Infants are very susceptible to cold, an appropriate clothing of the body is essential to ensure the baby’s health. Unfortunately, an opinion is prevalent in society, that the tender child has naturally a great ability to generate heat and resistance to cold and this most popular error has arisen fatal consequences.
The power of generating heat in warm-blooded animals is at its minimum at birth, and increases successively to adult age, young animals. Instead of being warmer than adults, babies are usually a degree or two colder, and part of their bodies heat more easily, and this is a fact that can not be too well known. They show how absurd must be the folly of this system of “hardening” of the infant’s body constitution, which encourages parents to plunge the tender and delicate child into the cold bath at all seasons of the years, and freely expose it to cold currents of a cutting wind, to the east, with the lightest clothing.
The principles that should guide a parent in clothing her infant are as follows:
- The amount of clothing and equipment must be such as to preserve a sufficient proportion of body heat, thus governed by the season of the year, and the delicacy or strength of the child to the constitution. To do this, the parent must also guard against the practice of wrapping the child in innumerable folds of warm clothing and keeping the infant in a very closed and warm room. Remember, nothing tends to decrease significantly the infant’s constitution that can induce the disease, and make the skin very sensitive to the impression of cold.
- They must be arranged so as not to restrict the free movement of all parts of the body of the child, and so loose and easy to allow perspiration insensible to have an output, instead to be contained and absorbed by clothing and kept in contact with skin, until it gives rise to irritation.
- It must not irritate the delicate skin of children. In childhood, therefore, the flannel is a bit too rough, but it is desirable as the child grows, because it gives a slight stimulation of the skin, and maintains health.
- In its construction the dress should be as simple to quickly put on, since dressing is painful for the infant, causing it to cry, and , it can feel mentally irritating . Pins should be completely excluded, their use being hazardous through the negligence of nurses, and even through the ordinary movements of the child itself.
- Clothing must be changed every day. It is eminently conducive to the health that complete change of dress should be made every day. If this is not done, washing, in large measure, fail in its object, in particular by ensuring freedom from skin diseases.
Courtesy of Space Planning