children clothing – Marisa Meidle's Baby Showers

KEEPING YOUR BABY HEALTHY DURING INFANCY TO CHILDHOOD

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Cleanliness is essential to your baby’s health. At first the infant should be washed daily with warm water; and a bath every night, to make sure that their body is clean thoroughly, is highly necessary. In order, however, the water in the morning should be made tepid, while baby bathing in the evening should use water warm enough to give a comfort feeling.

If washed with cold water, however, it must be kept in but a minute; for if it exposed to cold water more than a minute it may effect its body temperature, and prevents that healthy glow on the surface which usually follows the momentary and brief action of cold, and upon which its usefulness depends. With some children, indeed, the effects sometime takes longer, therefore, must be carefully watched.

The skin surface should always be carefully and thoroughly rubbed dry with soft towel, indeed, more than dry, for the skin should be warmed and stimulated by the assiduous gentle friction made use of. After a child experience a day full of activities which warm him/her body, should be washed with warm water, or when necessary, sponged with salt water from head to toe.. If the weather be very cold, the water may be made slightly tepid, but if his constitution will bear it, the water can be made cold throughout the year. It is a matter also of great consequence in bathing children that they should not be terrified by the immersion, we have to make bathing an enjoyable moment for children. If a child is of a delicate constitution, the cold bath during the summer is one of the best tonics that can be employed; and if living on the coast, sea-bathing will be a good alternative which offer the same benefit. The opinion that warm baths generally relax and weaken is misleading; for in this case, you cannot put them in general; in fact, the tepid bath is to this child what the cold bath is to the more robust.

In conclusion: if the bath for some reason cannot be provided, then cold saltwater sponging must be used daily, and all the year round, so long as the proper reaction or glow follows its use; but when this is not the case, and this will generally occur, if the child is delicate and the weather cold, tepid vinegar and water, or tepid salt water, must be substituted.

If you like this article, you might also want to read about Trends in Toddler Girls and Baby Girls Clothing, and Common Children Clothing Concerns.

SUITABLE CLOTHING FOR YOUR CHILD

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The clothing of the child should have the same properties as that of infancy clothing. It should be able to keep the body warm, made from non-irritating material and lets the body to move freely.

When we are talking about warmth, please remember, that too little clothing is frequently productive of the most sudden attacks of active disease; and that children who are thus exposed with thin clothing in a climate so variable as ours are the frequent subjects of croup, and other dangerous affections of the air- passages and lungs. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten, that too warm clothing is a source of disease, sometimes even of the same diseases which originate in exposure to cold, and often renders the frame more susceptible of the impressions of cold, especially of cold air taken into the lungs. Change the clothing, then, according to the season; resume the winter dress early; lay it aside late; for it is in spring and autumn that the vicissitudes in our climate are greatest, and congestive and inflammatory complaints most common.

Flannel may be put off with advantage during the night, and cotton maybe substituted during the summer, the flannel being resumed early in the autumn. If from very great delicacy of constitution it proves too irritating to the skin, fine fleecy hosiery will in general be a good replacement, and will greatly conduce to the preservation of health.

For the boys, it is important to make sure that clothing should be made from such material and such construction that it will not restrain the body movement or cause an injury to the waist or chest. All their muscles ought to have full liberty to act, as their free exercise promotes both their growth and activity, and thus insures the regularity and efficiency of the several functions to which these muscles are subservient.

The same remarks apply with equal force to the dress of the girl; and happily, during childhood, at least, no distinction is made in this matter between the sexes.

HOW TO CHOOSE CLOTHES FOR YOUR INFANTS

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It is very important to choose a suitable clothing for your babies. Unfortunately, an opinion is prevalent in society, that the tender child has naturally a great power of generating heat and resisting cold; and from this popular error has raised the most fatal results. The capability of generating heat in warm-blooded animals is at its minimum at birth, and increases successively to adult age; young mammals, instead of being warmer than adults, are generally a degree or two colder, and part with their heat more readily; facts which cannot be too generally known. They show how absurd must be the folly of that system of “hardening” the constitution (to which reference has been before made), which induces the parent to plunge the tender and delicate child into the cold bath at all seasons of the year, and freely expose it to the cold, cutting currents of an easterly wind, with the lightest clothing.

The principles which ought to guide a parent in clothing their infant are as follows:

The material and quantity of the clothes should be such as to preserve a sufficient proportion of warmth to the body, regulated therefore by the season of the year, and the delicacy or strength of the infant’s constitution. In effecting this, however, the parent must guard against the too common practice of enveloping the child in innumerable folds of warm clothing, and keeping it constantly confined to very hot and close rooms; thus running into the opposite extreme to that to which I have just alluded: for nothing tends so much to enfeeble the constitution, to induce disease, and render the skin highly susceptible to the impression of cold; and thus to produce those very ailments which it is the chief intention to guard against.

In their make they should be so arranged as to put no restrictions to the free movements of all parts of the child’s body; and so loose and easy as to permit the insensible perspiration to have a free exit, instead of being confined to and absorbed by the clothes, and held in contact with the skin, till it gives rise to irritation.

In infancy, therefore, flannel is rather too rough, but is desirable as the child grows older, as it gives a gentle stimulus to the skin, and keeps the body warm.

The design of the clothes should be so simple as to admit of being quickly put on, since dressing is not always a pleasant experience to the infant, causing it to cry, and sometimes can cause a feeling of trauma. The children’s clothing must be changed daily.