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THE MOTHERCRAFT MANUAL
[Illustration: Training in Mothercraft, at the School of Mothercraft,
New York City. FRONTISPIECE.]
THE
MOTHERCRAFT
MANUAL
BY
MARY L. READ, B.S.
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration: Decoration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1921
_Copyright, 1916,_
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
INSCRIBED TO
MY MOTHER AND FATHER
INTRODUCTION
“Seventy-five per cent. of the women of America are married, and most
of these have children.” It is not conceivable that women entering
into any other vocation of life would think of undertaking it without
deliberate preparation. Motherhood is so precious and wonderful that
we fear to think of it in terms of definite preparedness. We like to
think that it comes natural to be good mothers and that to study in
preparation for it or to analyze it might produce more harm than good.
Let me use my own case as an illustration of how ill-prepared even
earnest women are for motherhood. I was married twenty-nine years
ago. I wanted children with all my heart. My first baby came sixteen
months after I was married. I bought all the literature I could find
on my new occupation, kindergarten books beginning with Froebel and
ending with Susan Blow and her contemporaries; I studied Spencer’s
Education, William James’ chapters on habit and attention, and read
biographies of great people. My first ambition was to be a good
mother, and I was eager to learn all I could about it. My college
studies for five years were Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics,
with an occasional semester of botany, evidences of Christianity,
physics, etc. I do not remember hearing a reference to motherhood
during my college experience.
I have had six children, four of whom are living. Had I had the
knowledge I now have, or know how to get, it seems that the little
seven-months-old boy could have been saved. I was called a scientific
mother, my babies were fed regularly, put to bed regularly, and were
dressed as sensibly as babies are now, but at that time we did not
have the knowledge about the physical care of babies which we now
have. What I object to is the amount of time I had to give when my
children were little to learn things which I ought to have known
before motherhood came to me, so that I could have been free to give
myself to them. I knew “education through play” only as a figure of
speech. Last summer I took a year-old baby to camp. I had the care
of her three consecutive months, and was responsible for her six
months. I yielded to the impulse to play with her, and in gratifying
this instinct I used all the store of knowledge which experience had
brought to me. It was evident that she was learning things every
day, and that progress was astonishingly rapid. Most of the things
I taught her were taught by the use of signs and objects. I asked
her if she wanted to come to me by holding out my hands to her. She
understood, and soon asked me to take her by holding out her hands
to me. I asked her where her eyes were, her mouth, nose, ears, by
touching each in turn. She understood and touched each in turn. It
was interesting to note when it was no longer necessary to use the
sign, when she understood spoken language without the aid of gesture.
The phrase that “education begins at the cradle” took on a new
significance. I felt that I was a teacher as well as a mother and
the importance of my part in the education of this baby opened up
amazingly. It was play, but it was also education. Those minutes with
her when no one was near, when we were all in all to each other,
were precious beyond words. Through this love-relation there was
intense joy in both learning and teaching. The reason the mother’s
part in education is incomparable to any other is because of this
love-relation.
We are told that during the first five years of life more is learned
than during all the rest of life. The teachers during these years
are primarily the mothers. The mother-teacher relation goes on after
school days begin, but gradually is regarded less important, and the
teacher’s part grows. Mother is forgotten as a teacher. She loses
confidence in herself and forgets that no one can take her place.
It does not seem to me that any woman could have more earnestly
desired and striven to be a good mother. I studied and worked as hard
as I could, but it was not possible for me to secure the training
that girls can get to-day. It now seems to me that it is about as
rational for a woman to learn by experience with her own children to
be a good mother, as it would be for a doctor to get his education
merely by practising on his patients. Motherhood offers no less
opportunities for success than do the professions of law or medicine.
The preparation for it is just as definite and is more important. It
has remained for Mary L. Read, with splendid devotion and university
training, to put these matters together and to organize and conduct a
“School for Mothercraft.”
The time is coming when women will no more go into physical and
spiritual motherhood unprepared, trusting to “mother instinct”, than
they will go into law or medicine, trusting to their sense of right
and of sympathy with the sick to guide them.
