THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY
The human being arrives:
"Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me;
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen;
For room to me the stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me;
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
And forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me;
Now, on this spot I stand with my robust soul."
--WALT WHITMAN.
"The child grows up in a setting of social functions of a type
higher always than that of his private accomplishment. He must grow
by gradual absorption of copies, patterns and examples."--BALDWIN.
"He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world; much more
he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. Nature has implanted
within us the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety; to bring
these to maturity is the object of education. All men require
education, and God has made children unfit for other employments
in order that they may have leisure to learn."--COMENIUS.
"The most critical interval of human nature is that between the
hour of birth and twelve years of age; this is the time when vice
and error may take root without our being possessed of any
instrument to destroy them; the first art of education, then,
consists neither in teaching virtue nor truth but in guarding the
heart from evil and the mind from error."--ROUSSEAU.
"A ladder leading to heaven is let down to every child, but he
must be taught to climb it. Education should decide for every
child not only what is to be made of its life, but should seek an
answer to the question, what was it intended that child should
become?"--PESTALOZZI.
"An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy."--OLD PROVERB.
"Come, let us live with our children!"--FROEBEL.
=Conditions to be Secured for Every Child.=--There are several
conditions which must be secured for every child to insure that it may
be born and reared according to high standards.
These may be listed as follows:
I. Two parents, to secure in advance a favorable social position.
II. A competent mother, to insure his first two or three years of
life in health, happiness, and growing power.
III. A competent father, to stand back of the mother and help make
a home adequate at least to the minimum of normal life's
demands.
IV. Community surroundings that will make possible the successful
achievement of parental duty.
V. Census provisions for vital and social statistics that will
make it sure that every child is counted in the population
of his nation, state, and community, and that he is
accounted for in all social relationships.
VI. State protection against industrial exploitation, vicious
influences, harmful use of leisure time, and generally
unwholesome conditions.
VII. Health standards in the community, fixed by experts and
maintained in essentials by public provisions.
VIII. Education standards, fixed by experts and maintained, at
least in normal minimum, by community provision.
IX. Such vital relation between the family, the school, the
political system, and all cultural opportunities as shall
insure to each child his just share of the social
inheritance to which all are heir.
=The Need for Two Parents.=--The first point noted is the need of two
parents for every child. The illegitimate child is handicapped. It is
a sound social movement that aims to make every "slacker" father
accept his share of responsibility in the case of the unmarried mother
and either marry the woman or give financial aid for the child. It
does not thereby secure two actual parents for the child. The orphan
child, the half-orphan child is handicapped; more so if bereft of
mother than of father, but if the father dies or deserts after
marriage, all experience shows that even if the mother lives and is
capable and faithful, the child who lacks a father has many
difficulties to overcome. The child of parents who have come to
dislike each other is seriously handicapped. A forced tie between
those who no longer love each other creates an atmosphere often fatal
to comfort and happiness and one to which children, sensitive as they
are to the feeling of their elders, react most unfavorably. The child
of divorced parents is handicapped; perhaps not so often or so
seriously as when held for years in an atmosphere of mutual hatred,
suspicion, fault-finding, and distrust--handicapped, however, by many
social embarrassments, by shock to affection given, perhaps, to both
parents equally, and by the often great difficulty of finding a
suitable home for the child of the divorced couple. The child that is
not wanted and comes into a world hostile to his birth is handicapped
in proportion as the influence reaches him at the moment of conception
or lessens the power of the parents to give him what he needs before
or after he arrives.
There must, then, be two parents, in love, as in law, to start a child
right--two parents who live until he has reached age of independent
direction and support, two parents who pull together for themselves
and for him, two parents who are equally recognized in law as acting
for him in guardianship throughout his minority.
The recognition of some of these needs of every child has been more
general and intelligent than that of others. For example, the equal
guardianship of the father and mother, their mutual responsibility for
financial support when financially competent, their equal control over
the family life and their common pledge to the community of parental
care--this has not been recognized until recently, is not now in many
of the States of the Union and perhaps not perfectly in any one.
At an Annual Meeting of the Uniform Laws Commission, at Cleveland,
Ohio, Mrs. Catherine Waugh McCulloch, partner with her husband in the
firm of McCulloch and McCulloch, Chicago, Illinois, and representing
the League of Women Voters, secured an almost unanimous recommendation
for uniform laws giving equal guardianship to fathers and to mothers.
As Mrs. McCulloch is the successful mother of four children, besides
being Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of Illinois in Cook
County, and has long represented the legal interests of women in the
largest organizations of progressive women in the United States, she
could, and did, speak with special authority in urging the right of
mothers to protect their children on equal terms with fathers, by a
"Uniform Joint Guardianship Law."
Some facts have given color to the claim of the extreme feminist that
if you can only get the right sort of mother the father is more or
less a negligible quantity. The history of the family, however,
proves, if it proves anything, that to actively engage two adults in
the business of rearing children is an immense asset to those
children.
The two parents insisted upon as foremost necessity for child-care
may, however, be of a poor sort, perhaps only furnished with good-will
toward their task. Even so, whatever the lacks may be, however small
the capacity, feeble the will and poor the purse, however
society-at-large has to make up for deficiencies in the parents, it is
at least one step toward a successful life to have two recognized
parents who mean to do the right thing by their offspring and never
fail in love toward each other and toward the children whom they call
their own.
