CHAPTER VI
GUARDING THE BABY’S DIGESTION
SOUND DIGESTION MEANS A STRONG BABY—BOWEL CONDITIONS TELL THE STORY—THE UNDERFED AND THE OVERFED BABY—SYMPTOMS OF DISORDER IN THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM—VOMITING—COLIC AND CONSTIPATION—DIARRHEA AND ITS TREATMENT
Sound digestion in the family baby stands for many good things. It spells peace and comfort for the entire household; for good digestion means good health and good humor, therefore a baby whose presence does not disturb the family. It spells small doctor’s bills, because a sound digestion gives the baby power of resistance to throw off germs of disease and even to pass safely through exposure to contagion. It spells efficiency and intelligent care on the part of the mother, for, common belief to the contrary notwithstanding, the healthy baby is not a matter of accident but of care. The knowledge of how to give that care may be innate, inherited from a line of sensible, motherly women, or it may be acquired by education in the feeding and care of infants; but it is there.
That fact is proved by experiment among untrained mothers. A Philadelphia branch of the Congress of Mothers started an infant-saving campaign in a certain ward of that city. For a given time, they had meetings of mothers, with talks on the care and feeding of babies, week in and week out. Babies were weighed and measured, and, as they gained, the mothers were praised for the improvement in their children. In this one ward, where education for motherhood was taught persistently and intelligently, the death rate was reduced 44 per cent. on the year. No record was kept of the improved condition in mothers and homes. These are blessings which cannot be reduced to figures.
When the American woman knows as much about feeding babies and children under three years of age as she knows about mixing bread, polishing furniture, and embroidering doilies, our home economics and domestic relations will undergo a change for the better. Thousands of marriages have been wrecked by the ignorance of the mother in rearing her children, and the subsequent confusion and quarreling. A sickly baby loads the husband and father with harassing expenses. It brings the family bread-winner home to a disordered house and a tired, fretful wife. It keeps both husband and wife awake when they should be securing a good night’s rest to meet the next day’s duties. Result: in poor circles, the husband turns coward and deserts wife and child; higher up in the economic scale, the husband secures work in a distant city and the wife goes home to “her people.” In either case, the man often seeks, in more pleasant companionship, relief from the unsatisfactory conditions existing in his own home.
The wife considers the husband unreasonable and dishonorable. She declares that she has the heavier burden to bear, a sickly baby to tend day and night. What she does not realize is that the baby would not be sickly if the mother knew her job of motherhood as well as the father knows his trade of bread-winning. The law does not recognize indigestion in the family baby as a divorce cause, but any judge who has ever presided over what is known as a court of domestic relations will tell you that desertion, non-support, cruelty, and infidelity on the part of the husband can often be traced directly to the wailing of a baby or several babies, who would not wail if their mothers knew how to guard their digestion.
Mothers are not altogether to blame for their inability to prevent digestive ailments in their babies. Generally, their own mothers did not understand this wonderful science of infant feeding, nor warn them of the pitfalls which yawn before the young mother who has not studied it.
Even general practitioners have not placed great importance on the study of babies. They have had their hands full by doctoring grown-ups, who might have been healthy adults if properly started in life.
After ushering the child into the world and pronouncing it sound, the average family physician has turned the baby over to the parents; and under their care it has remained until it developed some acute malady, when the doctor has reappeared on the scene. The cure of the malady, not its prevention, has long been the office of the family physician. They do it better in China, where physicians are paid only so long as the health of the family is good.
The world has long proceeded on the theory that with the birth of the baby was born in the mother some heaven-sent knowledge of how to raise the baby. To be sure, she was taught to read and write and cook and sew, but there was no need to teach her how to feed her baby. By some mysterious process, God supplied that knowledge. That He did not is shown by the fact that twenty-five per cent. of the deaths in our country are of children under one year of age.