In cold weather, their heads but thinly thatched with hair are bare. So too their limbs; though warmth is life to young, developing creatures. In hot weather, the sun beats mercilessly down upon their hatlessness, their exquisitely-sensitive brains but slightly shielded by their thin un-ossified skulls. Degrees of sunstroke, with lifelong injury to health and faculty, occur. They knit their pale brows in fruitless attempt to defend their weak eyes from the glare. Many keep their lids close shut, to protect both eyes and brain from the nerve-shattering solar rays, which are far too powerful to be allowed to fall, untempered, upon an infant's highly-sensitive body. With closed eyes, the poor things miss all the joys of their ride; the colour and movement about them, and the spurs to intelligence these should supply. Their unobservant mothers and nurses suppose them to be sleeping!
Children old enough to walk are walked to stages—sometimes to extremes of exhaustion. You may see them dragging heavily along, with wan, exhausted faces; peevish and cross, and scolded and shaken and slapped for being peevish and cross. Exhaustion from such over-fatigue will keep a child below par for days; checking its growth and development—to say nothing of its happiness. Children derive but little benefit from their holiday changes to sea or country, because of the exertions forced upon them, or the too strenuous play to which they are exhorted.
Children who go bare-headed suffer, in large number, from eye-strain, with resulting permanent frown. As too, from ear-ache and from ear-diseases; from headache and toothache. In as many as 75 per cent. of school-children, vision is defective.
The obsessing aim of many mothers is to "harden" their children. Yet no more than a clay model in the shaping may be hardened and set, should the process be applied to children in the shaping.
Healthy children are inevitably delicate children, because of that highly-sensitive re-activity to surroundings which not only characterises but conduces to the developmental state. (Such delicacy must not be confused with sickliness.) The finer the organisation the longer it takes (within normal limits) to come to full growth. Our greatest men and women were delicate in youth. Hardy children are always of inferior type—for the most part, plain and shrewd and unimaginative, insensitive, unlovable. They have matured (have adapted to environment, that is) precociously. Evolution of higher faculty has been prematurely arrested in them.
Modern children are described as "super-children," for their abnormal sharpness and worldly perspicacity. They are merely precocious, which is to say, they have missed their childhood. And too early development entails inevitably early decline. Not only America, but England now has produced a grey-haired boy of ten!
No less amazing than it is lamentable is the light neglect by the majority of cultured mothers, of their grave maternal obligations. From earliest infancy, they hand over their children, body and soul, to the ignorance, the carelessness, the cruelty (not seldom to the viciousness even), of stranger-women of the uncultured classes; women of whose character and disposition they know nothing, and who are only too often unfitted by nature, by upbringing, and by habit for this most delicate, difficult and important of all human tasks.
It is by no means uncommon to find prostitutes, grown too old for a trade that has vitiated every cell and secretion of their bodies (to say nothing of mental vitiation), officiating in the capacity of nursemaid to children of culture.
Every child is a new creation, with a highly specialised organisation of mind and of body. For the nurture and best development of these, are required high degrees of intelligence, of understanding and of sympathy in treatment. To realise its idiosyncrasies, constitutional and temperamental, and to adapt to these in its rearing and surroundings, with respect to diet, exercise, play, sleep, moral supervision and discipline, demand intuitive perceptiveness, intelligent discrimination, and practical resource such as no other department of life demands—or is worth.
Notwithstanding all this, mothers who can afford to shelve their duty upon paid substitutes abandon the most complex and sensitive, the most beautiful and valuable, and moreover, the most helpless thing in Nature—the mind of a child—to be shaped and coloured, during all the most impressionable years of its development, by persons with neither aptitude nor faculty for this supremely complex and difficult function. In place of so adapting its environment to the child-organism as to enable it, fenced within the tender mother-fold, to enjoy to the full and to develop to the full the lovely, inspiring beliefs and illusions of natural childhood, latter-day mothers now cruelly rob their little ones of this fructifying phase, by prematurely forcing worldly knowledge and distrusts upon them, in precocious adjustment to mature view-points and conditions from which they should be carefully secluded.