157. _When a child is four or five years old, have you any objection to his drinking tea?_ Some parents are in the habit of giving their children strong (and frequently green) tea. This practice is most hurtful. It acts injuriously upon their delicate, nervous system, and thus weakens their whole frame. If milk does not agree, a cup of very weak tea, that is to say, water with a dash of _black_ tea in it, with a tablespoonful of cream, may be substituted for milk; but a mother must never give tea where milk agrees. 158. _Have you any objection to a child occasionally having either cakes or sweetmeats?_ I consider them as so much slow poison. Such things both cloy and weaken the stomach, and thereby take away the appetite, and thus debilitate the frame. Moreover, “sweetmeats are colored with poisonous pigments.” A mother, surely, is not aware that when she is giving her child sugar confectionery she is, in many cases, administering a deadly poison to him? “We beg to direct the attention of our readers to the Report of the Analytical Sanitary Commission, contained in the _Lancet_, on the pigments employed in coloring articles of sugar confectionery. From this report it appears that metallic pigments, of a highly dangerous and even poisonous character, containing chromic acid, lead, copper, mercury, and arsenic, are commonly used in the coloring of such articles.” If a child be never allowed to eat cakes and sweetmeats, he will consider a piece of dry bread a luxury, and will eat it with the greatest relish. 159. _Is baker’s or is home-made bread the most wholesome for a child?_ Baker’s bread is certainly the lightest; and, if we could depend upon its being unadulterated, would, from its lightness, be the most wholesome; but as we cannot always depend upon baker’s bread, home-made bread, as a rule, should be preferred. If it be at all heavy, a child must not be allowed to partake of it; a baker’s loaf ought then to be sent for, and continued to be eaten until light home-made bread can be procured. Heavy bread is most indigestible. He must not be allowed to eat bread until it be two or three days old. If it be a week old, in cold weather, it will be the more wholesome. 160. _Do you approve either of caraway seeds or of currants in bread or in cakes—the former to disperse wind, the latter to open the bowels?_ There is nothing better than plain bread: the caraway seeds generally pass through the bowels undigested, and thus might irritate, and might produce, instead of disperse wind. Although caraway seeds _whole_ are unwholesome, yet caraway-tea, made as recommended in question 97, is an excellent remedy to disperse wind. Some mothers put currants in cakes, with a view of opening the bowels of their children; but they only open them by disordering them. 161. _My child has an antipathy to certain articles of diet: what would you advise to be done?_