THE CHILD THAT DOES NOT STUMBLE I THE CHILD MUST NOT STUMBLE PHYSICALLY "Ample childhood makes rich youth, and rich youth glorious manhood, and these, taken together, form the perfect life. . . . The process of childhood must concern itself physically, with birth, nutrition, and growth." C. HANFORD HENDERSON. THE stern caution of the Master against causing "one of these little ones, that believe on me, to stumble" (Matt. 18:6) suggests the modern scientific view-point regarding the child. "To stumble" implies the interruption of progress. We think of the child now as a traveler from far realms of being. He is a little stranger-a pilgrim-having come a long journey, and still to pursue a further one. To cause him to stumble is to make him fall down upon his journey, to impede his movements, to obstruct his path. During his prenatal journey the child traverses with amazing swiftness long periods of development hinted at in the words of Boyesen: "I am the child of earth and air and sea, My lullaby, by hoarse Silurian storms was chanted, And through endless changing forms of tree and bird and beast The toiling ages wrought to fashion me." To be born into the world a human baby, is to have completed a most dramatic stage of the biological career. The little child has been thought of as an adult in miniature. The better informed see that to have longer arms, longer legs, and larger head are not the most important changes that must befall him as a growing creature. They see that the transitions of growth correspond to vast periods in the history of organic development. He has indeed a long journey to go on the road to becoming a finished human product. Bergsen's definition of time as marking qualitative rather than quantitative changes will help us to conceive of the length of that journey. To say that a child must undergo changes in every cell and fibre, on the way to becoming an adult, to say that he must change in the composition of his blood and gland secretions, in the structure of his heart, and most profoundly in the structure of his brain, is to more correctly describe what growth means, than merely to say that he must get bigger. That health departments and other official sources are concerned with pre-natal and postnatal culture, and that we are able to say that infant mortality is decreasing, means that we are learning how not to cause the child to stumble. We conserve the national resources-soil, forests, mines and water supply, but what can compare with the conservation of child life! It is said that preventable sickness more than equals our national cost of crime. Added to this the statement that nearly all criminals are physically or mentally defective, there is an economic as well as a moral significance in refraining from "causing the child to stumble." The great Metropolitan Life Insurance Company quotes upon some of its child welfare leaflets, "The ways you may help him are so few, the ways you may hinder him are so many.' We are reminded again of the words "causeth to stumble." After all, our part-that of the parent, the nurse, the teacher, is largely negative. We cannot by taking thought add one cubit to his stature. He must affect his own growth. We cannot confer upon him. But we can secure for him the con it |