Women's Health

In the past the rules about the bringing up of a baby have probably been a little bit too severe. Exact schedules, weighing after each meal, with worry over low weight, have been common. On the other hand there may be worry that the baby has eaten too much, although here we are told that babies know when they have had enough and that overfeeding is rare in infants. How we do lose that primal wisdom! Pediatricians tell me that babies are kept too warm and lose weight because they sweat it off. Mrs. Eliza Ann Jane Higgins, for forty years superintendent of the Boston Lying-in Hospital, in her latter days used to go about reaching under the bed-clothing and feeling the babies’ feet. She said that if the baby’s feet were warm, the baby was all right.
Fortunately babies are cuddled more now than they were a generation or so ago. In my intern days, or rather nights, I always had my favorite infant whom I picked up and carried about as I made my midnight visit to the infants’ ward. Babies are the better for the human touch and some moving about.
Recently I received a letter from a fond mother in which she asked, “What significance do you attach to a continual rise in temperature (mouth) 99.2 – 99.8 in my six-year-old boy who acts well and eats well? Owing to his negative tests I was told to let him resume his normal activities and throw the thermometer away.” In my answer I agreed with the doctor who told her to throw the thermometer away. “Acts well and eats well” pretty well told the story.
Clinical thermometers are of more use with babies than with grownups, for the former can tell us little and examination is all important.   Young parents must remember, however, that a baby’s temperature is not so stable as an adult’s and a high temperature may come quickly when the baby is not really very sick. Babies do react with suddenness, either getting sick or getting well, and they usually look the part of health or sickness. Fully as much as with the six-year-old just mentioned, if they act well, they probably are not very sick.
Wild animals, no matter how abundant food is, do not injure themselves by overfeeding.   Babies are wild animals and they do not hurt themselves by taking too much food. It is usually the wrong food that makes trouble, although it is realized, now, that they can take some more kinds than were previously given them. A gentleman with the Hibernian name of Cadogan realized many of these things two centuries ago and he said that the baby should have as much as it would take from both breasts at each time while he pitied those who were “stuffed with pap til they spue.”
Of course he lived in the days when it was taken for granted that the mother or wet nurse would give the baby breast milk. This pretty well persisted until less than a half century ago. Those who recall Edwardian days will remember that it was not so uncommon for the bosom of the nursing mother to be shyly exposed, whether in drawing room or public conveyance, in response to the infant’s need.
There is not one correct answer to any one of these problems. More babies should be nursed than has been the recent custom; an occasional mother has a good reason for not nursing. The baby should have something to say as to when he gets his nourishment; this does not mean that every time he whimpers he should be shut up by the breast or the bottle. He is almost always the best judge as to when he has had enough; but, if he is grossly overweight, remember that almost all grownups and a few babies can get the habit of eating too much.
But in feeding and in everything else dogmatic routines (typical of this perhaps over-organized age) are no substitute for judgment. Routines can be overworked; they are a reaction against the days when the doctrine of laissez faire (“Let nature take its course”) was popular. It is now in absolute disrepute. All this is largely evident in the upbringing of children. Regimentation is not only overdone in infancy but it is carried on into childhood and even adolescence. It was formerly said that the cat was the ideal mother. As long as her kittens really needed her, they got unremitting attention. After that, they were cuffed and sent on their way.
Fifty years ago the method of the cat was somewhat applied to human children. When school-time came, they were started out in reasonable condition and were expected to get themselves to and from school. There was no transportation even for Bill and Lena Johnson, who lived two miles away in the woods, or for a scion of wealth who had the same distance to go in New York City. Had the words “supervised play” been uttered on Cape Cod they would have been meaningless to our more than ordinarily intelligent parents. But a generation back, the organizers began to take hold. Twenty years ago the mother was not allowed to pick up the crying baby and pet him, and she was expected at all costs to get him clean in the first year  -  and preferably in the first month of his regimented life. Today she is encouraged by some doctors to pick him up the minute he cries, and to let him get clean at his leisure.
*10/276/5*
WOMEN’S HEALTH