to be an accepted doctrine that part of the responsibilities [of
parenthood] are to be discharged, not by parents, but by the public--a
part which is gradually becoming a larger part, and threatens to become
the whole. Agitators and legislators have united in spreading a theory
which, logically followed out, ends in the monstrous conclusion that it
is for parents to beget children and for society to take care of them.
The political ethics now in fashion makes the unhesitating assumption
that while each man, as parent, is not responsible for the mental
culture of his offspring he is, as a citizen along with other citizens,
responsible for the mental culture of all other men's offspring! And
this absurd doctrine has now become so well established that people
raise their eyes in astonishment if you deny. But this ignoring of the
truth, that only by due discharge of parental responsibilities has all
life on the earth arisen, and that only through the better discharge of
them have there gradually been made possible better types of life, is,
in the long run, fatal. Breach of natural law will, in this case, as in
all cases, be followed in due time by nature's revenge--a revenge which
will be terrible in proportion as the breach has been great. A system
under which parental duties are performed wholesale by those who are
not parents, under the plea that many parents cannot or will not perform
their duties--a system which fosters the inferior children of inferior
parents at the cost of superior parents and consequent injury of
superior children--a system which thus helps incapables to multiply and
hinders the multiplication of capables or diminishes their capability
must bring decay and ultimate extinction. A society which persists in
such a system must--other things equal--go to the wall in the
competition with a society which does not commit this folly of
nourishing its worst at the expense of its best."
We have evidence among primitive people that they understand the
necessity of limiting offspring, and practice it in a perfectly
healthful way. The natives of Uganda, a region in Central Africa, offers
an illustration: "The women rarely have more than two or three children;
the practice is that when a woman has borne a child she is to live apart
from her husband for two years, at which age children are weaned."
Seaman, speaking of the Fijians, says: "After childbirth husband and
wife keep apart three and even four years, so that no other baby may
interfere with the time considered necessary for suckling children."
Some fifty years ago there lived in New York a young couple, strong,
healthy, ambitious to be rich, and both saving and industrious enough to
become so under ordinary conditions. The husband was in a business which
required constant attention; and in order to promote it and save the
expense of help which he thought he could not afford, he labored nights,
often up to the hours of twelve and sometimes one o'clock, and then
arose early and went at it again. His wife sympathized with him in all
his undertakings, helped him in every way possible, even to the sharing
of his midnight toils. In no way did either of them spare themselves.
They knew something of the evils of poverty, and were determined that it
should not always be their lot. Fortune favored them, and their bank
account grew larger and larger until they could count the value of their
possessions as amounting to several million dollars. They lived in a
fine country seat, and could gratify every wish, so far as food,
clothing, books and travel were concerned. During their early married
life, when the strain of work was the greatest, two children were born
unto them, both boys, and they are alive today; but are they a comfort
to their parents, and a help in their declining years? Instead of this
they are both deformed and cripples, unable to help themselves or do any
labor. Their family physician has told me that the overwork and
privation of the parents at the time of their birth and before, was
undoubtedly the cause of the children's inferiority. A younger son born
after the wife had ceased to toil like a slave, gives some promise of
being a man of character.
We have here a typical case of strong, healthy parents, with a limited
number of offspring, yet they were not superior. On the other hand, it
would be easy to collect a large number of instances where the children
in large families have had superior endowments. Take Benjamin Franklin
as an example. He was the fifteenth child of his father, Josiah
Franklin, and the eighth of the ten children of his mother.
It seems that superiority is a result of great vigor and perfection of
body and mind and of abundant reproductive power. Where this is absent
the children will hardly be superior. Yet in both cases a certain degree
of limitation ought to be advantageous.
In conclusion, let me say what I have indirectly said already. Let the
strong, the capable and the good rear as many children as they can
without overburdening themselves in any way, and let the weak, the
imperfect and the bad rear few or none, but devote their lives to
perfecting their own characters. In this way the future race will be
modified for good and not for evil.
A THEORETICAL BABY.
