How I Kept My Baby Well
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM. 53
- Author:
By Anna G. Noyes. (Educational Psychology
Monographs, No. 9.) Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1913. Pp. 193. Illustrated.
Mrs. Noyes, who holds the degree of bachelor of science, dedicates her book to Professor John Dewey, “whose plea for the extension of the methods of science to the commonplace things of life gave me courage to believe that a mother’s own baby might be a fit subject for scientific investigation by even a baby’s own mother.” She confesses that to begin with, in spite of her college training, she was “a novice at baby culture,” but adds in extenuation of her shortcomings, that if she were “going in for chickens, or pigs, there would be schools, universities, and government pamphlets galore at her service, but when she would raise only a human baby, universities and government bureaus are silent.” Her next remark, by the way, throws a light upon the sort of preparation for life as a citizen and member of the race, which colleges today are offering, ?”I can not recall any particular instruction given me during my academic life that so much as intimated that the problem of baby raising existed in the world. But I had learned, although late in my college career, that there was such a thing as inductive thinking,” Mrs. Noyes is fortunately able to say, “and armed with the latter power, I was prepared to attack the former problem.” What she tried to do, and did with notable success, was simply, “to keep the baby well, so that he could not get sick… . This I should call the common sense way of caring for a baby, and it is the way, of course, in which many mothers have already brought up their babies. But I can not find that any one of them has stated the problem consciously, or at least stated it for publication, or has any data to offer in the shape of records, as to how the plan worked even in one case. And this is all I claim to have done. I have a complete record of one baby who was kept well for two years by not being allowed to get sick.”
The record is indeed complete in the utmost fullness of scientific detail. More than forty charts are presented showing the daily record as to time of nursing, intervals between nursings, sleep, regurgitation, vomiting, feces, condition of skin, behavior, crying, and amount of water swallowed. Later on when other foods were given in addition to the nursing, and later still when the baby was fully weaned, the charts record just what he ate and how he throve on it. The author’s comments and summaries of the data are thoroughly interesting and illuminating.
The book is illustrated with about sixty photographs of the baby at different stages of growth. It is a pity that they are so poorly reproduced in printing that much of their charm is lost in a greyish fog. Some of the pictures show the boy with his mother, and one even with his father, although usually it was the father who managed the camera; but in most of them the youngster appears alone, climbing, walking, playing, laughing, eating?doing nearly everything that a jolly, active baby can do when in perfect health.
Mrs. Noyes makes a suggestion which if carried out will work wonders for the children of the immediate future. “The next thing to do,” she urges, “is to follow this record with the records of, say, fifty babies.” What it would mean to thousands of intelligent but uninstructed mothers to have such records available for their guidance, can hardly be imagined. For babies differ normally within very wide limits as this mother and many others have discovered after days and months of needless anxiety. Just what variations may be normal, and what are abnormal or undesirable, still await the research of the psychologist of babyhood, and he in his turn is waiting for records, like this one by Mrs. Noyes, which can be compiled only by the mother who has the skill to observe, the patience to record, and the courage to leave false sentiment and irrelevant moralizing out of what she has to tell us.
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