The Ladies’ Magazine.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2598, 4 September 1909, Page 2 (Supplement)

The Ladies’ Magazine.

WHAT MOTHERS CAN DO FOR NERVOUS CHILDREN*

'(Bv Katherine Rolston Fisher, in the “Ladies 5 Home Journal. 55 ) Said a three-year-old to her mother, "Mamma. I want to be good. Why don’t Ibe it? 55 It took that mother twenty years to learn the answer—distracted nerves. Although we know more about the nervous system than we did twenty years ago, still to many of us nerves seem less real than veins or bones. Nerves, however, are substantial: they form a network of white fibres and gray masses, which connect the brain, the organ oi mind, with all parts of the body. - . _ ~ ~ It is, therefore, a great mistake to think that children who are “only nervous 55 need no attention. They need very special attention, and their mothers by giving this may save them from inefficiency, invalidism, insanity, or even moral ruin. As nervous disorders are most easily cured in their first stages mothers ought to be able to detect their earlier and milder symptoms. The late Sir Leslie Stephen owed his successful career primarily to his another observing such symptoms in him when he was seven years old and reporting them to the doctor. Pie told her the boy was in danger of becoming feeble-minded, but that a humdrum life with plenty of outdoor exercise • might save liim. She obejmd his orders, taught Leslie to control his high temper, and with his father’s aid kept him free from any heavy responsibility until his .frame was thoroughly mature, thus enabling the child threatened with feeble-mindedness to become the'eminent English philosopher and man of letters. The pitiable consequences of failure to take.such precautions as saved the mind of Stephen are seen in a little neighbor of mine, who, from being an exceptionally brilliant and beautiful boy, beoame, an a few months, little_ better than -an imbecile. Though apparently healthy, his constitution was probably act sound, his mother being nervous and his father elderly. The year he was :six his family did not take their usual summer outing. His playground was .a strip of city yard, his companions grown people, proud of his precocious ideas and his grown-up way of expressing .them. His mental activity expended itself chiefly in talking and reading. Sometimes his mamma found him -crying quietly—from lonesomeness, he said. She petted him, and told the neighbors about it, but without concern. Not even his fleeing from firecrackers and fireworks on the Fourth of July made his parents see that he was different from a normal youngster. Not until he grew thin and his rapid chatter was mixed with shrill cries did they call a physician. When he did hot know his mother, and plainly had delusions, a specialist was consulted; but his advice to take the child into the country was not followed, partly tec a use the heart-broken old father was ±OO sick to go, partly because they did not appreciate that the boy’s one chance lay in a change of scene. For two years doctors and trained nurses have -attended the little patient, bat they have not given him back his mind. The most common cause of nervous disease is an inherited tendency to it; »nt—sand this statement cannot &e made too emphatic—this heredity need not be the doom. A handicap it is: inasmuch as it threatens mind and morals, it is the worst of handicaps. Soecial provision for handicapped children is being made i"n schools. For the nervously-handicapped child special care must begin in babyhood. Mrs. F.’s baby was born—to use the doctor's words—“a little bundle of nerves. 55 Fortunately her mother had sense- to 'give her the peculiar care she needed. For seven or eight months she let her lie in crib or carriage quite alone. No one took her up or even went to her, except to feed, dress, or otherwise attend to her. No one talked or played with her. To avoid handling her unnecessarily her garments were the fewest and simplest possible. Only by flow degrees as sue grew out of babyhood was this “rest-cure” treatment dropped. Of course Mrs. F. had to stand much disapproval. “Your crankiness with the child will be the death of her.” her mother used to toll her. ihrt a Jew years later when the mother saw her son suffering—as her daughter had suffered—from nervous exhaustion, while Tier grandchild throve and promised to develop normally, she changed her views. “If I had but known what you know about children,” she confessed, “neither your nerves nor N.'s would , have broken down.” A nerveus parent tends to produce nervous children. The effect does not usually reappear in every child; it may not reappear at all in the first generation ; and it may not take the same form in parent and child, nor in two . children of the same parent. The mother who .says, “Helen gets her sick headaches from me,” wonders why her Georgie has fits, being quite unaware that the nervous instability which - causes her own and her daughter’s sick headaches also causes her boy’s con- - vulsions.