_Reported by request of Dr. Holbrook._
It was our first baby. I was making a living as a doctor by writing
articles on the general care of the health; and my wife before her
marriage had been a kindergartner, a trainer of kindergartners, and a
lecturer to mothers on the scientific and expert methods of rearing
children aright. We believed in the theories we had taught, and our baby
got nothing else from the start. According to the first applied theory,
we made our temporary home before the boy began to be, in the Rocky
Mountains of Colorado; and were a large part of the time either in our
garden or on horseback, in this perfect outdoor climate. My wife was
entirely in love with me, and I made each day count for nothing more
certainly than to deserve and return that sentiment of hers. We lived
simply but freely, and had next to no anxieties. My wife had practiced
general gymnastics for years; but for months prior to the birth of her
boy, she every day went through with a series of special maternal
gymnastics, by which the muscles that aid in parturition can be made
strong and entirely to be relied upon. We were rewarded for this outlay
of time in a delivery that was rapid and easy, without more than an
ounce of haemorrhage, and everything so perfectly controlled that--except
for the inconvenience of it--the presence and aid of the physician
(myself) might have been dispensed with. Recovery was rapid also. My
wife made no haste to get up, keeping quiet most of the time for two
weeks, to ensure good milk. But she did a family washing without effort
after three weeks, and was on horseback again by the sixth week. The
baby was not severed from his mother till ten minutes after birth
(ensuring a better blood supply). Then he got no bath, no food, no
dressing process; but was simply swathed in cotton batting and laid
aside for six hours in a padded box-bed, surrounded by bottles of hot
water, and covered with plenty of soft blankets, to sleep and get used
to his new environment. On the second day we began rubbing him daily
from head to foot with vaseline. His first bath, with a flannel cloth
dipped in warm milk diluted with soft water and without soap, came when
he was a week old, and was followed by the thorough rub with vaseline.
This bath he has had nearly every day up to date. He has often cried, or
crowed and begged for this bath; but never cried during its performance,
except when his clothes were being replaced. On the contrary, he enjoys
every moment of it.
Feeding began with a meal every hour of the twenty-four, for the first
week. Then night feeding was reduced to two meals, and he was fed every
two hours, from four or five o'clock in the morning till nine at night,
till two months old. About then he began sleeping right through the
nights; and until three months old was fed every three hours of the day
time; then for a month he went four hours between his meals. At his
fourth month began the present regime of four meals _per diem_. Now and
then he has cried in the night from thirst, and a few spoonsful of cold
water have sufficed to send him off to sleep again. All in all, I think
I could count on my fingers the times that he has wakened us out of
hours, and not once has anyone walked the floor with him. In fact, no
diversions of this sort have ever been practiced on him. He has never
been rocked to sleep; whenever cross or fretful in the day, we have
known that sleep was all he needed, and into his little bed he has been
promptly plumped, and covered with a loosely knit afghan, tented on a
light framework, which we call "the extinguisher." Here shut away and
entirely unnoticed he soon learned to give himself up to his own
reflections, and then presently to sleep. Thus we have kept down the
first great nuisance of ordinary infancy, namely, egoism and a habit of
howling for attention when no attention is really needed. But social
relations, and those of the gayest, he has constantly with both his
parents. We take up and make into play with him each idea of his own. We
have shown him some finger-plays. In the main we leave him to originate
his own amusements.
From the keeping of stomach and bowels absolutely healthy, by a regular
and reasonable exercise of their all-important functions, not only has
the boy been free from irritability, and spontaneously happy and
self-amused, sometimes quiet, and sometimes jolly to overflowing. But
the second great nuisance of those ordinarily attending baby-raising,
namely, sour stomach followed by colic, was eliminated. A secondary
result of this entire regularity of functioning at the upper end of the
alimentary canal was that a like regularity set in at the other end.
