OUR BABIES

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 45, 27 June 1929, Page 2

OUR BABIES

BY HYGEIA. Published under the auspices 6! the Royal'New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children (Plunket Sooiety). "It is -wiser to put up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom." , yjA THE SUPER-SENSITIVE CHILD. The following extracts are from another' of the excellent series of lectures arranged by the National Society of Day Nurseries in London, afterwards edited by Viscountess Erleigh and printed in book form under the title of "The Mind of the Growing Child." The lecture on "The Super-sensitive Child," from which we shall quote this week and next, was given by Dr. Mary Hemingway Rees. She says:— "The title of this lecture is of value inasmuch as it serves t 0 remind us that every child is sensitive, some more so than others. By the term 'super-sensitive' nrevou, highly-strung ,we intend to denote the individual who is exaggeratedly sensitive. By the term 'sensitive' we are really trying to express a quality which is inherent in all living matter—that is, the power of reaction to. stimuli. It is by the capacity to respond to stimuli coming from without or within, by virtue of the quality of the reaction to a stimulus, that we are enabled t 0 estimate the degree of sensitiveness of any individual. Given a particular stimulus, is the reaction of the individual great or small? Thereby we can tell whether the individual is normally sensitive or abnormally so.

STIMULUS AND REACTION. "Now let us consider for a moment or two the kind of,- stimuli to which the average* child is obliged to react. They fall, roughly, into three groups. ' There are, firstly, physical and ,chemical stimuli; secondly, emotional and environmental; and thirdly, intrinsic and developmental. These groups dovetail into •one another,.and are by no means exhaustive. ' As examples under the heading of physical and chemical stimuli come the ordinary factors in the environment stimuli I mean such factors as the personality of the people around the child, particularly of the parents, and their mutual inter-reaction; their general mental attitude towards the child, the quality of the emotional environment in which it is living—in short, the home atmosphere as a .whole. As an example of intrinsic and developmental stimuli I refer t 0 such stimuli as And their outward expression during puberty and adolescence, and which are derived from within the individual himself. "When do these stimuli begin to act. The individual is constantly reacting'to stimuli, and the process starts-no one can quite say at what point-in the intrauterine, ante-natal life. Growth, and development take Place in response to stimuli of a complicated chemical nature derived partly from the maternal tissues and partly from the endocrine system-in the makingin the child itself. . . • THE SENSITIVE AND THE SUPER-SENSITIVE.

"To-day we are concerned with the child in our nurseries. At -birth the child is subjected to a variety of physical sti/nuli. The whole environment changes: the character of the stimuli, externally anyhow, is changed to a very large extent. The child's mode of life is entirely altered. No longer is it sheltered and nourished without effort. It is horn into the world, separated from its mother, and obliged to breathe and feed and live by itself. The cold air of the world strikes the child who makes ts first effort at independent respiration; it j draws breath and utters its shrill protest. Almost from the start the supersensitive cbfild is recognisable as one that does not adapt itself to the demands and obligations of its new environment. Watch new-born children being bathedall in the same experienced hands. One will scream all the whileexcept when face downwards on the nurse's lap or in the water, whilst another remains almost uniformly placid. The reaction of children of, all ages to water is an interesting study. I am inclined to think that as a plaything at some stage of a child's life, water is a necessity. The satisfaction to the child and the tranquillising effect of a game with water are worth a good deal of wetness. WHAT MAKES SUPER-SENSITIVE-NESS? "Others, too, in their reaction to

food are very instructive. The little, fidgety baby who will not take hold of the nipple or teat, who is s 0 easily disturbed, and who needs so much encouragement to suck is not reacting readily to the demands of its new environment. But right at the very start a child who is not congenitally super-sensitive in the way I have indicated can be t»ade so by the wrong sort of handling. Right methods can be learne at any Mothercvraf.t Training Centre, and they may be shortly summarised—a regular, routine life for baby; feeding and bathing t 0 » e done by the clock; fresh, dry air; warm clothing and solitude. On the vexed question of baby's admirers, make it a rule to consider the baby. Each fresh pair of arms, each fresh voice, are so many extra stimuli to which our little sensitive is obliged to react. There are plenty to which to react in the business of living without adding extra stimuli'. For most of the '24 hours baby is better in his pram in the open. If there is a garden available, <it is not necessary )to push him along the road, and certainly not to rock him to sleep. But a certain amount of handling by the right person, the handling that baby is accustomed to, is good.