CHARLOTTE V. GULICK.
PREFACE
Certain definite ideals have been constantly in mind in the
preparation of the present volume, among these the following:
To write a handbook that is so definite, concrete, and clear that
the least experienced person of average intelligence will find it
practical.
To bring directly to those who have opportunity to use it,—the
home-makers, present and prospective,—some of the wealth of present
knowledge in biology, dietetics, hygiene, domestic efficiency, child
psychology, education, that is stored in the laboratories, research
reports, medical records, technical journals, and educational
classics, translating these from the obscure tongue of technical
language into the clearer speech of daily life.
To furnish a guide to more technical or detailed consideration of
each subject.
To present fundamental principles and facts rather than mere rule of
thumb procedure, so that the reader may act intelligently and make
intelligent variations.
Not to compromise on half-way procedure that merely prevents
disaster, but to make clear the means to greatest personal efficiency
and social power.
To keep a progressive yet reserved attitude between conservative and
radical theories.
To bring the spirit of sympathy and humanness, of love and
child-nature and poetry into the teaching of home-making.
To lighten the burden and enlighten the minds and hearts of earnest
young people so that with joy and satisfaction they may essay and
find the home and family life that their hearts desire.
Froebel outlined, nearly a century ago, a thorough, practical
training course for young women, preparatory to home-making
or to vocational work as teachers or mothers’ assistants. At
Pestalozzi-Froebel House in Berlin, half a century ago, under the
administration of Frau Shrader and Miss Annette Schepel, such a
course was organized. Echoes of it to-day are found in the German
secondary schools and special schools for girls. The same idea spread
to England a quarter of a century ago, and there to-day a score
of special schools, and some girls’ high schools, provide such a
training.
In America, the School of Mothercraft was opened in New York City
in December, 1911, to work out experimentally a training course for
educated young women.[1] Here has been developed a comprehensive,
human, practical course including domestic science and art, and the
care and training of babies and little children. The students work
in a home atmosphere, under home conditions, using the household for
their practice work, caring for the resident babies and children,
educating and training them in the course of the day’s régime, and
receiving their own training in personality and technique as well as
in theory. Extension classes have been maintained for young mothers,
brides, and engaged young women.
It is work with young women and the children in the School of
Mothercraft that has made possible the preparation of the present
volume.
No book can take the place of the living teacher. No amount of
discussion of theory can be a substitute for experience. Yet
experience, without sound principles, is also of minor value. Any
book presupposes a modicum of common sense and rational judgment in
its readers.
In a volume of such limited compass only a few significant principles
can be presented, and some of the important elementary facts and
technique that more technical books may overlook. The present volume
aims only to be an introduction to the many phases of home-making,
child care, and child training, to furnish something of vision for
these responsibilities, and a guide for further study.
No book can be a substitute for the personal advice of the physician,
the hygienist, the psychologist, and the teacher. The reader of any
book on applied science may easily make the mistake of interpreting
statements out of proportion to their significance, or of
misunderstanding directions so that they even become misleading. Only
discussion with the living teacher will discover and correct such
errors.
The reader must be open-minded to new discoveries, new theories, new
methods. At the present time, as never before, extensive researches
are being made in biology, hygiene, dietetics, child psychology, and
pedagogy. Important discoveries as revolutionary as the discovery of
the circulation of the blood, radio-activity, the cellular basis of
life, may be made at any future time.
In the present volume no attempt has been made to present
controversial points of view, but a consistently constructive régime
and programme has been given. The novice in any art must first learn
to work constructively and rather dogmatically, until he has learned
to apply one set of principles efficiently. Then he may begin to
modify details according to some rational principle, instead of by
mere whim, and to compare his method with other possibilities. The
basis and the special authorities for the régime here presented will
be found in the final chapter on bibliography.
