“Well, I suppose there are some mothers who find pleasure in raising children, but I’ve never had a care-free moment with mine. Just as soon as I could draw a long breath because they had survived the first month or so, I began to think about teething. When a couple of teeth were safely through, along came weaning. And then measles——”
Yet this mother has raised four splendidly strong boys and girls, and has never lost a child. Her husband would tell you that the family doctor’s bills have been extremely small. Perhaps you think the babies escaped illness because she worried over them and guarded their health. Not at all! They were healthy, normal babies. If they had been otherwise, the family doctor would literally have camped in her nursery.
The real trouble with their mother was that she did not recognize a normal baby when she had one, and she did not consider teething and weaning natural events or processes in a baby’s life. She could not believe that it was possible to raise babies without fighting illness in some form or another. She did not understand that her simple methods of preventive medicine, the intelligent care of her children from the day of their birth, insured normal digestion. With this health insurance she had no need to fear “symptoms” or bad results from teething and weaning.
The testimony of physicians who have specialized in the care and feeding of children, and of mothers who have raised normal babies, proves that both teething and weaning are normal and gradual operations which do not seriously disturb the child’s health, if the digestion is in good condition.
Teething in particular is often made the excuse or the cloak for chronic disturbances of the digestion, which should have been corrected long before the time for dentition arrived. The average child does not cut its first teeth until the sixth month, yet it is not unusual to hear a mother claim that an attack of indigestion, vomiting, or diarrhea in a three months’ old child is due to the fact that teeth are beginning to make trouble.
If the child is kept in all-round good condition, teething is merely a part of its all-round development, no more troublesome than the growth of the hair on the head, or the nails on the fingers. To the healthy child, the cutting of each successive tooth may bring a trifling irritability, restlessness or wakefulness for a few nights, and drooling. The baby may even suffer from loss of appetite, a very slight fever, light vomiting, or streaks of undigested food in the stools; but these symptoms will last only a few days and the baby will recuperate rapidly.
When the child is not in a healthy condition, and especially if it is fed irregularly and improperly, these slight disturbances take on a more serious form. The fever will run up to 101° or 102° F. The child will be unable to retain food, and the vomiting will be severe. Diarrhea next sets in, and the child is in a fair way to develop a case of cholera infantum, the dread disease responsible for the high death rate among children under one year of age. Summer complaint, as it is commonly called, is not due to teething, however, but to the bad condition of the digestive organs, which teething aggravates.
While it is important to guard the baby’s digestion always, it is even more important to prepare his entire system for the process of teething by setting the digestive organs in good order before—not after—the process starts. Here, indeed, the proverbial ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure. It is far easier to put stomach and bowels into good shape before the first tooth appears than it is to check the diarrhea which comes when the child’s digestion is too weak to meet the slight added strain of dentition.
The first teeth appear some time between the fifth and ninth months. These are the two central lower teeth. The average time of dentition in a healthy child is six months. Generally these two teeth appear very close together. Next, between the eighth and twelfth month come the four upper central teeth. Between the twelfth and eighteenth month the baby cuts two more lower central teeth, and four double teeth. Next in order are the four canine teeth, the upper teeth in this set are known as “eye teeth” and the two lower as “stomach teeth.” These should make their appearance by the twenty-fourth month. Between this date and the thirtieth month come the four back double teeth, which, according to tradition, are the most difficult to cut. In reality, they give little more trouble than any others, provided, of course, that the child is in good condition.
The following is an average table of dentition: