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Ebook has 3010 lines and 220762 words, and 61 pages

PAGE INTRODUCTION vii

PREFACE xi

CHAPTER

I MOTHERCRAFT: ITS MEANING, SCOPE, AND SPIRIT 1

II ESTABLISHING THE HOME 10

V GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT 41

VI PREPARING FOR THE BABY 62

X THE EDUCATION OF THE LITTLE CHILD 196

XX HOME NURSING AND FIRST AID IN THE NURSERY 337

BIBLIOGRAPHY 381

INDEX 425

LIST OF PLATES

FACING PAGE

Approved Baby Clothing and Bassinet 62

Approved Crib, Scales, Nursery Table. Holding the Baby, Supporting Head and Back 74

Approved Baby Carriage and Shoes 76

Drugs and Unsanitary Appliances. Unhygienic Equipment and Unsatisfactory Scales 80

For the Layette 82

Exercises for the Baby 114

Good and Bad Postures 142

Exercises for Trunk, Chest and Back 144

Some Especially Dangerous Foods for Children under Six. Poisons for Little Children 164

Wholesome Sweets at Suitable Ages. Laxative Foods 174

Day's Menu for Child Two to Four Years. Day's Menu for Child Four to Six Years 182

Learning Self-reliance and Regularity. At the School of Mothercraft Summer Camp 212

Unhygienic, Inartistic, Anti-social Toys. Hygienic, Durable, Constructive, Social Toys 290

Handwork that Utilizes Fundamental Muscles. In the School of Mothercraft Child Garden 320

Height and Weight Charts 370

THE MOTHERCRAFT MANUAL

MOTHERCRAFT: ITS MEANING, SCOPE, AND SPIRIT

"To know a child is to love it, and the more we know it, the better we love it.

"To know, love, and serve childhood is the most satisfying, soul-filling of all human activities.

"It rests on the oldest and strongest and sanest of all instincts.

"It gives to our lives a rounded-out completeness as does no other service.

"No other object is so worthy of service and sacrifice; and the fullness of the measure in which this is rendered is the very best test of a nation and race and a civilization."

--G. STANLEY HALL.

Mothercraft is the skilful, practical doing of all that is involved in the nourishing and training of children, in a sympathetic, happy, religious spirit. It is not merely the care of the little baby; that is a very small, though significant, part. Its practice is not dependent upon physical parenthood, but is part of the responsibility of every woman who has to do with children as teacher, nurse, friend, or household associate. It is no more an instinct than is gardening or building. It is not merely being with children. Its requisite is vital working knowledge of the fundamental principles of biology, hygiene, economics, psychology, education, arts. It is mothering--that oldest, steadiest, most satisfactory vocation to women always and everywhere--made intelligent and efficient and joyous.

Mothercraft cannot be learned simply from books any more than can music, agriculture, carpentry, dentistry. The most important factor in the learning of mothercraft is the daily intelligent association with the children in their natural environment of home. A hospital with sick children is a place to learn its pathological phases.

In these days of radical change in the activities and education of women, mothercraft has not kept pace with the other vocations open to women. In a society where marriage is no longer an economic, domestic, or conventional necessity, there has developed a tacit assumption that youth would not marry, and therefore special preparation for home-making would be presumptuous and a waste of time. The school has left this part of a girl's training for the home to give, and in a large proportion of homes there has not been the time or the intelligence or the foresight to give it. Girls have gone from elementary school directly into industry, or to high school and college, or to finishing school and society. Educators and vocational guides have frequently overlooked it in educational and vocational conferences, exhibits, and guidebooks.

And yet to-day in America, the care and training of young children is chiefly in the hands of women. Seventy-five per cent. of women in America are married, and presumably most of them have the responsibility of children in their own homes.

Nursing, within fifty years, has become a profession, and to-day it is almost impossible for a woman to find employment as a nurse unless she has had a special training for three years. Yet nursing has only to do with sick folk, usually in a hospital, which is still a far cry from the daily care, hygiene, and training of the normal child in a home. For an equal period, teachers of young children have been expected to take a special normal course of two to four years. Yet this training has had little to do, until recently in some quarters, with hygiene, biology, or the psychology of the child, but has concerned itself chiefly with subjects in the curriculum and with masses of children in an artificial grouping and environment, foreign to their native interests and inimical to their physical needs.

Only within the last twenty-five years has medicine developed pediatrics--the special study of children's treatment. Child-hygiene is still later as an exact science. Child-study, as an exact science, dates back to Froebel and the early nineteenth century, and is still a new field.

