CHAPTER XIX
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR CHILDREN TO BE BEAUTIFUL
IT is possible to train a child to beauty and this training consists of two means. One is to teach the little one habits of personal daintiness. The other is to impress upon him or her while very young, the principles of health.
A third is to correct any defects by early attention to them on your own part if you are parent, guardian or teacher.
For instance there is the child whose beauty may be marred by outstanding ears. The ears can be pressed back against the head by a compress made at home and worn at night. A bandage easily made in the house consists of a long, folded strip of strong muslin, twisted first around the head beneath the chin, then around the neck, then over the crown of the head, the ends of the strips of muslin being drawn rather tightly over the ears and fastened to one of the lengthwise strips by safety pins.
If you find the child often breathing with difficulty he probably suffers from that growth at the back of the nostrils called adenoids. Take him to a physician and have them removed, so preventing a long train of disasters, mental and physical, whose signs are that strained, drooping countenance we know as an adenoid face. Don’t let any charlatan try to convince you that they can be cured in any other way. The single way to remove adenoids is by a surgical operation.
Look to the fact that the child’s teeth have a good start. A little watchfulness will cause the first set to be drawn in good time for the second to come in straight and strong. Then teach the little one to take pride in their whiteness. Furnish a pure, fresh powder or paste, or let her use a powder for one cleansing and a paste for the next, and so on, alternating. Teach her to brush the teeth up and down, not across, and to brush them inside as well as out, and along the crowns. Help her to form the habit of always rinsing her mouth with warm water, or with warm salt water, if there be an acid tendency of the mouth, after each meal. Teach her that the mouth must always be rinsed with water into which a pinch of borax or of bicarbonate of soda has been dropped, after eating either fruits, which are acid, or candy, which soon resolves itself into acids.
Teach her that it is as necessary to be pure of mouth as of speech. Train her to be proud of clean nails and to be ashamed of gray or black rimmed ones. Teach her early to trim her nails and to keep them spotless, and keep the cuticle pressed back from them. Teach them that soiled hands are a disgrace to a little girl and offensive in a little boy.
Appealing to the pardonable vanity that is in little children, teach all that much of the expression of the face depends upon the arch and smoothness of the eyebrows, and show them how to train them by twice daily brushings.
Teach her to watch the dainty movements of her pet canary and her favorite kitten and emulate their table manners. Birds handle their food delicately, and kittens seldom fill their mouths overfull. The little girl will want to be as fine as her pets, and unconsciously will develop pretty table manners.
Teach him not to be afraid of fresh air. Teach him the contrary by telling him the story of “The Black Hole of Calcutta” and of the beautiful boy who was gilded to head a procession and who died after his brief glory because his pores had been closed by the gaudy stuff with which he was bedecked. Bogie stories are permissible if they frighten children into care of their health by leaving their windows open two or three inches at night and by wearing their clothes loose.
Don’t let the children in your charge study to the point of eyestrain. Teach them to use the ears to save the eyes. Let them learn by listening. It was prophesied by a writer on health that in time the phonograph that now grinds out rag time airs to the lessening of the standard of popular taste will have records which tell the classic short stories of biography, fiction and history. Don’t allow a child to overstudy. Better a well-developed, rosy-cheeked little one who knows no Latin nor higher mathematics than a squinty, anæmic who knows both, but who doesn’t know the way in the woods to the woodchuck’s hole nor how to defend himself in a schoolboy fight.
Teach them to love the life in the open. If you live all year in the crowded city, the roofs, at least, are available to you. And in some part of your home, even though small, you can put up a crude gymnasium. For instance, a horizontal bar, with a mattress drawn under it for precaution, will give the little ones great fun, besides being a developing agent.
Break the children’s unpleasant facial habits in the forming. Show a little girl how ugly and old she looks by flashing a mirror before her eyes while she is frowning. Show her that the frown of concentration is as ugly as the frown of anger and train her to solve a problem with smooth brows. If she twists her mouth unpleasantly when she talks, tell her of it, and if that doesn’t cure her, call the mirror to your aid.