CONSTIPATION
The stools of natural, healthy children should be bright yellow and perfectly smooth. If grainy and soft, food should be made richer. If in curds, it evidences too rapid coagulation; therefore an alkali should be added. If the stools are white and oily, it indicates an excess of cream. If hard and dry, it indicates an insufficient amount of cream. If green, reduce the quantity of milk, or omit it altogether, and increase the quantity of barley-water.
The majority of bottle-fed children suffer greatly from constipation, caused largely by the milk, or the failure to modify the milk properly, or to make it contain the constituent elements of breast-milk. This condition can be relieved by giving the child sweet orange juice every night and morning, or the juice from soaked prunes, if preferred. This should be administered in quantities ranging from a dozen drops to two or three teaspoonfuls, according to the age of the child and the severity of the condition. Intestinal congestion can often be relieved, however, by giving the abdomen gentle massage, preferably with a rotary or kneading motion.
In cases of diarrhea, infants from three to eight months old should be given first an enema, and then a diet entirely of boiled milk mixed with rice or barley-water.
EXERCISE
All infants need some exercise. They should be gently rubbed and rolled about after the morning bath, before they are dressed. There is nothing more healthful than exposure of the baby-skin to fresh air in a normal temperature.
CLOTHING
Next in importance to the food of the infant is its clothing. The usual style of dressing babies the first three months of their lives is positively barbaric; not that it imitates uncivilized people, but because it evidences the grossest ignorance and cruelest vanity. The mother seems to have no way of expressing her pride in her child except by bedecking it with elaborate garments. These usually consist of three long skirts, two of them attached to bands which are fastened around the body. The weight of this clothing prevents the free use of the baby's feet and legs, putting it into a kind of civilized strait-jacket, thus preventing it from exercising the only part of its anatomy that it can freely move.
It is nothing uncommon to see a beautiful baby sore, irritated, and broken out with heat all over its little body by being heavily enveloped in barbaric rags. The child, therefore, is made to suffer merely that it may please a proud mother, and conform to an ignorant custom a thousand years old.
The only purpose clothing should serve is that of bodily warmth. When it is made the instrument of painful adornment it is serving the same purpose as "rings in the ears and bells on the toes," and the mind of the mother who thus afflicts her child is in the same class as that of the ignorant barbarian whom she imitates.