That is, at the thirteenth week he began to have but one daily passage
of faecal matter, and that soon after breakfast. Of the approach of this
act he notified his mother without fail, and thereafter we had no soiled
diapers. Movements were received on pieces of old cloth, and cloth and
all tossed into a pan of ashes, or the fire, when we had one. When, at
six months, we put him onto cow's milk, mixed with thin graham porridge,
to supply the extra nourishment demanded by rapid growth, he went up to
two movements per diem--morning and evening. Thus, the third great
nuisance of of diaper washing was eliminated, in its more disagreeable
feature. Eructation of curds, rashes, colic, diarrhoea--these common
ailments of ordinary babyhood, we have never had a sight of. We believe
it due solely to strict adherence to the four-meals-a-day plan. These
consist of an early breakfast, a later breakfast, a dinner about one
o'clock and a supper between six and seven. The bath comes at any
convenient time. On pleasant days, even in winter, he is outdoors, well
wrapped, in a chair, for hours, and often has a long nap there. He was
provided, by my own needle and penknife, with an ample fur sleeping
sack, into which he is securely buttoned every evening and laid in his
box-bed, on a trunk. He never sleeps with his parents. According to the
coolness or coldness of the nights, additional covering, in the shape of
soft blankets and shawls, is laid in on the box, their weight supported
by the edges of the box. He cannot uncover himself, but he can kick
freely, and use his arms. We dressed him, from the first, in the
"_Gertrude_" system of baby clothes, introduced by Dr. Grosvenor, of
Chicago--all woolen princess garments, with shirring strings at the
lower hems, by which they are made closed bags, ending just below the
feet; warm, but allowing of kicking _ad libitum_. At five months--it
being winter time--he went into short clothes, including solid suits of
warm flannel underwear, shirts, drawers and long snug-fitting stockings.
He has never had a cold. His muscles, from the first (due to his
mother's gymnastics), were firm and active, like those of an adult. At
the fourth week he surprised us by suspending his entire weight from his
hands and arms one morning. Legs, neck, back and hands particularly have
developed steadily in power and quickness. There was never any fat
deposited--that _avant courier_ of so much infant mortality--yet he is,
and has been all along, a rosy, plump, dimpled baby, or boy, rather, for
babyhood very early lost its hold on him. Too often children seem
finally to emerge from the miseries and ailments of a tedious infancy
and to take on, at last, individuality and distinct character at the
second or third year. This child, _per contra_, having never had a
sensation of illness, or of pain, save honest hunger, has seemed to be a
happy little boy almost from the first, alert or thoughtful, shouting or
cooing, laughing and crowing, especially after his meals and movements,
studying the world of things about him by the hour, keenly appreciative
of colors and of music, and preferring some sorts to others, his face
crossed by vivid changes of expression, wonder, merriment, surprise,
reverie--all as perfect at six months as ordinarily seen at three years.
He has good color from head to foot, is pale when hungry, but the moment
a bit of food is down expands to his most genial flow of spirits.
Immediately after his day-time naps his cheeks are regularly flushed and
rosy. His spirits become more pronounced toward each evening, reaching
their high-point of talking, laughing, crowing and squealing at just
about bed-time. He keeps it up for some time after being tucked away for
the night, till sleep masters him; and begins where he left off early
next morning. All this is good physiology. So happy day succeeds happy
day, and we trust and hope that many good tendencies are getting a fair
start in a harmonious and spontaneous beginning of this great work of
growing up that we are fostering but not forcing.
AT ONE YEAR OLD.--Everything continues as begun. Teething at times
causes slight transient fretfulness, and more cold water is drunk. The
bowels remain absolutely regular. The all-night sleep (never "put to
sleep,") and two day-time naps are unchanged, in all thirteen or
fourteen hours of sleep _per diem_. On warm days he needs _and gets_
plenty of cool water to drink, often two-thirds of a pint at a time.
Talking, standing and creeping he has attained by his own unaided
initiative (this on principle). As for amusements, he invents his own
always, except when engaged in social exchange with his father and
mother, and in these, too, we are careful that he makes at least half
the advances.
On particular occasions he comes in need of mothering--and gets it. On
all others he simply lives with two big but highly sympathetic
playfellows; and he has developed separate lines of play and talk for
each. Often he chooses to alternate as between two poles of attraction,
turning his face to his mother's for her sympathy between shouts to his
father, or _vice versa_. From week to week we notice that the older
plays are mostly dropped one by one, and fresh ones invented. All,
however, are real and vivid to him.
In early prospect we have but two more points to compass. Perfect health
in all respects he has intact. Self-control and self-sufficiency, both
in amusing himself and in enduring lesser ills, such as bumps and mild
degrees of hunger, he is getting as fast as growth permits. But
obedience and responsibility will soon be needed in his repertoire.