The mother in her home, herself with slight special preparation, busy with her children, could scarcely have been expected to keep pace with these developments and to teach them to her daughters, even had she the foresight. The higher institutions of learning, naturally among the most conservative forces of society, have not yet begun to perceive the significance of such a subject as mothercraft in the curriculum, although the beginnings of some phases are being made. The secondary and elementary schools, bound by the fetish of college requirements, are only beginning to show here and there indications of efforts to prepare for living instead of simply for college.

And the young woman--still immature, inexperienced, and therefore not appreciative of life's values and impending responsibilities--has had neither the guidance of school and home, nor the educational opportunity, nor the personal foresight to prepare adequately for this vocation.

What is the consequence? A generation of women, the majority of whom are notoriously ignorant and unskilled in the most vital and significant human responsibilities. In millions of homes women are wasting their time and energy, losing the joy of their motherhood , perplexed, harassed, over-burdened, because they are bungling, stumbling blindly, groping at their vocation. And those they love most dearly are paying the penalty, in less happy homes, less efficient lives. Hundreds of thousands of self-supporting young women every year are going into industrial or commercial work or school teaching, not because they prefer it, but because opportunities for acquiring the requisite skill are at hand, and conditions of work have been standardized. Hundreds of thousands of mothers with young children are seeking in vain for assistants of desirable personality and efficient training. For such workers there has been no adequate opportunity for training and no standardizing of working conditions. In all this, America is far behind both Germany and England.

What of fathercraft? Every child has two parents, equal in responsibility for his heredity and likewise for his rearing. Fathers could hardly be expected ordinarily to be versed in the intricacies of clothing, feeding, and bathing the baby. But why should not every man understand the principles of hygiene and foods as a matter of his general knowledge quite as much as for co?peration with the mother in the children's r?gime? Why should he not with equal zest make a study of growth and development during childhood? Even more, why should he not be intimately acquainted with child psychology and the fundamental principles of child training and education, that he may understand his own children and co?perate sympathetically in their upbringing? Is there any valid reason why he should not be equally acquainted with the sociology of the home, the meaning and principles of eugenics, the psychology of harmony in home life?

There is no profession open to either men or women that offers such opportunities for personal culture, individual expression, technical skill, scientific research, social contribution and welfare, as mothercraft. Perhaps the very comprehensiveness of it and its humanness have presented a problem so complex that it has baffled the educators and delayed its admission to academic dignity.

Through the channels of child welfare, eugenics, and pediatrics, a keener sense of responsibility toward the child unborn is developing. Through the increasing knowledge of heredity, child psychology, and education, a clearer vision is appearing to young men and young women of what they themselves might have been, and of what they may yet create and develop by combining wisdom with their great love. Philanthropists are realizing the futility of simply relieving immediate suffering, crime, inefficiency, for generation after generation. They are looking to the elimination of the causes: ignorance of the rudiments of living, poor heredity, neglect in childhood, unsanitary, ugly, unspiritual living conditions. "There is no wealth but life," we are realizing with Ruskin. Statesmen and legislators are beginning to see that the stability of society and the State demand that the organizing of homes, the founding of families, the spending of family incomes, shall not be intrusted to novices and unskilled workers. As indications of this, we have the recently established Children's Bureau, and the Smith-Lever Bill with its appropriation for education that includes home-making.

In America, clubs, reading courses, and special correspondence for parents have been developed in the last quarter century by the International Congress of Mothers, Parent-Teachers' Association, Home and School League, American Institute of Child Life. This is good and is helping many parents in meeting their perplexities, but as a national means of vocational training, its psychology and pedagogy is shortsighted and inefficient.

What banker would trust his ledgers to a youth just out of school, whose only special preparation for bookkeeping was a current reading course in business methods? What woman would permit a man to experiment on her garden if he was just beginning a correspondence course in agriculture? What business man wants to intrust his correspondence to a stenographer just out of a business course, even after months of such vocational training? All this is recognized as inefficient, wasteful, expensive in business; how much more so is it in the home, where precious human lives are the factors to be dealt with.

Slowly, but certainly, there is coming a new ideal in education. Children and young people are to be prepared for living. They are to know how to develop physical vitality and mental ability and spiritual power. They are to be prepared in spirit and intelligence, in skill and in science, in personality and technique for the responsibilities that most of them will assume, for the greatest responsibility any of them can assume--home-making and family rearing.

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