Many epileptics are children of wo- ; men subject to. sick headaches or ho neuralgia. One ; who comes to mind is the daughter of a neuralgic mother and an eccentric though clever father. This girl, extremely shy, sensitive, and in childhood a stutterer, was sent to school under conditions which fatigued her greatly, and after school life was oyer she'was still taxed with nerve-wearing work. Lastly, she was obliged, coiitrarv to her desire, to take up the study and practice of medicine. Intensely conscientious and sympathetic, she was subjected by her- professional life to constant nervous strain. Before she was thirty years old her long over-tax-ed nerve centres gave way: at a patient’s bedeide she fell in an epileptic attack. To such seizures she has now been subjected to Jcor years. Unfitted . work she lives burdened, hot only wail the strangest-and most terrible of diseases, but with the well-founded fear that she may die insane, all because her parents .did not take care not to overbalance the unsteady nerves they had handed down to her. Second to neuropathis heredity among causes of nervous disease in children, is malnutrition. Malnutrition tends both to starve and to poison the nerve htres; Therefore an ill-nourished ''.3d .or one with weak digestion, even * ! 'his general health seems good, should lie looked on as liable to nervous dis-

order under extra strain. If all, efforts fail to improve the nutrition tlio demands on the child’s energies must be kept well within his capacity. Oases of juvenile insanity and child-suicide, occurring near the close of the school year, show the extreme consequences of letting an undernourished, ambitious child work “on his nerve.” The nervous system is likely to 'suffer if severely taxed during the “teens” when the reproductive organs are developing. A schoolmate of mine wh6, throughout her cchool lifel, kept the title of “ the brightest girl in the school” might have kept her health, too, had she not been transferred from the rather old-fashioned seminary where I knew her to a college preparatory establishment, the principal of which used to say that “until you tried it you would not believe how much work you could get out of a sixteen-year-oid girl.” Mv brilliant friend was "just sixteen when this woman tried the experiment on her. At eighteen she broke down. At twenty-one she was still an invalid. Whether she ever recovered or not I don’t know; but tlie last time I saw her her pitiful condition ' impressed me as that of one whose whole nervous system had beenrivrecked beyond repair. Still sadder is the history of another girl, who, ten years ago, began to show towards her mother "a causeless_ antipathy, and lias extended it to include one by one other members of the family. These relatives, grieved and mortified by her conduct, reproached and blamed her. Only recently ; when she declared that the whole family were maliciously conspiring against her, did they divine the truth: that for ten years she has been progressively insane. The discovery, comes ten years too late. For youngs lives such as these gone wrong/parent, teacher, physician must share the blame. What can a mother do to help other such lives go right? First, she should bear in mind that the nerves of children, in any one of the following five classes, need especially watchful care: 1. Children of neuropathic predisposition—that is, children of nervous parentage or of ancestry in which nervous disease often appears. 2. Underweight, undersized or poorly-nourished children, whether or not showing signs of nervousness. 3. Children who are made delirious by slight illness, and those who had convulsions from teething or other causes. 4. Exceptionally bright or precocious children. 5. Children exhibiting extreme restlessness, irritability, shyness, twitching, or other nervous habits, headache, or attacks of indigestion or other illness after excitement. (Symptoms of imbecility, chorea Saint Vitus’s dance and other defects and disorders so well marked that they cannot fail of notice are omitted.) Headache is always a sign of something wrong. Temper-fits caused by nervousness are often mistaken for naughtiness. Refusal, apparently willful, to do lessons or sewing or -other work requiring close attention and fine muscular adjustment may be revolt, instinctive and self-protective, of the nerves.

-One summer, many years ago I daily .taught a 'little girl, bright, but hard ;to manage, ‘whose mother wished her mot,to lose in vacation any of the reiiriarkable advance she .had made during her first year at school. "What .trouble she gave me ! —-apparently doling .review examples wrong on purpose, and going ditto tantrums over familiar spelling-words. We-called her naughty, but now, recalling her thin, flushed little face and twitching .mouth, I can see we, who taxed her -bo unwisely, were at fault.