Negative obedience his mother is obtaining already in response to "No,
no," and shakes of the head. Positive obedience will be the far more
vital thing to secure--just as soon as he can help in little ways. Here
we hope to make him responsible as far as can be for the welfare, safety
and amusement of younger playfellows, whether brother or sister it is
now too soon to say.
AT EIGHTEEN MONTHS.--A cold douche has, for three months past, ended his
morning bath, regularly given by his father after his sister arrived,
and his weight became considerable. This douche, poured slowly from a
dipper until redness set in, has added markedly to his spirits,
muscular activity and digestive capacity. It causes screaming at the
moment, but an instant later, as three Turkish towels are wrapped
closely about him, his exuberance is delightful to see. Coincidently he
has taken up a selected diet of solid food, including chocolate and
cooked fruits, and will have but one nap, though often that is a long
one.
As the child is working out of babyhood, every day counting (as no day
of half illness in childhood can count), and well into boyhood, the
single principle already outlined, of leaving the little individuality
to establish its own activities and socialities, seems sufficient, as
the illustrations appended, I believe, prove. Doubtless a child that is
not, day after day, enjoying, and often thrilled by health and life, as
this little boy is, a child not brought up in an unbroken _camaraderie_
with both parents, such as he has had, and particularly a child not
having the send-off of trust and amiable impulse which he received
before his birth, could not be left to blossom in such wild-flower
style. Ugly, sulky or "streaky" conduct, jumping perversely out in place
of good cheer, we have never had to deal with. In fact, we have never
been able to detect the slightest resentment immediately after punishing
him for taking forbidden articles, or for raising an outcry over being
denied sundry things he wanted. His crying when punished is that of pure
grief, and he is ready at once to nestle down under the hand that had
spatted disapproval, to be comforted, resuming good spirits two or three
minutes later on. In the main, simply "No, no!" from either parent, has
sufficed to stop him in the beginnings of mischief, sometimes resulting
in cheerful desisting, and sometimes in a little of what we call the
"grieved cry." But this, too, if it becomes loud or insistent, can be
hushed by another "No, no," and enable him to regain control of himself.
With this regained self-control has always come gratefulness for aid in
the matter, as evinced by extra sweetness and brightness immediately
after, and eager resumption of some one or other of his plays or calls
with one or both of us. This may be what is known as discipline. It
always brings a smile to our faces, however.
Without a break of more than a day or two at a time, we have been able
to be equally near him all the while, and divide up about equally the
matters of bathing, feeding, dressing and undressing him. The
conventional estimate of those standing nearest to a child of,
1--Mother,
2--Nurse,
3--Teacher,
4--Servants and playmates,
5--Older brother or sister,
6--Father--the man behind the newspaper,
certainly does not apply here. When I am absent for from three to six
hours his uneasiness sets in, and grows stronger and stronger, ending in
repeated expeditions to a short distance along the road, where he stands
and calls "Vager," "Vager," (Father, Father,) at first hopefully, then
protestingly, and sometimes at last with indignation or tears. When I
return--and he listens and catches the first distant sound of hoofs, or
wheels, or whinny of the left-at-home colts, or voice, or opening
gate--an eager, beaming face welcomes me from gate or doorway, or even
several rods down the beaten snow on the road. Once back, things are all
right in his little domain again, and he goes on, without special
attention to me, in his series of occupations and plays.
