The aforesaid canny mothers call in the little ones from play before sundown in summer, bathe them, endue them in nightgowns and pajamas, put dressing-gowns over these, and loose slippers upon the tired feet, then set them down to a supper of bread and milk, or buttered bread with a dash of jam or jelly, and good, sweet milk, with once in a while a plain cooky as an afterthought. Supper over and prayers said, the darlings are laid in bed by the time the west begins to blush at the sun’s nearer approach. In winter, the six o’clock supper is served in the nursery or dining-room, and the bairnies disposed of comfortably to themselves and to the rest of the household before “grown-uppers” sit down to the “hearty” supper or dinner dividing the working day from an evening as busy, and sometimes almost as long.
To borrow from the slang dictionary—the child needs the ten or twelve hours’ sleep in his business of growing tall and robust, steady of nerve and sane of mind. Furthermore, he needs food adapted to his needs. Plenty of cereals; plenty of milk; plenty of ripe fruit in the season thereof; meat once a day; nourishing broths and a few green vegetables. No fried things whatsoever; neither tea nor coffee. No pastry; no mince pie nor plum pudding, nor highly seasoned entrées. Time enough for these delicacies when the inches (and feet) are all in, the muscles in splendid working order, the gray matter of the brain “all there,” and ready to do the duties of a man’s brain for fifty years to come.
One branch of a child’s education, sorely neglected in tens of thousands of homes, is mastication. As soon as he cuts his teeth teach him why they were given him. Make him chew everything he takes into his mouth. Able dieticians are proclaiming boldly that milk should be chewed, a mouthful at a time, if one would not have it change to curd about the diaphragm. The child’s meat should be finely minced for him until he can cut it up for himself, and bolting be reckoned as a breach of decent behavior. He may forget the truism that “gentlemen eat slowly” after he joins in the great American rush for fortune. Obedience to it for a term of years will lay the foundation of sound digestion. He will have a better chance of long life and no dyspepsia, than if he had been allowed to gulp down milk by the glassful without drawing breath, and to gobble steaks and chops in two-inch chunks.
Insist that the child shall behave decorously at the table, as well as eat properly, from the time he can comprehend an order conveyed in the simplest language. Do not let him make porridge of his soup by crumbing bread into it, or churn crackers into mush in his milk, or dip toast into his cocoa, or work vegetables and gravy into a mound, using the knife as a trowel. He should be reproved for sipping soup and other liquids audibly, and for loud inspirations after drinking. Line upon line and precept upon precept, gently but regularly enforced, will make a well-bred boy of him. And right habits learned in childhood last a lifetime.
There is common sense in each of the conventions at which vulgarians scoff.
DIET AND DIGESTION
The second depends upon the first. The two make up a whole which is Health.
“Food values” is so emphatically a technical term that I would not employ it here if it did not express just what I mean, when used untechnically.
What we eat has many and differing values. It is possible, without degenerating into dietetic cranks, to appraise them properly and to apply the knowledge thus gained to the building up of these bodies of ours and the consequent up-building of the immortal better part they encase.
Digestions are so many and so diverse, the one from the other, that it is rank folly to prescribe bills-of-fare warranted to agree with everybody.