Wood County Reporter

Fatal Indulgence.

As in this article we wish to attack a real and wide-spreading evil, we may as well begin by saying that in our belief many parents kill their little children through a mistaken kindness in gratifying their appetites at the table not only, but between meals. Herod's evil fame for the murder of the innocents gathers blackness with the centuries, but there are multitudes of perfectly amiable and lovely people who reach Herod's result without a particle of his intention. Fathers and mothers to please their darlings often give them food which the digestive organs of a child cannot assimilate, and which produce disturbances of brain and stomach that in some cases terminate in fatal congestions, while in others they sow the seeds for long years of dyspepsia and wretchedness. We not long ago heard a clergyman who has for an extended period of time been the pastor of a city church, declare that nothing astonished him more than the ignorance of otherwise well educated people concerning the commonest laws of health. Neglect of proper ventilation, carelessness in adapting dress to the changes of the weather, and overfeeding and cramming children with dainties, he said, were shadowing many homes with the gloom of bereavement, which was then mournfully charged to the account of a mysterious Providence.

The fact is, we often wickedly charge upon Providence what we ought remorsefully to ascribe to ourselves. The universe from the greatest to the least of its parts, is not under the control of accident, but under the reign of wise and beneficent law. We put ourselves in the way of an ordinance of nature, and complain that its wheels as they roll crush us beneath their weight. We have no business to sin in this way through want of information, especially in these days. Treatises on dietetics are multiplied, journals of health abound, great thinkers bring their minds to bear on the problems of sanitary science, and still the average well-to-do American citizen goes on feeding his precocious little ones on an indiscriminate jumble of pickles, preserves, candy, plum-cake, mince-pie and kindred articles of diet. Europeans seldom fail in their notes on our American life, to remark with wonder upon the things which children are permitted to eat, not to say surfeit themselves with, at the tables of boats and hotels. The simple porridge or bread and milk or the bread and butter and jam, which give Scotch and English children their well-knit frames and ruddy cheeks, would be disdained by many of our little republican princes. Far better off are the children of the poor than those of the rich in this regard, for the plain food to which they are confined aids in a sturdy development of the physical powers, and fits them to bear the wear and tear of life's rough vicissitudes.

Parental love can show itself in no tenderer or wiser way than by denying and withholding from the little ones tempting food which is sure to undermine their health, and which may destroy their life. Dishes which may not harm adults may be very hurtful to children, yet there is a wide range of food which both may eat without danger. The trifling self-denial which prefers to do without pastry and condiments rather than to place them in the children's way, ought not to be beyond any reasonable parent's power. So plain and simple are the laws of healthful living, and so hard is the way of the transgressor that a word to the thoughtful ought not to be spoken in vain.—Hearth and Home.