Better Babies Brought to You by Milk ~ How Advertisers Sold Us Bigger Fatter Milk-Fed Babies

Want to Keep Up With the Jones's Baby? Drink Milk ~ Lima Ohio's Better Babies Movement ~ 1916 ~ Vintage Lima Ohio Collectibles and History

GOT MILK?
How did milk-fed babies became the chubby ideal? A  brief look at how the advertising industry sold us on bottle feeding our babies, and changed our image of what healthy looks like.

The milk industry, and other advertisers sponsored the Better Baby Movement, using chubby blonde blue eyed babies in their advertisements to introducing baby formulas, promoting bottle feeding, changing America's baby nursing habits, according to Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink by Erna Melanie DuPuis.

All babies under a year old who are registered will receive a white felt pennant bearing Lima's slogan, "Better Babies, Better Homes, Better Communities".

Excerpted from The Lima News March 4, 1916
Better Babies Day Observance Plans Complete
Program For Baby Week As Planned For Lima 

BETTER BABIES 
BETTER HOMES 
BETTER COMMUNITIES. 

The above is the official slogan for Baby Week celebration. 
"Baby Week" was officially in augurated today, when Mayor B. H Simpson issued an official proclamation asking that all Lima citizens interested in making for children a better home and better place in which to live, link their efforts In a great educational campaign to give the baby his just deserts. 

From now on until next Saturday, the greatest forces for good in the city will pull together to help mothers and fathers know more about their young children and the bringing up of the little ones in a way which will make them healthier boys and girls. 

President Woodrow Wilson is heartily in favor of the plans put forth for the celebration of Baby Week in the United States. He thinks it is one of the greatest factors for good inaugurated. Governor Frank B. Willis has also taken up the good work and his proclamation regarding the celebration, has been issued. 

All babies under a year old who are registered will receive a white felt pennant bearing Lima's slogan, "Better Babies, Better Homes, Better Communities". 

These pennnts will be distributed at Baby Week headquarters at 213 West High street, for those not previously registered. Those babies already registered will receive a pennant through the mails, together with a pamphlet, "Save the Babies". 

Pamphlets and booklets of scientific information from best authorities on the care of the baby may be had free of charge. Exhibits and charts showing facts concerning infant mortality, proper feeding and clothing, etc, will be shown, and will be on display all week. 

Special conferences will be held on "Food and Feeding", and on "Milk". 

The primary school will present a playlet, "Mother Goose Up to Date"; the grammar school will write essays on "The Clean Food Code", "The Milk Code"
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Prizes for the HEAVY Babies

Grandmother's Methods Made Prize Babies

Even Rose O'Neill's Kewpies got on the Better Baby Bandwagon.

For Better, or Worse?

More on the Better Baby Movement:

Better Baby Contests: The Scientific Quest for Childhood Perfection in the Early Twentieth Century by Annette K. Dorey -- Beginning at state fairs where judging cattle was the norm, a unique campaign of "scientific" baby judging spread to towns and cities of all sizes across the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Infants were poked and prodded, weighed and measured, and then rated on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 being "perfect."

Read about the controversial aspects of these contests "creating" better babies as a form of eugenics.

Go even deeper into the subject here.

Originally published on 'Tique Talk by msdowantiques.com

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Findlay Antique Bottle Club
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