In cold weather, their heads but thinly thatched with hair are bare. So too their limbs; though warmth is life to young, developing creatures. In hot weather, the sun beats mercilessly down upon their hatlessness, their exquisitely-sensitive brains but slightly shielded by their thin un-ossified skulls. Degrees of sunstroke, with lifelong injury to health and faculty, occur. They knit their pale brows in fruitless attempt to defend their weak eyes from the glare. Many keep their lids close shut, to protect both eyes and brain from the nerve-shattering solar rays, which are far too powerful to be allowed to fall, untempered, upon an infant's highly-sensitive body. With closed eyes, the poor things miss all the joys of their ride; the colour and movement about them, and the spurs to intelligence these should supply. Their unobservant mothers and nurses suppose them to be sleeping!
Children old enough to walk are walked to stages--sometimes to extremes of exhaustion. You may see them dragging heavily along, with wan, exhausted faces; peevish and cross, and scolded and shaken and slapped for being peevish and cross. Exhaustion from such over-fatigue will keep a child below par for days; checking its growth and development--to say nothing of its happiness. Children derive but little benefit from their holiday changes to sea or country, because of the exertions forced upon them, or the too strenuous play to which they are exhorted.
Children who go bare-headed suffer, in large number, from eye-strain, with resulting permanent frown. As too, from ear-ache and from ear-diseases; from headache and toothache. In as many as 75 per cent. of school-children, vision is defective.
The obsessing aim of many mothers is to "harden" their children. Yet no more than a clay model in the shaping may be hardened and set, should the process be applied to children in the shaping.
Healthy children are inevitably _delicate_ children, because of that highly-sensitive re-activity to surroundings which not only characterises but _conduces_ to the developmental state. (Such delicacy must not be confused with _sickliness_.) The finer the organisation the longer it takes (within normal limits) to come to full growth. Our greatest men and women were delicate in youth. Hardy children are always of inferior type--for the most part, plain and shrewd and unimaginative, insensitive, unlovable. They have matured (have adapted to environment, that is) precociously. Evolution of higher faculty has been prematurely arrested in them.