Some children, who are .just as nervous, but of different make-up, must be kept from over-taxing themselves. A dear little chap whom I once allowed to try my typewriter applied himself to it so intently that .half an hour afterwards I had to stop him. Not until 1 asked him did he know he was tired. Then the way his hands dropped and his head fell back showed that he was more than the “little tired” he confessed to. When I told his mother about it . she said his teachers noticed in him this too intense" concentration and application. Yet so little did she realise the amount of rest needed by so active a brain that she would let this little fellow sit tip in a hotel lobby full of lights and people till he fell asleep against her knee. A mother’s second duty is to. have causes of nervous irritation searched for and removed. Eyestrain is one of the commonest. Abenoids and. enlarged tonsils usually cause nervousness. Spinal curvature is sometimes at the bottom of a so-called.stomach, heart or throat ailment. The possibility that circumcision is called for should not be ignored. To discover the basic cause of a nervous condition is often difficult. Do not imagine, however, that nothing can be done unless the cause of trouble is known. Attention to general health may enable Nature to make a cure. This attention, closer than normal children require, is the third duty of a mother to her nervous child. Children in any of the classes already named need all the sleep and outdoor life they can be made to take. Postponing school life may work wonders. A little girl, with marked ‘ nervous heredity began, like her mother, in early, years, to have violent headaches. Wisely allowed 'to run wild on a farm till ten years of age, she then entered school free from headache, and ' was graduated from college in good health, which she still keeps, though her life has been far from easy. ' Recreation may require special planning. Not for the nervous child is the children’s party, the noisy picnic, nor the exciting game. The loss of these oan .be made tip by some treat not given to the other children.

Fourth to be named, but of prime importance, is mental hygiene. A wise mother never speaks before a child of his nervousness. Remark that Johnnie looks as if he were going to have another of-bis attacks, and the chances are that Johnnie will. Manifestations of nervousness which the child cannot at first help may ..by proper suggestions be brought underhis The cough, mostly nervous,:. which sometimes persists after whooping-cough has run its course, can be checked by a quiet, “That will ’do now; don’t cough any more.” ■A- 'nervous.' mother -Tjjill do harm to a nervous child. If year child’s welfare can best be served by giving him for a time into other hands' let neither" pride nor love stand in the way. Finally, for your encouragement, remember that “with right; care the exceptional child may become ?%eeptional in the best sense.”

OUR BABIES.

(By Hygeia.) Published under the auspices of the Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children. ADDRESSES OF PLUNKET NURSES AND SECRETIES. Wellington.-—Plunket Nurse M‘Donald, 73 Aro street. Tel. 2425. Hon. sec., Mrs. M‘Vicar, ,45 Majoribanks street, City. Tel. 2624. Auckland. —Plunket Nurse Okappel, Park street. Tel. 851. Office of Society, 2 Chancery street. Tel. 829. Office hours Tuesdays and Fridays, 2.20 .to 4 jj.m. Hon. sec., Mrs. W. H. Parkes, Marinoto, Symonds street, Tel. 240. Napier. —Plunket Nurse Donald, Masonic Hotel. Tel. 87. Hon. sec., Mrs. E. A. W. Henley, P.O. Box 64. Tel. 147.Society’s Baby Hospital, Karitane Home, Anderson’s Bay, Dunedin. Tel. 1985. Demonstrations on points of interest to mothers are gven by the matron every Wednesday afternoon from 2.30 to 3.30. All mothers invited. Messages may be left at any time at the Plunket Nurses’ Offices or private addresses. The Society’s official sheet of instructions, written by Dr. Truby King, price 3d (postage free), and ail other information available from the lion, secretary of each branch. —The Humanised Milk Fad.— Under the heading, “Humanised Milk Fad/” a very offensive anonymous letter signed E. V. J. appeared about a fortnight ago in the “Taranaki Herald,” and was evidently reprinted in the Taranaki Budget, because I have just received the following telegram from a lady in Westport:— —Telegram.— “Read absurd letter, page 44, ‘Taranaki Budget.’—A. B.”

