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3
FRESH AIR.
Babies are more susceptible to the evils of foul or tainted air
than grown-ups. If you are a mother of the working class, you
have one other room besides the kitchen. Keep baby's cot there.
Do not let it sleep in the kitchen, the one little room where it is a
pity you should all have to live, and where the air is so hot and
so foul. And let the sunlight into the room. Do not let your
little one grow up in a dingy twilight. This would sadden the
brightest life. The window of the room in which baby sleeps
should always be kept open, care being taken that the cot is
placed in such a position as to be free from draughts. No matter
how young the baby may be, when you are able to take it out,
take it out every day ever after, whether it be winter or summer,
and whatever the weather may be. It is the babies who are kept
indoors who are always taking cold and having bronchitis. It
would be better for baby if you could keep it out all dav long, but
if you have not time for that, you must make time to take it out
once every day at least, if you would have your little one strong
and healthy.
FOOD.
Nature provided that children should be nursed by their
mothers, and not the cunningest artifice can compete with nature's
method. But nature's provision can be abused. The newly-born
infant has to acquire habit and the habits it so quickly acquires
are good or bad according as the mother is intelligent and wilful
or stupid and weak. Motherhood imposes from the first the
need for restraint and guidance. Natural affection and maternal
impulse must not run riot but be educated for the infant's welfare.
Babies do not cry only because they are hungry, and the cure for
crying is not an incontinent application of the infant to the
breast. Least of all is this method the way to feed the child.
Babies are frequently starved to death by too frequent and irregular
feeding. The food put into the stomach in these circumstances
is not digested. The digestion of one meal is interrupted by fresh
food introduced too soon after the first meal, and neither meal
agrees—that is to say, neither is digested. The undigested milk
ferments in the stomach and gives rise to wind, colic and
diarrhoea, with their attendant discomfort and inevitable crying.
Children thus mis-fed are truly stated to be ravenous and never