What a Young Wife Ought to Know

by Emma F. Angell Drake

I have not touched upon the subject of rest which is an important one. Many children through lack of knowledge or carelessness are allowed to fall into pernicious habits concerning sleep. Oftentimes these bad habits are fixed in the child in its tiny babyhood, when mother or nurse wakes the little one for the benefit of admiring friends.

There should be a fixed retiring-hour for the children, and nothing should be allowed to interfere with it. Each child should have a bed by itself. Little thought is given to the detriment, morally and physically, of bed-fellows for children. We have touched upon the moral danger in another chapter, and speak here of the physical. Children of different temperaments draw much from each other of electrical and vital force, and nearly always to the detriment of both. In losing anything which properly belongs to it, the system has lost its poise, and must suffer from it proportionately. Children differ much in the quantity of covering required, hence cannot properly be put under the same amount without one or the other suffering. The tendency is to throw off the clothes, and colds result.

If you have had trouble with nervous fretfulness on the part of your children, especially in the morning, and they have been in the habit of sleeping together, separate them at once and note the results. One may be a very restless child, while the other is quiet, and the consequence is the sleep of both is made miserable.

From earliest childhood accustom your children to regular sleeping hours, and do not begin by speaking in whispers and walking on tiptoe when the baby is asleep. Accustom them to sleeping with all the ordinary work or pleasure going on in the ordinary way. Of course the child should be in a room by itself if possible, especially if there are other children about.

As a people we suffer from lack of sufficient rest. We stint ourselves here as nowhere else, and little wonder that we are a nervous, restless people, with worn-out energies in early life. Too many women come to maternity tired and worn, and the result is anything but promising for their children; the chances are that their children are born with a heritage of sleeplessness, and their care is a burden to their mothers and others.

There is something fine in our great public, free school system, but to me there is something wofully pathetic also. When I find little tots, from the third grade on, nervous and anxious in the daily rush of lessons, fearing lest they will fall below the imposed standard, and so lose their grade, or be obliged to pass the dreaded examination; going about with fretted, careworn faces, I think it time to cry a halt. It is not the lessons they are crowded through, but the lessons they master that are going to be of value to them. Is there not a-crowding-them-all-into-the-same-mold, a-modeling-them-after-the-same-pattern danger, that takes largely from their individuality, and forbids the evolution of such geniuses as the past generations have known? No doubt we know more than our ancestors, but is it not a question whether we are wiser than they? For this state of things I do not attach blame to the teachers, the curricula of the schools are to blame. This is a part of the everlasting rush of the American race, and what is the remedy? All this nervous strain draws largely upon the physical nature of the child, and produces dwarfed bodies that are nerveless and tired, at the expense of crowded brains. When will our splendid educators see the wrong and devise a better way?

But not all the fault lies with the schools. Many of our children are not properly fed and rested when they enter the schoolroom, and the consequence is poor work languidly done. To obviate this, our home-keepers should be truly good cooks, and by this I mean one who knows how to make an appetizing meal from very little, and that little plain. She should know how to cook the plain solid foods in such a manner that her family will call it a royal meal, and their health and physical vigor will prove it so. Like the mother in the little story, “Bread and Cheese and Kisses,” who, when the meal was particularly scant, would say, “well, dearies, we have only bread and cheese and kisses to-night,” whereupon the kisses would be so warm and full of love, and the love pats so tender, that the little ones would sit down with hearts full of content and rise with thanksgiving and gladness.

Do we half realize how very much the food we set before our families has to do with the contentment and temper of the home, and of the school and business life? A poorly prepared, and poorly served evening meal will send our children to a night of restless, dreamy, unrefreshing sleep, and an awakening in the morning, fretful, disordered and poorly prepared for the day. An unwisely chosen breakfast, carelessly prepared, finishes the work, and our children enter the schoolrooms to endure the day as best they can, a burden to themselves and their teachers.

And right here, the mothers who have not ordered their children before birth may take comfort in the thought that they may still do much for their future by properly nourishing them. Any woman may live a great life in giving the attention she should to the hygiene of cooking for the home; for when she learns how much of knowledge is bound up in the chemistry of cooking, she will explore many fields in her research, and come out the winner in wide culture and loveliness. Much that is called cooking, is but the throwing together of the ingredients in the easiest manner possible, and often disguising the unpalatableness by spices and condiments.