“Let me decide the food, the home, and the condition of life of every child from birth to seven years of age, and the rest of mankind can do with the children after seven years of age what they like.”
Feeding of children.
Constant and increasing attention is being paid in these days to the proper feeding of children, to the study of dietetics, to the preparation of suitable food for infants, and to the proper intervals for administering the food. Any mother of average intelligence in our land may secure one of the carefully prepared books such as Dr. Holt’s on “The Care and Feeding of Children,” or the smaller leaflets such as “What Children Should Eat,” and by making a study of them and of her child may hope to see that it is well and properly nourished. But what chance is there for the mother in Asia or Africa who, even if she cares to learn, has no means of knowing how to feed her child properly?
Ignorant mothers.
I was making a call of condolence on a neighbor in Persia who had just buried a dearly loved baby, the fourth or fifth she had lost. With such a pathetic look she said, “It seems as if we did not know how to care for our babies. You missionaries take such beautiful care of yours.” A wonderful opening, by the way, for starting a mothers’ meeting at which we used to discuss the care and training of our little ones. A mother arrived early one meeting day to tell me, “I tried on my children what you suggested last week, and it worked.”
Quite different was this set of mothers who had long been in contact with the missionaries, from the mother in a Persian village who begged a missionary to put a cent on her baby’s head and write a prayer that it might not die as six others had done in that family. The missionary replied with some severity that it was much more to the purpose to have the mother learn to take proper care of it, for the baby was not yet a year old and she was feeding it with meat and fruit.
In most if not all of the non-Christian lands whose child life we are studying there seems to be the tendency to two extremes. The children are often nursed by the mother for two, three, five, or even more years, and at the same time they are allowed to eat anything that their fancy dictates or that they can get hold of. Mrs. Noyes of China says that if the mother has no milk she cannot afford to buy canned milk, and of course fresh milk is entirely out of her reach. So she chews rice most carefully until it is soft and mushy, then takes it from her own mouth and puts it, germs and all, into the baby’s mouth. This diet is supplemented with rich cakes and the inevitable tea. Another missionary tells us that, if a child in China is ill, his appetite is tempted by rich, heavy food or fruit, and adds, “the mortality of children is frightful.”
An unwholesome diet.
Mrs. Underwood, an experienced mother and physician who has lived and worked many years in Korea, says:
Every imaginable practice which comes under the definition of unhygienic or unsanitary is common. Even young children in arms eat raw and green cucumbers, unpeeled, acrid berries, and heavy, soggy bread. They bolt quantities of hot or cold rice, with a tough, indigestible cabbage, washed in ditch water, prepared with turnips, and flavored with salt and red pepper. Green fruit of every kind is eaten with perfect recklessness of all the laws of nature, and with impunity....
But even these, so to speak, galvanized-iron interiors are not always proof. It takes time, but every five or six years, by great care and industry, a bacillus develops itself ... and then there is an epidemic of cholera.[9]