The Fresh Air Habit

Otago Witness, Issue 1582, 18 March 1882, Page 29

The Fresh Air Habit

Early impressions are very enduring, ana can make useful habits as well as evil ones a sort of second nature. In order to forestall the chief danger of in-door life, make your children love-sick after fresh air ; make them associate the idea of fusty rooms with prison life, puuishment, and sickness. Open a window whenever they complain of headache or nausea: promise them a woodland excursion as a reward of exceptionally good behaviour. Save your best sweetmeats for out-door festivals. By the witchery of associated ideas a boy can come to regard the lonely shade tree as a primary requisite to the enjoyment of a good story book. ' Only the movement of my feet seems to set my brains a-going, says Rousseau.' And it is just as easy to think, debate, rehearse, &c, walking as sitting. The peripatetic philosophers derived their name from their pedestrian proclivities, and the Stoic sect from their master s predilection for an open porch. Children who have been brought up in hygienic homes not rarely 'feel as if they were going to be choked in unventilated rooms, and I would take good care not to cure them of such salutary ldiosynCr Every observant teacher must have noticed the innate hardiness of young boys, their unaffected indifference to wind and weather. They seem to take a delight in braving the extremes of temperature, and, by simply indulging this penchant of theirs, children can be made weather-proof to an almost unlimited degreß ; and in nothing else can they be more safely trusted to the guidance of their protective instincts. Don't be afraid that an active boy will hurt himself by voluntary exposure, unless his chances for out-dobr play are so rare as to tempt him to abuse the first opportunity. Weatherproof people are almost sickness-proof: a merry hunting excursion to the snow-clad highlands will rarely fail to counteract the consequences of repeated surfeits ; even girls who have learned to brave the winter storms of our north-western prairies will afterwards laugh at 'drafts' and' raw March winds.— Dr E. L. Oswald, in Popular Science Monthly.