■"lndigestion, unrecognised, often passes muster as super-sensitive-ness to the Unwary. If a child is cross and irritahle it is an easy matter nowadays to have its whole regime and dietary thoroughly investigated by an expert-and ought in every case to he done. "To summarise what I have said, a' super-sensitive child is on who does not adapt himself readily to his surroundings or nature demands that life makes upon him. But all children are sensitive. It is very largely a question of how we parents mediate to them the exJperience of growing up whether we have to cope with a so-called normal or a super-sensitive child. "Many little girls, and little hoys too, love to gaze at themselves m /the glass. It is the beginning of Canity, some say; and a campaign hi ruthless squashing may he entered upon, which may, and sometimes does, lay the foundation of neurosis in after-life. It is important to remember'that the child in its development passes through phases, and this is one of them, and quite .normal. let it pass without comment, and it will soon be left behind. In this connection, tod, one. mU st be mindful of the pernicious effect of personal remarks, favourable or otherwise. They . enhance and tend to fix the child's,'self-im-portance, and frequently lead to a pre-occupation with itself, the manifestations of which can develop into a very colourable semblance of a super-sensitive child. A child too, is uncannily aware of the emotional environment it creates and the reaction it produces in its parents.,

A STORY WITH A LESSON. "Toke the case of the little only girl of 10. Her toother describes her, in her hearing, as 'a bundle of nerves and so highly strung.' The child has a tiresome cough; it come 5 ' on mostly at night, and keeps both mother and child awake nightly for hours. Incidentally, in the child's presence, the mother gives a sympathetic friend a vivid description of the 'awful nights.' In her dairy life the child might be described as •a little madam,' being very much of a 'law unto herself; she goes to bed when she chooses; she simply has the whole family 'on a String'. Take the child away and put her In another environment, and what happens? Of course, at first the queen will miss her kingdom of willing subjects, but she will settle down. In the case lam speaking of she did. She spent happy days 4 and increasingly good nights. It did not come about at once, how-

ever. A night nurse was on duty, and there were one or two 'feezes.' These, however, gradually subsided, and all was shaping weU. But the anxious mother could lM hear to be separated from her, soon went to see her, and the child insisted on returning wtih her. The misguided mother was as Avax in the child's hands, and although full of the best intentions, her resolution melted, and, of course, she took her home—and the whole trouble started afresh. The first night at home the night nurse went to take charge, but the little patient delivered her ultimatum. 'l'll scream till mummy comes,' and she She knew that mummy was her obedient slave.

"A super-sensitive child is frequently very intelligent; but parents sometimes run the risk of. transforming an extra-intelligent child

into one of the super-sensitive type, or apparently so. , .

"It has been said that the art of parenthood lies in the avoidance of ultimata. An intelligent child can be extraordinarily persistent. I have known a small girl of three go without her dinner rather than swallow an abnoxious pill that she was quite capable of taking. The stuff that hunger strikers are made of, perhaps, but a difficult proposition in the nursery!

"In the estimation of the degree to which a child is genuinely supersensitive a large number of factors come under consideration, but it is very valuable to study the child out of its ordinary environment. One can thereby discover how much of the trouble is really inherent in the child and how much „is environmental. WISE MANAGEMENT. "What applies to the management, of normal children applies also to the'management of the supersensitive child. In this connection (I wish to preface my remarks with' ft quotation from Dr. Cameron in his book 'The Nervous Child,' a most .valuable work, full of insight and helpful points, which I commend to your notice. He says: 'Among the children even of the well-to-do oftjen enough the hygiene of. the mind is overlooked, and faulty manage-

fment produces restlessness, m- \ stability, and hyper-sensi'tiveness, [which pass insensibly into neuropathy in adult life. To preventso distressing a result is our aim in the training of children." "In general, one must think of of the child as an organism which .is growing and developing th e whole 'time. It is possessed of certain potentialities in accordance wjhh which it ought to develop. Tbes3 • potentialities are modified by the environment in which the child is placed—not only the physical, but, even more important, the emotional environment. In the main it is <wis e to remember the saying of a leading phychologist: 'The child is not a lump of putty to be moulded.. but a bulb which has to grow, fcid it is the duty of the parent to provide the right environment in which growth may take place.' " (To be concluded next week.)