Child hygiene / by S. Josephine Baker.

  • Sara Josephine Baker
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Child hygiene / by S. Josephine Baker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    43/556 page 25
    support for his children. He is required to make adequate provision for their physical surroundings. It is his duty to see that they get food, clothing, shelter, and medical attendance. The mother is not given this same responsibil¬ ity, as a rule. Her relation to her children has a more intimate and personal and less material side. She is expected to bring them up and care for them, and has been told through countless generations that this is her business. All books and other writings on child care have been directed at her. If one depended upon the literature on child hygiene as a basis for drawing conclusions, it would be easy to believe that the child had only one parent, and that parent was his mother. It is possibly because we think she has more leisure to devote to these more social questions and to the matters that more intimately concern health and wel¬ fare that we place it as her business to see that her chil¬ dren are properly brought up. It might be well if all instruc¬ tions on child care were issued to fathers and mothers instead of to mothers alone. There can be no division of the responsibilities of parenthood. Both mothers and fathers must make use of all measures for the care of their chil¬ dren. Both fathers and mothers must see that the child receives proper protection and has health care in the home, and both fathers and mothers are responsible in an equal degree for the future health and welfare of their children. Therefore, both fathers and mothers need to be intelligent and informed about the type of care that is required. The responsibilities of parenthood are greater in the human relationship than in any other species. We may revert for a moment to the common habit of considering the mother responsible for the destiny and care of her young. Human mothers have replaced instinct by so-called ‘‘intelli¬ gence, ” and therefore they are the only mothers of any species of animal life that do not know instinctively how to care for their offspring. They have to be taught, and each generation and each individual mother has to be taught over again. She does not inherit this knowledge; she does
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3