JULY, 1916. MARY L. READ.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The word “mothercraft” was coined by the author to express the
comprehensive scope of the training. The word has since come into
use in England in a narrower sense, including merely infant care. It
is hoped that in America the use of the word may be retained in its
larger significance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author begs to acknowledge indebtedness and gratitude to many who
have participated in the making of the book.
To the Messrs. Macmillan Co., Ginn Company, F. A. Stokes Co., and D.
Appleton & Co., for permission to quote from their publications; to
the American Medical Association Press and Dr. Roland G. Freeman for
use of the graphs on growth; to Mr. William S. Bailey and The Nurse
Studio for many of the photographs taken specially for this work.
Especially the author begs to tender sincere thanks for many
criticisms, suggestions, and reviewing of manuscript to Dr. David
Starr Jordan, Dr. William F. Snow, Professors Rudolph M. Binder,
Willystine Goodsell, Robert M. Yerkes, and Mr. Paul Popenoe, on the
sections dealing with the home and the family; to Dr. Josephine H.
Kenyon for sections on maternity and infancy, Drs. Henry I. Bowditch,
William Shannon, and William H. Burnham, for sections on hygiene
and growth; to physicians and nurses at Battle Creek Sanitarium for
assistance in the sections on nursing and nutrition; to Dr. William
H. Park for revising data on communicable diseases, and to Professors
Henry C. Sherman and Mary S. Rose for suggestions and for unpublished
data on nutrition. Mrs. Anna Martin Crocker and Miss Sunnyve Carlsen
have kindly given literary assistance. Helpful suggestions on the
reading list have been furnished by science teachers of Horace Mann,
Ethical Culture, Francis Parker, and the University of Chicago
Elementary Schools. Miss Helen O. Rider and Miss Mary Scott Allen
have rendered invaluable aid in criticism and clerical details. To
the many others who have furnished technical data or read portions
of the manuscript, the author here expresses thanks. Finally, the
author would gratefully acknowledge the unfailing patience and kindly
encouragement of the publishers. For such errors as may be found the
author alone is responsible. Criticisms or suggestions from readers,
which may improve the helpfulness or accuracy of the Manual, will be
gratefully received.
MARY L. READ.
JULY, 1916.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
PREFACE xi
CHAPTER
I MOTHERCRAFT: ITS MEANING, SCOPE, AND SPIRIT 1
II ESTABLISHING THE HOME 10
III FINDING THE MEANS FOR MOTHERCRAFT 20
IV FOUNDING A FAMILY 29
V GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT 41
VI PREPARING FOR THE BABY 62
VII CARE OF THE BABY 85
VIII THE PHYSICAL CARE OF YOUNG CHILDREN 119
IX THE FEEDING OF CHILDREN 155
X THE EDUCATION OF THE LITTLE CHILD 196
XI STUDYING THE INDIVIDUAL CHILD 223
XII A CURRICULUM FOR BABYHOOD AND EARLY CHILDHOOD 246
XIII PLAY 264
XIV GAMES 275
XV THE TOY AGE 285
XVI STORY-TELLING 299
XVII SCIENCE AND HISTORY 309
XVIII HANDWORK 317
XIX MUSIC AND ART 329
XX HOME NURSING AND FIRST AID IN THE NURSERY 337
APPENDIX 365
BIBLIOGRAPHY 381
INDEX 425
LIST OF PLATES
Training in Mothercraft, at the School of Mothercraft,
New York City _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Approved Baby Clothing and Bassinet 62
Approved Crib, Scales, Nursery Table. Holding the Baby,
Supporting Head and Back 74
Approved Baby Carriage and Shoes 76
Drugs and Unsanitary Appliances. Unhygienic Equipment
and Unsatisfactory Scales 80
For the Layette 82
Exercises for the Baby 114
Good and Bad Postures 142
Exercises for Trunk, Chest and Back 144
Some Especially Dangerous Foods for Children under Six.
