The effect of the change in seasons is much more marked in children than
in grown people. In the Spring in particular the watchful mother should
keep a careful eye on the health of her little ones. “There come with
the Spring in many children,” writes a noted physician, “a restlessness
and excitability, a perversity and irascibility of temper, or a
listlessness, and indisposition for exertion that are not displayed at
other times; and there come then, also, more plentifully than at other
seasons, physical indications of debility and the scrofulous habit, such
as enlarged glands and tonsils, dyspepsia and loss of appetite, strumous
ophthalmia, discharges from the ear, and enlargements of joints.”
The moral is that since the body is growing fastest (and therefore has
the greatest need of husbanding its vitality) in the Spring time, any
extra pressure on the nervous system as from prolonged school hours, or
any undue exertion, should be strenuously avoided. Unfortunately with
the “final” examinations in the early summer, our school systems demand
that the hardest and most strenuous work of preparation falls in the
Spring time, the season at which the body is least fitted to withstand
abnormal stress.
When a child or growing boy or girl becomes more nervous in the Spring
time than is his usual habit, or becomes depressed in mind, or
constantly complains of being tired, the only common-sense treatment is
to put an end at once to all schooling for the time being, and to turn
the child out-of-doors every day for all the hours of sunlight.