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Child
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insufficiently protected, children, and especially girls, cannot be out
of doors unless the weather is mild. So they are kept in for fear of
the cold. If children are well clothed, it will benefit them to exercise
freely in the open air, summer or winter.
Mothers who desire their boys and girls to possess the vigor
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of health should dress them properly and encourage them in all
reasonable weather to be much in the open air. It may require effort
to break away from the chains of custom, and dress and educate the
children with reference to health; but the result will amply repay the
effort.
The Child’s Diet
The best food for the infant is the food that nature provides. Of
this it should not be needlessly deprived. It is a heartless thing for a
mother, for the sake of convenience or social enjoyment, to seek to
free herself from the tender office of nursing her little one.
The mother who permits her child to be nourished by another
should consider well what the result may be. To a greater or less
degree the nurse imparts her own temper and temperament to the
nursing child.
The importance of training children to right dietetic habits can
hardly be overestimated. The little ones need to learn that they eat
to live, not live to eat. The training should begin with the infant in
its mother’s arms. The child should be given food only at regular
intervals, and less frequently as it grows older. It should not be given
sweets, or the food of older persons, which it is unable to digest.
Care and regularity in the feeding of infants will not only promote
health, and thus tend to make them quiet and sweet-tempered, but
will lay the foundation of habits that will be a blessing to them in
after years.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when
he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs 22:6
.
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As children emerge from babyhood, great care should still be
taken in educating their tastes and appetite. Often they are permitted
to eat what they choose and when they choose, without reference to