Poisons for Little Children 164
Wholesome Sweets at Suitable Ages. Laxative Foods 174
Day’s Menu for Child Two to Four Years. Day’s Menu for
Child Four to Six Years 182
Learning Self-reliance and Regularity. At the School of
Mothercraft Summer Camp 212
Unhygienic, Inartistic, Anti-social Toys. Hygienic, Durable,
Constructive, Social Toys 290
Handwork that Utilizes Fundamental Muscles. In the
School of Mothercraft Child Garden 320
Height and Weight Charts 370
THE MOTHERCRAFT MANUAL
CHAPTER I
MOTHERCRAFT: ITS MEANING, SCOPE, AND SPIRIT
“To know a child is to love it, and the more we know it, the better
we love it.
“To know, love, and serve childhood is the most satisfying,
soul-filling of all human activities.
“It rests on the oldest and strongest and sanest of all instincts.
“It gives to our lives a rounded-out completeness as does no other
service.
“No other object is so worthy of service and sacrifice; and the
fullness of the measure in which this is rendered is the very best
test of a nation and race and a civilization.”
—G. STANLEY HALL.
Mothercraft is the skilful, practical doing of all that is involved
in the nourishing and training of children, in a sympathetic, happy,
religious spirit. It is not merely the care of the little baby;
that is a very small, though significant, part. Its practice is not
dependent upon physical parenthood, but is part of the responsibility
of every woman who has to do with children as teacher, nurse, friend,
or household associate. It is no more an instinct than is gardening
or building. It is not merely being with children. Its requisite is
vital working knowledge of the fundamental principles of biology,
hygiene, economics, psychology, education, arts. It is mothering—that
oldest, steadiest, most satisfactory vocation to women always and
everywhere—made intelligent and efficient and joyous.
Mothercraft cannot be learned simply from books any more than can
music, agriculture, carpentry, dentistry. The most important factor
in the learning of mothercraft is the daily intelligent association
with the children in their natural environment of home. A hospital
with sick children is a place to learn its pathological phases.
No one of intelligence will dispute the _theory_ that the most
important period in the child’s life is the first seven years.
It is in these years that the foundation of his physical life is
settled (or unsettled); that the lifelong habits are formed; that
the prejudices and the bases of his spiritual and social life are
laid. The “gates of gifts”—his potentialities—are closed at birth,
possibly when his parents are chosen. Whether one is an advocate of
heredity or of environment as the most influential factor in the life
of the individual, none will now gainsay that both the heredity and
the environment of every individual can be controlled, and that each
of these factors may be made vastly more efficient through the high
ideals, the intelligence, and the foresight of parents present and
potential.
In these days of radical change in the activities and education of
women, mothercraft has not kept pace with the other vocations open
to women. In a society where marriage is no longer an economic,
domestic, or conventional necessity, there has developed a tacit
assumption that youth would not marry, and therefore special
preparation for home-making (and especially for child care) would
be presumptuous and a waste of time. The school has left this
part of a girl’s training for the home to give, and in a large
proportion of homes there has not been the time or the intelligence
or the foresight to give it. Girls have gone from elementary
school directly into industry, or to high school and college, or to
finishing school and society. Educators and vocational guides have
frequently overlooked it in educational and vocational conferences,
exhibits, and guidebooks.
And yet to-day in America, the care and training of young children
is chiefly in the hands of women. Seventy-five per cent. of women
in America are married, and presumably most of them have the
responsibility of children in their own homes.
There are _ten million_ children under six years of age whose care
and training is naturally in the entire control of their homes. There
are _fourteen million_ children between five and fifteen years of age
who, on the average, spend thirty hours a week, for forty weeks a
year, in school, while all the rest of their life—about seventy per
cent. of their waking hours, as well as all their sleeping hours—is
in the control of their mothers and fathers.
Nursing, within fifty years, has become a profession, and to-day
it is almost impossible for a woman to find employment as a nurse
unless she has had a special training for three years. Yet nursing
has only to do with sick folk, usually in a hospital, which is still
a far cry from the daily care, hygiene, and training of the normal
child in a home. For an equal period, teachers of young children
have been expected to take a special normal course of two to four
years. Yet this training has had little to do, until recently in some
quarters, with hygiene, biology, or the psychology of the child, but
has concerned itself chiefly with subjects in the curriculum and with
masses of children in an artificial grouping and environment, foreign
to their native interests and inimical to their physical needs.
