Exercise Strengthens the Child

There long prevailed a barren old idea: that the child is soft-boned, and must therefore be handled only with the utmost gentleness and caution, for fear his bones should come to harm. But the tests and discoveries that have followed one upon another in the last quarter century have thrown light on this subject and proved the opposite. Interest in physical exercises for children grows from day to day, and the number of those preaching their benefits and affirming their great importance is multiplying.

The first efforts made on this subject were in Germany, shortly before the last war, and the English and the Americans took up this idea with earnestness and interest, once its general benefit to the child's health, even in his first months, had been established; and to that end dispensaries were opened which welcome all mothers who wish to profit and to watch the course of the exercises, as appears in the picture, figure (3).

Those with experience and special knowledge have affirmed that these exercises bring the child abundant benefit: they ward off from him the danger of falling victim to nervous diseases, and help him to recover from them and from any crookedness in the skeleton, such as that caused by “rickets” in the legs or the spinal column, or from the head down to the feet. They cure, to a great extent, the intestinal ailments arising from living in damp houses. And all these exercises help in the cure of nervous diseases of every kind, by stimulating the child's reflex actions, whereby he overcomes his nervous weakness. Their cheering results, moreover, strengthen the child's confidence in himself, and this moral strength has its share in strengthening the child bodily and in his overcoming of his various ailments.

The exercise in figure (6) begins by laying the head on a smooth table, and the child practices until he can accomplish this exercise by himself. It goes without saying that this child feels great pride at being able to straighten his body thus... And there is no fear whatever for the child in placing him as in figure (7), as most of our mothers might imagine, for in it lies a great help toward overcoming nervous diseases.