I say "occupations." They are nothing else to him; serious matters that
he goes about accomplishing. He is at his best when he can help his
mother at her work--blowing the fire, bringing her kindling, handing her
clothespins one by one as she needs them, shutting or opening doors on
request, picking up articles from the floor. But there are many hours
continuously when he is left to his own devices, which are numerous,
though many of them he goes through daily, such as feeding the cat,
visiting his little sister, emptying and refilling the wall-pockets,
collecting his blocks, and fishing articles off the table with a long
stick. He has learned, untaught, to get a cloth to open the stove door
with and save burned fingers; to get and bring clean diapers to his
mother when he wishes a change; to stoop and lap water out of the pail;
to stand by his bed and point up at it when wishing his mid-day nap; to
retreat to a dark corner and drape his handkerchief over his head for a
brief period towards the close of a day, in lieu of the discarded second
nap; to scoop bread or biscuit out of a pail hung above his reach, with
an iron spoon; to lasso peaches toward him with a cord, said peaches
being in pan on the floor just beyond where he could reach from a little
gate separating the kitchen and sitting-room. None of these things has
been taught him. Nothing whatever has been taught him, and especially no
words and no "tricks." He invents or does without, in all non-essential
matters, in regular Spartan style. So, in pursuit of his own
undertakings, he rarely asks for what he would have; just tries and
tries, day after day, until he succeeds or is beaten. But as he is at
some new act or plan much of the time when left to himself, he has, we
are satisfied, independently attained to more of childish accomplishment
than the most incessant teaching processes could have effected. In doing
what he does do, for instance, in certain climbing feats, he has slowly
worked up to, he is both cautious and sure; he rarely tumbles and never
loses his confidence. Thus for the past two days he has achieved the
feat of climbing up and standing erect on a little box fourteen inches
high, where he calls and shouts and roars to us his ecstacy over the
matter for ten minutes at a time. Today only he has found out how to get
down alone. Contrast is taken here with the frequent falls and wailings
of children who are first persuaded into attempts of various sorts, but
have not worked out a real personal mastery of given acts for
themselves.
He has quite a vocabulary now of his own invention. The meanings of
these terms we have learned mostly, and use them to him. Of our
vocabulary he understands the meanings of a large number of the words
for things in which he is interested, forty or fifty nouns, and a dozen
verbs, perhaps. He sings to his mother, and now and then to me, rude
imitations of the songs he has heard us sing, and his mother he roughly
accompanies. His inflections of voice have developed to the point of
entirely expressing many of his emotions; while his expressions of face
are as much beyond these as the inflections are beyond his stock of
English--about seven words, and those requiring some exigency to bring
out.
All this pleases us, because we truly want him to become rich in his own
life, to subsist and grow in his own home-made lines of feeling and
thought; and not to learn words, parrot-like, before he has the thought
formed, and searching, even struggling, for a means by which to convey
itself. It is dearth of internal life, emotion and unaided thought that
is in need of replenishment in the average young person, not lack of
English dictionary terms for things that can be _talked about_, but are
evidently not intrinsic and personal.
C. W. LYMAN, M. D.
_New Castle, Col._
_NOTES._
_War and Parentage._
In the interests of unborn children we should, so far as possible,
remove from the world those causes which, acting on the mother, either
directly or indirectly, may injure them by lowering the standard of
their health, or by altering and debasing their moral and intellectual
natures. One of the most potent of the causes for harm is war. War has
generally been regarded as one of the ennobling professions. If we look
upon it in its most favorable light, all that we can say in its favor is
that among primitive and barbarous races it has perhaps resulted in the
preservation and spread of the most capable ones, and that it has at the
same time welded them together into larger groups, and finally into
nations, and habituated them to those restraints which are necessary to
social existence; but we no longer require it for this purpose, and the
industrial pursuits and the evolution of civilization are so disturbed
by them that they should cease, and especially should they cease in the
interest of our children, both born and unborn.
How can war injure children? We have already shown in the chapter on
Prenatal Culture that when the mother is under the influence of any
powerful mental emotion, such as fear, depression, anger and similar
passions during the months in which the child is being developed in her
womb, there is very great danger of permanent injury to it. Only the
strongest mothers, those with the most robust health, or who have the
most stable nerves, those who are rarely thrown off their balance, are
capable of resisting the intense excitements to which they are subject
during some of the phases of war.
As I mentioned in my early work on Marriage and Parentage, Esquirol, a
French historian, gives details of a considerable number of cases of
children born soon after some of the sieges of the French Revolution,
which were weakly, nervous and idiotic, on account of the terrible
strain to which their mothers had been subjected. In every war where a
city is besieged, even if its women and children are sent away, they
cannot be altogether free from anxieties and mental strains of a most
unwholesome nature, and if some of them are soon to become mothers, the
offspring not yet born must suffer. No one can estimate the vast number
of children injured under such conditions in the ages past. They have
been only incidentally referred to in history. The fame and glory of
conquerors must not be dimmed by the relation of such occurrences.
Joseph A. Allen, in _The Christian Register_, gives the results of some
of his observations which bear on this subject. He says:
"So much is being said about war and its effects, that I am prompted to
send you the result of my observations.