Children, from the cradle, are wrongfully treated. Their first rights are here curtailed. Look at the baby that is permitted to creep out “on the porch,” or over nature’s green carpet, and there bask in the sunshine and frolic in the open air; then look in pity upon the pale weekly house-plant child. The contrast is as striking as lamentable.
“O, he’ll get his death’s cold if the air blows upon him,” hysterically screams the ignorant mother. Yes, “ignorant”—that is the adjective I want to describe her.
The young mother has doubtless been sent to a fashionable boarding-school, where she was taught algebra, French, (?) the art of adornment, how to walk fashionably, eat delicately, and dress à la mode, and even how to make a good “catch,” but never how to preserve her health or rear an offspring. O, this would be shockingly immodest, or “counting chickens before they are hatched,” I once heard a lady affirm.
Nine tenths of our American wives are totally ignorant of everything that pertains to their own health, or that of the healthful rearing of an infant.
Baby in a Strait Jacket.
At first the infant is usually bound tightly in swaddling clothes, lest it move a limb, or for fear (like the down east orator) that it will “bust,” and thus kept from air and exercise the first year or two, till it not unusually becomes a stunted, rickety thing, hardly worth “transplanting” or raising. Haven’t you and I, kind reader, been subjected to something of this sort of strait jacket insanity?—insanity of parents! And having been tolerably strongly constituted from a “tough stock,” we survived that first wrong, whereas thousands of “nicer” babies have succumbed to the swaddling and stifling process.
This is wrong, all wrong. The infant should be left free, at least as to its chest and limbs, in order to breathe, kick, and expand. How happy the little fellows are at evening to get rid of the murderous clothes which have been bundled about them all day, and how they will fight and squirm to get down on the carpet all stripped, and creep, or, if old enough, run about in freedom! How they crow and prattle!
Now, don’t swaddle them—a simple, easy bandage is early admissible,—or cover their heads and faces with caps, sheets, or blankets. Inure them to the air early and continually, and they will have less colds and “snuffles” than if you confined them within doors. Give them air and sunlight, and away with your “goose-grease.” Yes, I have even known some country people to apply skunk’s oil, and others who larded the infant’s nose and chest for the “snuffles.” Croup delights in such babies!
Then from the strait jacket, baby is taken to the other extreme—bare arms, neck, and chest. Old Dr. Warren once said, “Boston sacrifices hundreds of children annually by not clothing their arms and chests.” Once, when in remonstrating with a mother against this barbarous practice of thus exposing her little one-year-old to a chilling atmosphere when my arms and chest were not over warm as wrapped in an overcoat, she replied to me,—
“O, the little dear looks so pretty with its little white arms and neck all bare!”