HOW TO TRAIN YOUR CHILDREN TO BE BEAUTIFUL
It is possible to train a child to beauty and this training consists
of two means. One is to teach the little one habits of personal
daintiness. The other is to impress upon him or her while very young,
the principles of health.
A third is to correct any defects by early attention to them on your
own part if you are parent, guardian or teacher.
For instance there is the child whose beauty may be marred by
outstanding ears. The ears can be pressed back against the head by a
compress made at home and worn at night. A bandage easily made in the
house consists of a long, folded strip of strong muslin, twisted first
around the head beneath the chin, then around the neck, then over the
crown of the head, the ends of the strips of muslin being drawn rather
tightly over the ears and fastened to one of the lengthwise strips by
safety pins.
If you find the child often breathing with difficulty he probably
suffers from that growth at the back of the nostrils called adenoids.
Take him to a physician and have them removed, so preventing a long
train of disasters, mental and physical, whose signs are that strained,
drooping countenance we know as an adenoid face. Don’t let any
charlatan try to convince you that they can be cured in any other way.
The single way to remove adenoids is by a surgical operation.
Look to the fact that the child’s teeth have a good start. A little
watchfulness will cause the first set to be drawn in good time for the
second to come in straight and strong. Then teach the little one to
take pride in their whiteness. Furnish a pure, fresh powder or paste,
or let her use a powder for one cleansing and a paste for the next,
and so on, alternating. Teach her to brush the teeth up and down, not
across, and to brush them inside as well as out, and along the crowns.
Help her to form the habit of always rinsing her mouth with warm water,
or with warm salt water, if there be an acid tendency of the mouth,
after each meal. Teach her that the mouth must always be rinsed with
water into which a pinch of borax or of bicarbonate of soda has been
dropped, after eating either fruits, which are acid, or candy, which
soon resolves itself into acids.
Teach her that it is as necessary to be pure of mouth as of speech.
Train her to be proud of clean nails and to be ashamed of gray or
black rimmed ones. Teach her early to trim her nails and to keep them
spotless, and keep the cuticle pressed back from them. Teach them that
soiled hands are a disgrace to a little girl and offensive in a little
boy.
Appealing to the pardonable vanity that is in little children, teach
all that much of the expression of the face depends upon the arch and
smoothness of the eyebrows, and show them how to train them by twice
daily brushings.
Teach her to watch the dainty movements of her pet canary and her
favorite kitten and emulate their table manners. Birds handle their
food delicately, and kittens seldom fill their mouths overfull. The
little girl will want to be as fine as her pets, and unconsciously will
develop pretty table manners.
Teach him not to be afraid of fresh air. Teach him the contrary by
telling him the story of “The Black Hole of Calcutta” and of the
beautiful boy who was gilded to head a procession and who died after
his brief glory because his pores had been closed by the gaudy stuff
with which he was bedecked. Bogie stories are permissible if they
frighten children into care of their health by leaving their windows
open two or three inches at night and by wearing their clothes loose.
Don’t let the children in your charge study to the point of eyestrain.
Teach them to use the ears to save the eyes. Let them learn by
listening. It was prophesied by a writer on health that in time the
phonograph that now grinds out rag time airs to the lessening of the
standard of popular taste will have records which tell the classic
short stories of biography, fiction and history. Don’t allow a child to
overstudy. Better a well-developed, rosy-cheeked little one who knows
no Latin nor higher mathematics than a squinty, anæmic who knows both,
but who doesn’t know the way in the woods to the woodchuck’s hole nor
how to defend himself in a schoolboy fight.
Teach them to love the life in the open. If you live all year in the
crowded city, the roofs, at least, are available to you. And in some
part of your home, even though small, you can put up a crude gymnasium.
For instance, a horizontal bar, with a mattress drawn under it for
precaution, will give the little ones great fun, besides being a
developing agent.
Break the children’s unpleasant facial habits in the forming. Show a
little girl how ugly and old she looks by flashing a mirror before her
eyes while she is frowning. Show her that the frown of concentration
is as ugly as the frown of anger and train her to solve a problem with
smooth brows. If she twists her mouth unpleasantly when she talks, tell
her of it, and if that doesn’t cure her, call the mirror to your aid.