When a mother has to work, what is she to do with her young children?
In co-operation with the Child Helping Department of the Russell Sage
Foundation, the Edison Company has produced a motion picture film which
is one answer to the question. The reply, as given in the _Kinetogram_,
a semi-monthly bulletin of moving picture news, is that “she should
board her baby with some mother who is capable of caring for and feeding
another child than her own.” The film is described as follows:
“In this picture the mother has twins, one she boards with a foster
mother and the other is put into an institution because the foster
mother will take only one. The mother of the twins is compelled to do
this because so handicapped she cannot get work. The work of the care of
infants in an institution is shown and the only fault to be found is
that the individual attention that an infant must have is lacking, owing
to the fact that a nurse in an asylum often has as many as fifteen
babies to care for alone. That is where the infant suffers. It is not,
however, due to any fault of the nurses but to conditions. In this case
the fostered child lives while the institution child does not. Seventy
per cent of asylum babies succumb while seventy out of a hundred live
where individual care is exercised.”