Excerpt from The Daily Meals of School Children The subject of the proper feeding of children of school age involves problems which may be said to be the most difficult as well as the most important of all the problems of human nutrition. The child of school age must grow and must also work. In this he differs on the one hand from the infant, whose work is all ahead of him, and on the other hand from the adult, whose period of development is past. The work which is expected of him is, to be sure, not large in amount, but it must be done at certain prescribed times, and it takes the form of the utilization of opportunities and privileges which have been provided for him at great public expense. It is costly to educate a child, and the cost may become waste if educational advantages are offered to those who are dull because of improper feeding, or who are underfed and ill nourished. The child's school work, however, represents only part of his total activity; there are other forms of activity for which provision must be made in his diet. Of these an important one is play, which is being recognized more and more by educators to be a large factor in normal development. There is a direct connection between the muscular activity involved in play and the satisfactory performance by food materials of their function in the building of bones and muscles. To supply abundant energy for play is therefore one of the important purposes of the proper feeding of the child. We may therefore say that there are three distinct points to be kept in mind: First, the necessary supply of energy for bodily growth; second, the necessary supply of energy for play; third, the necessary clearness of the brain for study. Another element in the problem is the absence of any fixed stand ard, either for the amount of food needed by a child of given age, or for the relative proportion of the various so-called food principles in the diet. This makes the problem more difficult than that of the artificial feeding of infants, for which the composition of human milk offers an exact model. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.