The great interest which this lady A. 8., takes in the work of the Society is due to the fact that not only her own baby flourished exceedingly on the regimen advocated by the Society in its pamphlet, “The Feeding and Care of the Baby,” but she herself has been the means of aiding i many other mothers on the West Coast, whose children have also done well on the lines of treatment denounced by the Taranaki correspondent. —A Foolish Hoax.— But from the telegram from Westport no notice would have been. taken of the Taranaki letter, because it bore on tlic face of it the evidence of not being bona fide, and I had assumed that it belonged to the class of popular practical jokos represented by the frequent washing ashore of bottles containing harrowing personal narratives of shipwrecks which have never occurred. Indeed, I have no reason now to suppose otherwise; but it is evident that a hoax of this kind may cause young mothers much groundless anxiety, and give rise .to a considerable amount of harm and misgiving, so I shall treat the letter as if it were really genuine. Providence of the Mother—Whose Fault? —

Accuse not Nature she has done her part, Do thou but thine. Milton.

The writer says her baby was delicate from birtli, and that her first mistake was that she tried for six months to feed it as the Almighty intended. “ I did the first unwise act by tryng -to breast-feed it. After battling for nearly six months with a fretful and ailing baby, weak and ill myself, I was advised to give the child ‘humanised’ milk. . . I followed the instructions in the pamphlet on the ‘Feeding ami Care of the Baby ’to the letter. After four months’ trial I noticed my baby was losing weight, and then one day I woke up to the fact that baby was more helpless at 10 months old than he was at five.” v . '

Here, indeed, was a Rip Van Winkle of a mother. After a prolonged sleep (in which month after month she had let her baby drift unobserved), this Billy woman suddenly wakes' up and commences 'rubbing her sleepy eyes, wondering what tlio ‘‘pitiful screams” of her truly unfortunate progeny were all about. .She says she had “followed the instructions in the pamphlet to the letter,” but she must have been sound asleep at every weighing time, and dreaming for the rest of the four months, or she could not have failed to‘ notice that her baby was going downhill. The, Socety’s pamphlet, says (page 14): — rt —Weighing the Baby.—

By whatever means an infant is fed it ought to bo weighed regularly every week for the first few months, * and at least every month afterwards, to ascertain whether proper growth is taking place. No absolutely fixed feeding standard can be arbitrarily laid down which will be suitable for all infants, under all circumstances. We can only give the average requirements, leaving it to the mother to make such slight alterations in quantity as may appear desirable or necessary from the appetite, condition, and weight of the child. If it is not thriving properly obviously a doctor should be consulted. —Doctor or Clairvoyant?—

No medical man was seen until the end of four months’ sleep, when the mother consulted wliat she! describes as a doctor, but he must sfirely have come from the country of her dreams. and hysterical imaginings, because, without a moment’s hesitation, and evidently without inquiring about the ordinary causes of failure, such as patent foods, condensed milk, “taking what’s going,” or irregular habits, defective hygiene, etc., he said, after merely glancing at thJ baby. “Yon’to he°n feeding that child on humanised milk.” The incident was as dramatic as that of George Washington with' his Axe—the wretched mother merely told her doctor, the guilty truth. ,‘T acknowledged I had. Then he said: ’Have you over paused for a moment to consider that you have been sterilising all the goodness out of that child’s food? Then the scales fell from before my eyes, etc., etc. Of course she had not been sterilising the .food, because humanised milk is purposely heated to only 150 deg. Fahr. Heating to 212 deg :Fahr (boiling point) is needed for sterilising tion. ..However, when one begins draw-