Only within the last twenty-five years has medicine developed
pediatrics—the special study of children’s treatment. Child-hygiene
is still later as an exact science. Child-study, as an exact science,
dates back to Froebel and the early nineteenth century, and is still
a new field.
The mother in her home, herself with slight special preparation, busy
with her children, could scarcely have been expected to keep pace
with these developments and to teach them to her daughters, even had
she the foresight. The higher institutions of learning, naturally
among the most conservative forces of society, have not yet begun to
perceive the significance of such a subject as mothercraft in the
curriculum, although the beginnings of some phases are being made.
The secondary and elementary schools, bound by the fetish of college
requirements, are only beginning to show here and there indications
of efforts to prepare for living instead of simply for college.
And the young woman—still immature, inexperienced, and therefore not
appreciative of life’s values and impending responsibilities—has
had neither the guidance of school and home, nor the educational
opportunity, nor the personal foresight to prepare adequately for
this vocation.
What is the consequence? A generation of women, the majority of whom
are notoriously (and sometimes shamelessly) ignorant and unskilled in
the most vital and significant human responsibilities. In millions
of homes women are wasting their time and energy, losing the joy
of their motherhood (and too often their little ones), perplexed,
harassed, over-burdened, because they are bungling, stumbling
blindly, groping at their vocation. And those they love most dearly
are paying the penalty, in less happy homes, less efficient lives.
Hundreds of thousands of self-supporting young women every year are
going into industrial or commercial work or school teaching, not
because they prefer it, but because opportunities for acquiring
the requisite skill are at hand, and conditions of work have been
standardized. Hundreds of thousands of mothers with young children
are seeking in vain for assistants of desirable personality and
efficient training. For such workers there has been no adequate
opportunity for training and no standardizing of working conditions.
In all this, America is far behind both Germany and England.
What does mothercraft require in its practitioners? First,
_personality_: love of children and sympathy with child-nature,
responsibility, patience, thoroughness in the minute details day in
and day out, self-control, good judgment, adaptability, the play
spirit. Fundamental also are open-mindedness, spiritual vision, and
the poise that results from a well-regulated physical régime and a
firm apprehension of eternal verities.
Then _knowledge_: a sound foundation in the fundamental principles
and vital facts of applied biology, psychology, sociology, ethics,
economics, natural sciences, play, arts, as they relate to the home,
the family, and childhood. Equally important is the scientific mind
that knows how to approach new problems and receive new principles.
Then _technique_: the actual doing and practice of mothercraft.
Knowledge is of no value until it is translated into efficient
action. There must be little children to care for, tend, play with,
educate.
What of fathercraft? Every child has two parents, equal in
responsibility for his heredity and likewise for his rearing. Fathers
could hardly be expected ordinarily to be versed in the intricacies
of clothing, feeding, and bathing the baby. But why should not every
man understand the principles of hygiene and foods as a matter of his
general knowledge quite as much as for coöperation with the mother
in the children’s régime? Why should he not with equal zest make a
study of growth and development during childhood? Even more, why
should he not be intimately acquainted with child psychology and the
fundamental principles of child training and education, that he may
understand his own children and coöperate sympathetically in their
upbringing? Is there any valid reason why he should not be equally
acquainted with the sociology of the home, the meaning and principles
of eugenics, the psychology of harmony in home life?
There is no profession open to either men or women that offers such
opportunities for personal culture, individual expression, technical
skill, scientific research, social contribution and welfare, as
mothercraft. Perhaps the very comprehensiveness of it and its
humanness have presented a problem so complex that it has baffled the
educators and delayed its admission to academic dignity.
Through the channels of child welfare, eugenics, and pediatrics, a
keener sense of responsibility toward the child unborn is developing.
