FIRST "BAD HABIT'-^SUCKING ITS THUMB 





■"w 



David Fairchild 



HOW is it to be explained that 

 these babies, when still too 

 young to imitate what is going 

 on around them and without 

 being taught, acquire what many 

 doctors and dentists declare to be a 

 very bad habit ? Baby mud-wasps which 

 hatch after their mothers and fathers are 

 dead know how to build their compli- 

 cated mud nests without being taught. 

 Are we sure that this human habit of 

 thumb-sucking, which has appeared 

 successively generation after generation 

 in very young babies, is not of a similar 

 instinctive or hereditary character? 



If it is hereditary, is it beyond ques- 

 tion injurious, and does it certainly 

 produce protruding teeth and flattened 

 thumbs, and does it arch the roof of the 

 mouth, or are these changes merely coin- 

 cidental with the habit? Are we con- 

 fident that by employing forcible means 

 to cure the habit we do not run the 

 risk of affecting the child's emotional 

 or moral nature — of making it secre- 

 tive or even untruthful? Should not 

 the habit be cured by the ridicule of a 

 child's peers on the playground — by 

 its own self-control? 



If this habit is hereditary, are not 

 others of the same nature, and should 

 we not, in our discipline of children, 

 differentiate between the habits of imi- 

 tation and those which are inherited? 



According to Dr. Alexander Graham 

 Bell: 



The mere act of suction could produce no 

 such effect as the protrusion of the teeth. 

 On the contrary, with a partial vacuum in 

 the mouth the atmospheric pressure from 

 outside would tend to push the teeth in, not 

 out. Theory would indicate that the act of 

 suction should actually be beneficial to the 

 plastic growing mouth by bringing atmospheric 

 pressure into play from outside, tending to 

 consolidate the mouth and oppose any tend- 

 ency to the spreading of the parts. 



Any spreading action could only be due to 

 pressure applied from within. A child for 

 example might press his tongue against the 

 roof of the mouth or against the back of the 

 front teeth and thus produce a pressure which 

 if constantly applied would gradually result 

 in a spreading action, but there is no evidence 

 that a child ever does this. 



ricT. 11. 



370 