ing on the imagination a matter of 60(leg more or less is a mere bagatelle 1 —Who are the Faddists and Experimentalists ? Humanised milk is simply cow’s milk adapted to the needs and digestive power of a young human being. . This is effected by removing the excess of curd, which is good for the calf, but bad for a baby, and by adding the necessary quantity of sugar of milk, be sides killing all 'hatched microbes by mild heating. E. V. J. warns mothers against “experimenting or allowing themselves to be persuaded to experiment in fads.” She docs not realise that people using the unmodified milk of the cow fotr human babies are really the faddists and wild experimentalists who ruin the digestive power and proper nutrition and development of the .unfortunate infants who com© under their care. On the other hand, the mothers who adhere as closely as possible to Nature and prepare humanised milk for babies who cannot be led naturally are simply following the dictates of humanity, common sense and scientific truth. That- they and the babies have their reward is shown by the constant stream of grateful lotters which pour in from mothers in every direction, and the Society has besides the assurances of the Plunket Nurses throughout the Dominion, who -are unanimous as to the enormous advantage the babies derive from modern systematic care, compared with the slipshod guess-work which was all they had to go on in regal'd to. the rearing of infants prior to receiving special training for this special work. To return to the Taranaki mother the remarks given above were the prelude to a tirade about “starving my child,” denunciation of the use of sugar of milk by implication, etc. She says: “Cane-sugar is about as pure an article of food as is on the market at the present time, and contains nothing deleterious.” Oblivious of the fact that thousands of mothers all over the world, and the leading physicians of the day, have found, in practice, that babies thrive far better when given tlie natural form of sugar present in mother’s milk, instead of the highly fermentable vegetable product known as sugarcane—oblivious of such facts, this Taranaki woman , who has failed so. egregiously with the mothering of her own baby, does not hesitate to parade her ignorance under the name of practical experience and common sense. She speaks with a ripe confidence and authority akin to that of the mother who has buried seven. However, as I said earlier, the letter is apparently ■ mere fiction, but the treatment of babies is not a fit subject for this class of fooling. The following sentence makes one doubt whether the writer is even a woman—she is certainly not an experienced mother, because she knows nothing about the possibilities or limitations of tlie growth of babies. She writes: “I am glad to say that after two months of sensible feeding of unsterilised milk and other raw food, such as eggs, oysters, and fruit, my baby lias gained 151bs in weight”—that is a gam in two months by an infant ailing from birth of as much weight as a strong healthy breast-fed baby averages in a year!•What does a foolish, lying letter such as this represent? What does a foolish lying message cast into the sea represent? In either case we have to deal with the heedless, irresponisble folly of fools, and the law makes no provision for such vargaries, though it punishes many less harmful offenders. —The Society’s Mission. — Fortunately, the time for killing or seriously injuring the work undertaken by the Society ici; the Promotion of Health of Woman and Children either by ridicule or misrepresentation has gone by. There has been much of both ridicule and misrepresentatibn r in the past, but the simple truths we have been setting forth hi the interests of mother and child have and we are satisfied, are going to prevail still more in the future. Breast-feeding is increasing, and many 'tons of sugar of milk are given to babies every year in the Dominion, where only a few hundredwcigtlis were used previously. We knew that there are over a thousand women successfully feeding babies with humanised milk in New Zealand at the present moment, and several thousand mothers who are using the Society’s pamphlet as their guide. Some 10,OUU copies have been disposed of during the last three years, aoid a new edition or 5000 copies, enlarged to double their original size is to be issued. Add to this copies of “Our Babies,” issued every week; the Karitane Baby Hospital, and tlie woi'-k of a dozen speciallytrained nurses now practically demonstrating the truth to mothers throughout the Dominion, and 1 avc have no reason to fear that ignorance and prejudice can hold* their own much longer. They have had their day, and the thinking and feeling part of the world is now fully aroused against the further countenance of a regime which is none the ]ess heinous because it is the outcome of blind ignorance and prejudice. Moreover, we can no longer afford to have the health of the race sapped before it has got beyond the cradle. The muscles, teeth,, digestion, nerves, grit, and staying power of the rising generation of New Zealanders will not bo satisfactory until our mothers and nurses know and put into practice all the simple conditions needed to make our babies flourish. Our infant deathrate has to be reduced to less than half of its present proportions ; then the health of babies who survive will be correspondingly better. These advantages are mere matters of a few years more of steady and persistent work on the part of sensible people backed up by the Health Department and Biloh agencies us the Society for the 1 31 °~ motion of the Health of Women and Children.