Better Babies and Their Care

CHAPTER I. Preparation for Motherhood

PREPARATION FOR MOTHERHOOD

MOTHERHOOD A PROFESSION WHICH REQUIRES TRAINING—PRENATAL INFLUENCE AND HYGIENE—MATERNITY CLOTHES

Maternity is woman’s exclusive profession, the only one of which progress and science cannot rob her. It is also her highest profession, for, compared to motherhood, art and science dwindle into insignificance.

Successful motherhood, like genius in any art or profession, is founded on efficiency and joy in the chosen work, and the greater of these is joy. She who is merely efficient can reduce the mountains which rise in the pathway of the mother; joy in motherhood can remove them. For joy casts out doubt, fear, and all sense of burden. The woman who finds joy in maternity is absolute mistress of the domestic and social situation. Through it she commands the love and reverence of the husband to whose eyes she has opened the wonders and the mysteries of parenthood. For her the doors of the divorce court never yawn. For her motherhood entails no sacrifice. She has no regrets for a career cut short by marriage, because she finds in maternity the same supreme satisfaction of accomplishment which comes to the successful lawyer, financier, writer or artist.

Motherhood, like any other profession, requires preparation. For many generations the world has held that the maternal instinct and the ability to rear children were born in woman. It has been discovered that the maternal instinct, like many others, needs encouragement, while the ability to bring up children requires development or practical training. The phrase, “a born mother,” has rather fallen into disrepute. We are beginning to realize that one “born mother” in a thousand is not enough to leaven the maternal mass. And out of this discovery has risen a demand, which comes largely from women themselves, for education in motherhood, practical, sincere preparation for woman’s exclusive profession.

Perhaps the day will come when each college for women will have its endowed chair of motherhood, when the care and feeding of infants will be taught in our normal and high schools for girls. At present, certain colleges offer a course in psychology which prepares young women to guide, mentally and spiritually, the children they will some day bear. In a few city schools, particularly in the congested districts, girls are now taught how to bathe, dress and feed infants, largely for the purpose of having the message of sanitation and hygiene carried home to the tenement house mother.

Until these two forms of training for motherhood are combined, the American girl must enter the profession of maternity without the sort of practical preparation which will insure efficiency and joy in her chosen work. What knowledge she now possesses is a smattering of what her mother has learned by experience, what the family physician imparts at odd moments, what she reads in books or magazine articles, and what she hears at lectures where a few valiant souls proclaim motherhood as a profession which requires the most thorough of training.

Preparation for motherhood must rise above the practical instruction in the care and feeding of infants which leads to efficiency. It requires a certain mental and spiritual adjustment of the woman to the environment and conditions of maternity. She who is obsessed by the fear of physical suffering which motherhood may entail, who regards the coming of a child as the end of her individual career, her social life, her personal pleasures, will be neither efficient nor joyous. Fear and doubt come between her and success. They even threaten her health.

Therefore, the first step in preparation for motherhood is the firm belief that it is a privilege, not a duty; a joy, not a sacrifice; an investment that will pay big dividends. Thus armored, the prospective mother enters upon the nine months of pregnancy insured against anxiety and ill-health. The joy she finds in carrying her child provides a splendid foundation for the child’s health. The woman who frets brings forth a nervous child. The woman who rebels generally bears a morbid child.

Science wrangles over the rival importance of heredity and environment, but we women know what effects prenatal influence works in children. And, knowing this, what a mystery that we do not mold each thought and act in the interest of the children whose up-bringing will be our real life-work! How strange that mothers do not realize that the burden of maternal and domestic duties can be lightened by prenatal care and character molding.

Science has done much for the modern mother. It has lessened the danger and the pains of childbirth. The once dreaded child-bed fever is now practically unknown. Disinfectants and sanitary care have reduced this danger to a minimum. Anæsthetics have reduced the strain and pain of labor. Physicians no longer withhold the anæsthetic until the hour when instruments or an operation make its use necessary; through the later stages of ordinary labor, the modern physician offers the alleviation of chloroform, and the mother comes through the ordeal with one-fourth the pain endured by her mother and grandmother.

Modern ingenuity also designs many comforts for the prospective mother, not the least of which is maternity raiment, including corsets and adjustable gowns. Why do not women avail themselves of all these aids? Largely because they are not educated for motherhood.

Medical science, through sanitation and hygiene, has lightened the mother’s burden in rearing her baby. It has proved beyond doubt that the child raised under sanitary and hygienic conditions, fed, bathed and clothed properly and trained to regular habits, can escape most of the ailments which were once counted as almost normal manifestations of the child’s growth.

Many of us can recall the day when a colicky baby was considered a dispensation of Providence, not a proof of maternal ignorance or carelessness; when convulsions during teething were regarded as “natural”; when “summer complaint” was accepted as a normal feature of baby’s second summer; when children were actually exposed to whooping-cough, measles and chicken-pox, so they would have these juvenile ailments and be done with them!

To-day, unless a baby is born with some inherited weakness or chronic disease, science teaches how to protect the child from ordinary ailments—colic, convulsions, summer complaint, and contagious diseases. This is the day of preventive medicine, particularly in the care of infants. Prevention lightens the burden of motherhood. When young women are trained to ward off illness in children, not to nurse them through illness, motherhood will mean what it should mean to women—Joy.

Start your maternal career right by preparing your body and your mind for motherhood. Start your baby right in life by studying sanitation, hygiene, the care and feeding of infants. Know your business as a mother, and motherhood will have no terrors for you.

Remember that your own physical condition and the health of the baby you will bring into the world depend largely upon your mental attitude. Cast out all fear of childbirth and all dread of maternal duties and sacrifices. Fretting, grieving, or rebellion will not purchase immunity from maternal duties. Rather it will increase them. The child will be born and laid in your arms to be fed, cared for, and reared, whether you weep or smile through the months of pregnancy. Self-control, cheerfulness and love for the little life breathing in unison with your own will practically insure you a child of normal physique and nerves.

Physicians and scientists may regard stories of prenatal influence which float through open nursery doors as “old women’s tales”; but we women who have borne children know the price babies pay for maternal self-indulgence, mental abnormalities, bitterness, hysteria.

I recall one woman of my acquaintance whose self-consciousness amounted to an affliction. She was super-sensitive, self-effacing, apologetic, always afraid that she was not wanted. One day when speaking of her futile efforts to correct the tendency, she explained that she had been an unwelcome child. Her mother had rebelled throughout the period of pregnancy. She had nursed her child in bitterness of spirit. Later in life she learned to cling to her daughter for companionship as well as material care, but the girl never outgrew those unfortunate prenatal influences.

Another girl, sixth in the family, was carried and nursed by her mother through times of financial stress, when one more mouth to fill was a hardship. As soon as the child could toddle, she developed a passion for running away. She grew up absolutely devoid of family instinct, filial affection and womanly sense of responsibility. While very young, she eloped with her first suitor, rather than remain under the parental roof. She was never dishonest or immoral, but she was born hating her home and indifferent to her parents.

Still sadder is the case of a mother who gave way to hysteria and hideous paroxysms of anger throughout the period of pregnancy. Though physically sound herself and married to a man without taint, this woman brought into the world a child who never developed mentally beyond her second year. To-day this mother, now a self-supporting widow, never leaves the institute for feeble-minded children, where her daughter is safest and happiest, without the throbbing thought, “Why did no one warn me of what I was doing to my child?”

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