OUR BABIES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2967, 25 January 1911, Page 66

OUR BABIES.

Bt Htgbia.

Published under the auspices ol the Society for the nealth ol Women and Children. " It is wiser to put up a fence at the top of ft precipice than to maintain an ombulanoe at the bottom.”

TEE SOCIETY’S BOOK. The Society’s book, “The Feeding and Care of the Baby,” is procurable from the ihon. secretary of each branch, the P Junket 'Nurses, and the leading booksellers throughput the Dominion. Price, Is; postage, 3d. ( A few copies printed on specially good! paper are available at Is 6d, and the latter edition, bound in cloth, is procurable at 2s 6d. COLD BATH FOR CHILDREN. At the close of last week’s article I referred my readers to what is sard in the Society’s book, ‘‘Feeding and' Care. ot Baby,” on the subject of cold bathing. For the benefit of those who have not a copy at hand I may quote the passage. How To Start. “Cold bathing should be begun as soon as the child is sufficiently strong to _ take n-eally active exercise. The vast majority of children of two years, and some even younger, would be immensely benefited it given a cold bath every morning, the following precautions being carefully attended to; “ 1. Gradually reduce the temperature of the water day by day, until at the end of 10 days or a fortnight the bath.' can be taken" quite cold. With a very young child it is well to start in the summer, and in any cause to pave the way by standing the child with, its feet in. warm water while sponging with cool water, reducing the temperature of the latter each. day until cold is reached. “2. The child should be taken straight from its bed, popped into the bath for a few seconds, rubbed and dried well with a linen towel, dressed very quickly, and taken for an active walk, run, or game {in the open air if possible) for not less than 20 minutes. The exercise must never he emitted, and it should be mad© as active and pleasurable to the child as possible. There is no greater mistake than that of allowing children to dawdle about either before or after the bath. “Cold bathing, followed by really active ©xeroise, is one of the most health-giving of all habits, and should be continued throughout life.” THE OLD SCHOOL. It will be- remembered 1 that in a passago I cited last week Dr Leroy Yale, a typical representative of the old school (the school to which most mothers are still tied), gave it as his opinion that the hardening method in any shape not b© begun- on <l little child. 1 In another place he says: “I have no sympathy with the senseless hardening theory”—condemning the practice ahead by using the epithet “senseless.” For younv children he says water should be warmed to 70deg Fah., rendering it almost lukewarm. As I shall show later, water thus mildly warmed is apt to be depressing and devitalising, where cold water would prove an invigorating stimulus' to the whole system-. Why. then, are mothers strongly advised against the use of cold Dr Yale gives as a reason for his advice the fact that in- proportion to its size, heat escapes more rapidly from a child than from an adult. Of course, small bodies do tend to cool more rapidly than large, ana this does afford ample reason for having everything in readiness for drying a baby rapidly, for wasting no time over dressing or undressing, and for tucking it snug and oosv in its cradle as quickly as possible. This last refers to the “nursling —in other words, to the young baby who cannot be induced to take active, sustained exercise, and %vho has, therefore, not reached the proper stage for cold bathing. When sustained voluntary bodily activity is possible a new factor {curiously enougn habitually left out of account in dealing with this problem) really dominates the situation. That factor is exercise. There is nothing to fear and everything to gain ■by habituating infants to the regular daily use of the cold bath as scon as they are capable of 'taking a sufficiency of active exercise to ensure a healtny reaction usually at any time from the eighteenth to the twenty-fourth month. Sometimes tne cold bath may be given earlier, where the mother or nurse can 'give the attention and spare the time to ensure suitable energetic play for at least a quarter of an hour immediately after dressing. Rapid Burning in Infancy. In plain terms, the question whether a young creature will or will not benefit by a cold bath is not determined simply by size and relative surface exposed to the escape of heat, but by this consideration taken in conjunction with the heat-pro-ducing power of the individual. Dr Yale takes no account of the fact that _ the fire of life burns much more actively in a baby than in an adult. An infant six months old “ burns ” a quart of milk a day. An adult weighing twelve times as much as the baby needs to “burn the equivalent of only three or four quarts —in other words, needs only that relatively small proportion of food for his complete nutrition, —not 12 quarts! This explains why children revel in seaside-bathing, and why, carried away by the sheer ioy of their experiences in paddling and tumbling about in the surf, they are apt, if left to- themselves, to overdraw their physical capital. They have such a splendid balance _ of natural reaction that they realise no limitation to the extent to which it can be safely drawn on. However, after having allowed an excess of heat to be abstracted from the surface, we must never forget to ensure a more active burning throughout the system—in other words, we must on no account allow proper active exercise after cold bathing to bo omitted.

The fact that excessive or injudicious seaside-bathing is the reverse of beneficial affords no ground for stopping one of the most healthful and invigorating pleasures of early life, and the same may be said of the momentary dip or cold sponghfg of infants. If Nature had been guided by the old eohcol she would have confined the instinctive resorting to cold water among ■warm-blooded animals to leviathans, like fche whale and hippopotamus, and the joy of swimming would havo been unknown to full-grown ducks or dogs—to say no thing of duck-Unas and puppies.

In this country those who foolishly inveigh against cold bathing for young children should visit a primitive Maori settlement—whore they would find infants swimming almost as soon as they can walk —or they should consult the usages of other vigorous races in the past before they were sapped by modern civilisation, I shall pursue this subject next week, and! give in detail some striking instances of the benefits.of cold bathing for young children coming within the scope of my own experience.