Child Health: Tempering

Hardening is a system of procedures, under the influence of which the body's resistance to adverse environmental influences increases. The physiological basis of hardening is that the person constantly and systematically develops conditioned reflexes that provide better thermoregulation - maintaining a constant body temperature.

The organism, unprepared for abrupt changes of temperature, responds to them with a reaction of the type of an unconditioned reflex. For example, in response to cooling, the superficial vessels of the body expand, so that due to a larger inflow of blood to the skin, it can be warmed. But this dramatically increases the heat transfer, which further cools the body. The tempered organism, in response to the cooling signal obtained from thermoreceptors, immediately increases the formation of heat. Vessels of the skin, however, expand only for a short time, increasing the flow of warm blood to the surface layers of the body, and then this heat is delayed due to a sharp decrease in heat transfer - the vessels are sharply reduced.

Hardening not only trains the heat-adaptive systems of the body, it also activates the immune system. Due to these two factors, quenching avoids many diseases.

What is needed for this? First of all, create an influx of fresh air into the room where the baby lives. To do this, it is often necessary to open the window in winter and to ventilate the room. In the summer, it is better to keep the windows open so that not only fresh air penetrates into the room, but also the sun's rays, under the influence of which the anti-rheumatic vitamin D is produced in the child's body. In addition, the sun's rays kill pathogenic microorganisms. No less important is the moderate air temperature - it should not be above 22 ° C for full-term babies. Walking, air baths, which the baby takes when changing diapers, changing clothes, preparing for bathing, washing and hygienic baths with final pouring with cool water are all those first in the life of the child, hardening procedures that are simply necessary for newborns.

But is such hardening enough to really increase the resistance of the child's organism to adverse effects, others ask. Is the newborn so vulnerable to them? After all, the possibilities of its adaptive mechanisms are unusually high. Otherwise it can not be. Without this, he would have died right after birth, like a fish thrown out of the water: the baby spent nine months of pre-natal life under completely different conditions.

The rate of adaptation reactions in newborns is also extremely high. Reorganization of the functioning of their body begins almost instantaneously - from the first cry, the first breath. That is why in earlier times a child without harm to health could be born in a reindeer team at 30-40 ° C below zero, at 50 ° C heat in a Finnish or Russian bath, he carried bathing in an icy font and wiping with snow.

These traditions are based on people's experience, according to which a short-term, but strong enough effect on the newborn low temperatures has a beneficial effect on it - it gives rise to the protective forces of the body, after which the child develops well. Here is what the well-known doctor VN Zhuk wrote in the past: "Both a weak and strong child, baptized in winter in the water directly from the well (plus 8 degrees of Reaumur, plus 10 degrees Celsius) develops very quickly and almost immediately receives a special, pleasant, vigorous, strong appearance ... A quick immersion in cold water exactly strengthens all the exchange processes.The skin turns red and pleasant to look at: the child looks fuller, ruddy, rounded, sucks harder and greedily, soon falls asleep, does not cry after baptism, lies calm and looks.Within 4-6 weeks a weak child is unrecognizable " . Often parents asked to baptize a child in warm water. The results of the baptism were completely different: "The children were compared after six weeks, when they were brought for prayer, literally all the priests declared the advantage of cold water over the heat, only the dive should be complete and very fast." "Of the 22 children baptized in warm water, nine died (40.6%). Of the 42 children baptized in cold water, one died (2.4%). In one case, there was twins: a stronger child baptized in warm water water, died, and the weaker, baptized in the cold, remained healthy. " It is established that high rates of adaptation remain in the child during the entire period of newborn, because at this time the baby adapts to the new conditions of life. And then, if adaptation mechanisms do not train, their capabilities quickly decline as useless, as the baby is in comfortable conditions. Parents protect it from the adverse effects of the environment with warm clothing, which helps for the time being, because weakening, reduction of the adaptive systems of the body to a low level of activity makes the child defenseless even before a slight draft and cooling.

Authors of a number of childcare allowances emphasize that it is advisable to develop certain systems of his or her organism only as they mature - the readiness to function (it turns out, at the time when the child's adaptation systems work most effectively, it is practically not hardened) and recommend to proceed with cautious hardening even after the speed of its adaptive processes has begun to decline, when the body's capabilities have already been largely lost and need to be restored.

We will mention two more drawbacks of this system of "cautious" tempering of children. First, the temperature drops at such hardening are much less than those with which the child meets in everyday life, and even if only for this reason they can not give a quenching effect. Even when the baby is changed diapers, the temperature difference is 10-12 ° C, whereas in the manuals it is recommended to lower the water temperature by quenching by 0.5-1 ° C in three to six days. Secondly, the hardening effect on this system is short-term and incomparable with the duration of the effect on the body of comfortable conditions.

In the opinion of Yu. N. Chausov, the author of a number of books on hardening, for a good effect, it is not enough to systematically and gradually carry out hardening procedures - such effects should be sufficiently intense and prolonged. Supporters of another point of view on hardening believe that in order to increase the resistance of the child's organism, it is necessary to use those unique opportunities that nature gave him during the newborn period, and to take as a basis not hardening procedures, but a way of life of the child that would ensure the constant work of the adaptation systems of his organism.

How does it look in practice? Here is what Nikitin writes: "A child is naked or in one turtleneck all the time until he sleeps or when his mother feeds." He freely moves his arms and legs, and we are not afraid if his heels turn blue. " Ilya Arkadevsky says that this is the first thermo-adaptive reaction of the baby to the cold. Rejoice, parents, that it works for him, - cold legs give less heat, the heat balance of the body is restored.

In the first two or three days the baby can sometimes hiccup, but this is also a process of getting used to the new thermal regime. The hiccup passes by itself and stops when the baby is wrapped to sleep in a room in one or two diapers.

To fall asleep to him better with warm legs. For this, Mom needs to take stops in their hands or even breathe on them.

In the room, try to keep the temperature 17-19 ° C. If the baby is naked in it, then:

• muscle tonus is elevated, ie, they are strained to produce more heat (apparently, this is the main way of warming), and the muscles develop at the same time;
• the coolness always invigorates and makes the movements particularly pleasant;
• diapers and clothes do not constrain movement;
• thermoregulators of the body are included in the work and transfer the entire body's defense system to another regime.

It is important only to remember: if the baby has stopped moving, relaxed, then it must be dressed and wrapped in a diaper - warm.

Thus, the duration of the hardening procedure in this case is determined by the child himself, or rather his parents - by changing the state of the baby. Initially, a physiologically immature toddler, this procedure can take only 5-10, and in a mature - sometimes 60 seconds at once. As the child gets used to it, the duration of the air bath increases, and soon the baby spends the entire waking period either naked or in one undershirt. Such children are practically not exposed to catarrhal diseases.

This way of life of the child is extremely useful for his psychomotor development. The baby quickly develops various movements, before he starts to sit down, get up in the crib, crawl ... It is beneficial also for the baby's skin, which is especially important for immature children, with a tendency to allergic diseases, in particular to diathesis: the baby's skin in such conditions does not need any frequent washing, neither in daily bathing and without any lubrication and powders remains clean, healthy and velvety to the touch. The aches, rash, redness that he received in the maternity hospital, disappeared literally in a few days and did not appear again. "A good quenching effect is the washing away of the child with cold water from the tap (water is taken into the palm).

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