How would we like to be joggled for three quarters of an hour steadily just after a heavy dinner? When the joggling has produced its natural Atlantic Liner effect, this of course leaves a vacancy to be filled, then more joggling until another Jonah performance occurs, and so on literally ad nauseam.

Remember that the normal state of a healthy baby for the first three months is not wakefulness, but sleep. The only thing that he thinks it worth while to wake up for is the absorption of nutriment; and when he has once successfully surrounded this, he is not going to waste any time in staying awake. If, however, he does want to stay awake for a little while out of pure good nature and good fellowship, by all means let him. He will go to sleep in the end just as inevitably as water will run down hill. There is no more need for your taking the personal responsibility of putting him to sleep than there is of seeing that darkness follows sunset. On the other hand, when he is once asleep, he should never be awakened for anything short of the house being on fire.

It is most important to get him into regular habits, but it should be his kind of regularity and not yours. He is no railroad train that reaches an eating station on schedule time, just every two hours. They did not know anything about clocks where he came from. But he has a natural self-acting dinner gong in his little interior which serves his purposes excellently and will rise to the potency of a fog horn or a fire alarm if you do not pay attention to it promptly. His idea of regularity is a nicely balanced rhythm of sleeping till he is hungry and then feeding till he is sleepy, with a fine disregard for the hands of the clock and even for the difference between day and night. As his fuel box is limited in size and the degree of concentration of the fuel administered does not vary much, it will take him just about so long to burn up each charge, so that he will tap the gong at pretty regular intervals. But there will be nothing machinelike about this regularity. If he should awake fifteen minutes before the sacred hour, and show by unmistakable minor signs that he is ready for business, feed him at once. He should never be allowed to go to the length of crying. To cry is a signal of distress, and a baby that cries much has been unlucky in its parents or its nurse.

The idea that babies cry to expand their lungs or to develop their voices is a nurse's yarn. A child that never cries is as healthy and as happy as a nation that has no history. If he happens to sleep on past the precise hour, do not wake him on any account. So long as he sleeps it is a sign that he has got plenty of fuel under his boiler and water in it, and is growing like a weed. All the growth processes and the construction activities of the body are most active in sleep. It is the spending and the down-breaking processes that are dominant when we are awake. We take in food while we are awake, but we utilize it chiefly while we are asleep. Do not be afraid to give your little human dormouse plenty of leeway in regard to his hours of waking.

Some people seem to have the mechanical, salvation-depends-upon-it kind of idea of regularity of the old lady who was travelling down the Hudson Valley. No sooner had she boarded the train than she began to show great uneasiness for fear she would not know when she got to Poughkeepsie.

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She made both the conductor and the brakeman promise that they would be sure to tell her when she arrived there; and when the time approached, kept asking at every other station if this were not Poughkeepsie. The conductor promised her solemnly that he would not let her be carried past. But just before they got to Poughkeepsie they had to lay off for another train, and then hurry past to the next junction to catch up with the schedule, with several other complications added. So that in the hurry and bustle of the moment he was nearly a quarter of a mile past Poughkeepsie before he thought of the old lady. So mortified was he at the idea of failing in his promise that he actually pulled the rope and ordered the train backed up again into the station. Then he hurried down the aisle and in his politest manner said: "Here we are, madam. This is Poughkeepsie. Can I help you off with your valise?" "Oh, no! Thank you ever so much. I am not going to get off at Poughkeepsie. I am not going to get off at all; but the doctor told me I was to take a pill when I got to Poughkeepsie."

This kind of punctuality is not necessary with the baby. But if he is allowed to follow his own sweet will and drink himself to sleep and sleep himself awake on his own schedule, he will be so regular you will hardly know he is on earth. Indeed, I have actually known of a family who lived next door to a house where a baby was being brought up on this vegetable plan, who indignantly refused to believe that there was a baby in that house at all, as they had never heard even a whimper in the daytime, or seen lights in the windows or signs of sentry duty in the dead of night.

Another thing we must learn to appreciate and respect in the baby is his attitude toward light. This is widely different from ours. Light is one of the most stimulating and attractive things in the world to us, and the brighter the better. Witness the glitter of the Gin Palace and the blaze of Coney Island. But to a poor blinking tot of a baby it is as dazzling and irritating as it is grateful to us. His chief objection to the new world in which he finds himself, if he could put it in words, would be: "It's so beastly light." He is born a cave-man in more senses than one. While the rooms which he occupies should get plenty of sunshine, this should never be allowed to fall directly into his eyes or full upon his face. He has neither pigment in his tender skin nor hair on the top of his pink little head to protect him against the light rays; and it is little short of "cruelty to animals" to lay an unfortunate baby on his back in a troughlike perambulator or baby buggy so deep and so well padded that he cannot even squirm, load him down with clothing and wraps, or even actually strap him down, so that he can lift neither hand nor foot, and then wheel him about for hours with his little face turned up to the full glare of the light and even the direct rays of the sun. Here is where the foundation of many a case of headache, of irritable nerves, of fretfulness with its accompanying indigestion and sleeplessness is laid. Look at the faces of these poor little human cocoons and you will see, three times out of five, that while they are bravely trying to make the best of it and accept it good humouredly, their tiny countenances are wrinkled into one universal frown of perplexity and protest.