loio The Cornell Reading-Courses 



The feeding of the baby during the first nine months or year of its life 

 is so important to its future that under normal conditions nature is not 

 willing to let us experiment with it, but cares for it herself by providing 

 mother's milk. This first year is the time when the baby's digestive 

 powers are being made ready for use. Toward the end of the year the 

 healthy, human digestive apparatus is ready to begin its more exacting 

 education. It now needs training by carefully chosen exercises. It would 

 be absurd and unwise for us to try to hamper the year-old baby in his 

 attempts to crawl or walk or otherwise use his strengthening muscles. 

 It is equally foolish to limit the diet of the normal year-old child to milk 

 only. He is instinctively ready to begin the active use of his muscles, 

 whether of locomotion or digestion. On the other hand, these are func- 

 tions which are by no means fully developed. Are we going to demand 

 greater feats of the muscles of digestion than of the arm and leg muscles? 

 The underlying principal of child feeding should be to develop the child's 

 powers of digestion, and neither to retard nor to overtax them. If child 

 labor is to be discouraged it must be discouraged in the less apparent 

 but equally real way of making a child's immattire digestive apparatus 

 do grown-up service. 



The two mistakes most often made in feeding children are: 



(i) Giving foods unsuited to the stage and age of development. 



(2) Permitting children to eat between meals and at irregular hours. 



The baby just weaned is not immediately ready for a very varied diet 

 of solid foods, although it has established its ability to digest starch and 

 has increased its ability to digest the other food-stuffs. These powers 

 should be tested a little at a time and the burdens imposed on them should 

 be gradually increased. The first starchy food given to a baby is cereal 

 gruel mixed with its milk, later cereal jelly and unstrained cereal, and 

 then bread crumbs and bits of crust or zwieback or tough educator crackers 

 to develop its powers of mastication. Strained fruit-juices are given first, 

 then fniit pulp and cooked mashed fruit, and finally the fruit itself. Meat 

 broth and meat juice precede the use of scraped meat, and this precedes 

 meat which is finely cut. Vegetables are mashed, bread is crisped, cereals 

 strained, meat scraped or cut fine, until the child has some grinding teeth 

 and is old enough to obey the command to " chew." The child should 

 be trained to digest fat by giving it, first, rich milk, then thin cream, 

 then butter, and lastly other solid fats. 



This idea of gradually increasing the strength of the food to be digested 

 as the child grows and develops should be carried out all through child- 

 hood. If more thought were given to this there would be little need in 

 later life to discuss the digestibility and indigestibility of various foods. 

 A sound, well-educated stomach would be able to stand the wear and tear 



