The Training of Children (1872)

AUTHOR: Jackson, James Caleb

KEYWORDS: dress reform, food, health, morality, Temperance

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This volume covers the period from before birth to marriage, focusing on a diverse array of factors related to health: from breast feeding, to clothing, to education, to diet. While Jackson believes that the “mental capacities” of humans have almost exponentially developed “within the last fifty years,” he is convinced that physical health has actually deteriorated (8). According to Jackson, this is particularly true of American children due to the unhealthy lives of their parents, both before and during child-rearing (9). Jackson lists the following causes of the American populace's ill health:

improper food; unhealthy beverages; habitual use of tobacco; free use of condiments; defective clothing, causing disturbed circulation; too close application to business; want of recreation; great social taxation; mental excitement, inducing irritation, fretfulness, discontent, dissatisfaction and unhappiness; great exposure to extremes of temperature; want of sleep; all constituting a round of dissipation which prevents the body from taking on or habitually maintaining anything like normal conditions (10-11).

In order to rectify the situation, in addition to Temperance, dress reform, proper sleep, and more recreation, Jackson recommends the following in terms of diet:

• No stimulants during pregnancy; instead, a diet largely comprised of “grains and fruits” only (22).
• For newborns, “mother's milk” only. Jackson maintains “that the woman who lacks vigor to secrete from her own blood good healthy milk in sufficient quantity to supply sustenance for a new born child, has no right to have one” (33).
• In order “to have plenty of milk,” mothers should predominantly rely on “bread, pudding and porridge made of wheat, ground into what I call unbolted meal, or Graham flour; the fluid of which preparations should be good, pure soft water. Of drinks, nothing is so good as water” (37).
• Importantly, “there should be no difference made between the male and the female child in the direction of development. Girls need physical handling and management after the same plan and to the same extent as boys. Mothers should make no difference in opportunities, advantages and disciplinary movements, nor in dietetic arrangements for them” (45). Jackson actually says that the gendered standards of education, particularly with respect to the very reduced sphere of girls and women, is “a great crime which society has committed against woman” (78).
• “During the teething period, and up to five years of age, or thereabouts, children should not be allowed to eat spices at all, nor sugar, nor common salt” (47).
• “[F]or children between five and fifteen years of age, the best foods for bone-making processes are the grains and cow's milk. Of vegetables, there may be included peas, beans, beets, onions, pumpkins and squashes. Of fruits, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, apples, peaches, and pears – of all of these none is better than the pear. Flesh meats are contra-indicated for use by children during the bonemaking period. Of the grains, white winter wheat ground up into Graham flour is of great service, particularly so when eaten with good cow's milk” (50).
• For young people between fifteen and twenty-five, the recommended diet is similar: “good unleavened wheat bread, oatmeal cakes, rye gems, with good sweet cream or good fresh cow's milk, eaten in free quantities, with peas and beans, and flesh meats, if he desires them, only occasionally, with the different kinds of fruits” (89).
• “Simple food” along veg*an lines as described above is Jackson's general recommendation (59).

Jackson is convinced that incorrect diet and intemperance are the causes of all crime:

I have as yet been unable to find in either sex, a boy or girl, man or woman, who has given way to crime, who was not either a glutton or a drunkard. Always I have found this to be the case. So confident have I been that my position is warranted by existing facts, that I have repeatedly challenged audiences of men and women, or individual men and women, to find me a person who had so far swerved from what is accepted amongst us as right rules of morality whereby to govern one's conduct in life, as to be open to the charge of criminality, who drank no intoxicating liquors, used neither tea nor coffee, ate no flesh meats, and took no poisonous drugs nor medicines. Up to this time I have never been brought face to face with such a person, nor with unquestionable testimony that such a person did exist (100).

Thus, diet and drinking habits have as much moral influence as they have effects on physical health. Indeed, they have moral influence insofar as they have physical effects: “Hence so to live as to have body and soul and spirit wholly sanctified; to have one's body the temple of the Holy Spirit; to have one's bodily members no longer the servants of sin but of righteousness; to have the whole man converted and not simply the spiritual part of him is so desirable as to be worth great effort to bring it about” (101).