Through the increasing knowledge of heredity, child psychology, and
education, a clearer vision is appearing to young men and young
women of what they themselves might have been, and of what they may
yet create and develop by combining wisdom with their great love.
Philanthropists are realizing the futility of simply relieving
immediate suffering, crime, inefficiency, for generation after
generation. They are looking to the elimination of the causes:
ignorance of the rudiments of living, poor heredity, neglect in
childhood, unsanitary, ugly, unspiritual living conditions. “There
is no wealth but life,” we are realizing with Ruskin. Statesmen
and legislators are beginning to see that the stability of society
and the State demand that the organizing of homes, the founding of
families, the spending of family incomes, shall not be intrusted to
novices and unskilled workers. As indications of this, we have the
recently established Children’s Bureau, and the Smith-Lever Bill
with its appropriation for education that includes home-making.
In America, clubs, reading courses, and special correspondence for
parents have been developed in the last quarter century by the
International Congress of Mothers, Parent-Teachers’ Association, Home
and School League, American Institute of Child Life. This is good
and is helping many parents in meeting their perplexities, but as a
national means of vocational training, its psychology and pedagogy is
shortsighted and inefficient.
What banker would trust his ledgers to a youth just out of school,
whose only special preparation for bookkeeping was a current reading
course in business methods? What woman would permit a man to
experiment on her garden if he was just beginning a correspondence
course in agriculture? What business man wants to intrust his
correspondence to a stenographer just out of a business course, even
after months of such vocational training? All this is recognized as
inefficient, wasteful, expensive in business; how much more so is it
in the home, where precious human lives are the factors to be dealt
with.
Slowly, but certainly, there is coming a new ideal in education.
Children and young people are to be prepared for living. They are
to know how to develop physical vitality and mental ability and
spiritual power. They are to be prepared in spirit and intelligence,
in skill and in science, in personality and technique for the
responsibilities that most of them will assume, for the greatest
responsibility any of them can assume—home-making and family rearing.
Both the school and the home are responsible for the preparation of
these future parents. They must apply to this vocational problem
all their knowledge of psychology and pedagogy. Right habits of
regularity, responsibility, self-control, must be carefully trained
in those babyhood and early childhood stages; the manual phases
of household work are to be taught in the manual stage before the
teens; boys and girls are to be imbued with a wholesome, responsible
spirit toward motherhood and fatherhood and the home which they are
taught to look forward to as the goal for themselves; girls in their
teens are to have companionship and experience with little children,
learning the essential details and the significant guiding principles
of their high calling in a practical, human, motherly way, under
wise and sympathetic teachers. Girls, and boys likewise, will be
encouraged to foresee the significance and values and responsibility
of home and family, and to conduct themselves worthily of such a
mission.
Secondary and elementary schools are beginning to give school credit
for assistance at home. Domestic science and art are now taught in
hundreds of schools. Their field as yet is narrowly restricted to the
mechanics of the household, usually taught in an academic way. This,
however, is an entering wedge for more practical, comprehensive, and
human phases of home-making education whenever school administrators,
teachers, and parents shall see that vision. The day seems not
distant when colleges generally will give credit for all home-making
branches, as a few do now for some phases. We may even yet see
universities granting M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mothercraft and
fathercraft, as well as in philology, astronomy, history, or other
more consequential branches of learning. College alumnæ themselves
are making earnest appeals to their Alma Maters to prepare their
students for home-making responsibilities. It is not unthinkable
that the colleges, before many decades, might even include the
preparatory work in these subjects among their entrance requirements,
as they now do algebra and Latin. In that day “applied science”
will be esteemed more worthy than “pure science”, and ability
to utilize more honorable than ability to memorize. By the next
century, a mothercraft course may become as conventional a part of
the curriculum of a finishing school as French or vocal training or
æsthetic dancing; and its rudiments as requisite as a certificate of
age for working papers; and preparedness in fathercraft as stringent
a requirement for a marriage license as a medical certificate. Why
not?