=Every Child Should Have a Competent Mother.=--The second demand of
child-life is for a competent mother--competent in health, that the
baby may get really born alive, competent in nursing and household
skill, or in power to secure that skill from others, in order that the
baby may be sure of that first long start of two or three years toward
physical, mental, and moral sanity and strength. It is in those first
years that the child gains power to begin his own conquest of the
world at an advantageous point. That many women are not competent
physically for even the first test of childbirth we know from many
sources of inquiry. The facts brought out in legislative hearings by
those urging support for the so-called "Maternity Bill" amply prove
this. Taking the figures for New York State alone, in the year 1920 we
find a total of thirteen mothers out of every thousand dying in
childbirth, with an estimate from physicians that with proper care
two-thirds of these women could have been saved. A competent mother,
then, physically speaking, means not only one measurably strong but
one sufficiently cared for to prevent overstrain before the
birth-hour. Again, in New York State alone, we find that eighty-six
babies out of every thousand die before they reach the end of their
first year. This may be from ignorance on the mother's part, or it may
be from her physical weakness unequal to the care of the new baby. It
may be there are already too many children near that baby's age who
also make heavy demands upon time and energy. It may be that
discouragements from unhappy family conditions or worry over economic
disabilities sap the mother's vitality. It may be that taints of blood
doom the child and the mother. Whatever the cause, it is reason for
deep concern that a great state, like New York, for example, has a
rate of infant mortality nearly twice as high as that of New Zealand
and ranking eleventh in the twenty-three states of the registration
area in which the death of babies is set down with care. When we add
to this loss the death of at least 25,000 women each year in
childbirth, most of whom could have been saved under right conditions,
we are still more concerned. Of the 250,000 babies lost last year we
are safe in estimating at least one-half whose lives could have been
spared with even a minimum care. The effort now making all along the
line of social advance to give every child a decent start in life is
obviously necessary and wise.
If the mother is proved wholly incompetent in mind or character we
have acquired a social right to take her child from her and place it
where it can receive better nurture and training. We are beginning to
recognize the corollary duty of social aid to all women of good
character, motherly feeling, and any fair degree of intelligence in
their function of motherhood. There are those hopelessly incompetent
who should never be allowed to have children. There are far more with
power to bear and rear children successfully whom adverse
circumstances submerge to incompetency. These, we are now learning,
must be helped in some way, for society's sake even more than for
their own, if they are willing to undertake parental service to the
race.
The passage of the so-called Sheppard-Towner Bill is one answer in the
United States to the right of the child and its mother to life and
health. There are those who deplore the tendency to seek for such aid
to individuals through the Federal Government. The Governor of New
York State, for example, although a man of progressive ideas and
liberal point of view, opposed "starting aid to mothers and babies
from the Washington end," declaring that work for the "welfare of
citizens of any class should start at the locality to be benefited."
He would not have the people educated to depend upon the Federal
Government for benefits. He feared that the Sheppard-Towner Bill would
tend to "make the public expect to be nursed from the cradle to the
grave" and be a detriment to the public life rather than a benefit.
New York State made a good appropriation for its own aid to mothers
and babies, but did not apply for the Federal aid in addition. By the
middle of the second month of 1922, however, nearly thirty states had
accepted the Act as a welcome help in their welfare work, and few will
be left outside of its provisions by the end of the year. The fear
that such an Act would make the general government the active
controller and director of the lives of parents and their children in
most intimate ways seems not justified by the facts. The Bill, when
passed, simply provided money to be given to the states on the
fifty-fifty basis "for the purpose of coöperating with them in
promoting the welfare and hygiene of maternity and infancy." The
specific plans for each state are to be made by the state agency in
charge of the work and the only Federal supervision is that of
standardization, by which the Chief of the Children's Bureau, the
Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, and the Commissioner of
Education must approve those plans as "reasonably appropriate and
adequate to carry out the purposes of the Act" before the money of the
Federal Government is passed over to any state.
It is rather as a help to states desiring aid in this particular than
as a compulsory requirement that the Act is intended to operate. There
are those, however, who fear any extension of power of the National
Government even through influence acquired by subsidies for necessary
aids to the common life. It is a matter for thought and unprejudiced
study what form of public aid is, on the whole, the best for our
country. It cannot be denied, however, that different states have
differing burdens to carry for the immigrant, the ignorant, the
destitute, and the defective. It is at least desirable to press the
point that no state lives to itself and no one dies to itself. Disease
knows no boundary lines of political government and the death-toll of
mothers and babies does not halt at geographical limitations. We are
all one country insofar as bad social conditions are concerned. We are
all helped when any smallest country town most remote from the centres
of population is raised in its social standards and conditions. Hence,
perhaps, we may not fear national aid to each locality in need or feel
concerned as to what agency accomplishes a required social advance.
Ellen Key declared that every mother should be maintained by the state
during the first year of every child's life and that afterward each
child should have one-half its support from the state and one-half
from the father. That may not be the ideal. We may believe that to
thus reduce the father's responsibility would mean a dangerous
lessening of his energy and devotion to the family well-being. It is
true, however, that while there are so many in every community without
essentials for care in childbirth or for the early nurture of infants,
we must find some way of providing these essentials, or the state is
endangered at its vital centre.
=Every Child Should Have a Competent Father.=--The third demand of
childhood is for a competent father. That takes us at once into the
area of wages and economic conditions. When the Children's Bureau,
itself a testimony to the awakened social conscience in respect to
childhood, shows from careful investigation that in families where the
father earns only ten dollars or less a week more than twice as many
babies die before the age of two years than in families where the
fathers earn twenty-five dollars a week or more, we can see with
clearer vision than ever before that to give babies a fair chance in
life the father must be fairly paid for his work.
The following table shows this fact in graphic form:
[Illustration: INFANT MORTALITY RATES. ACCORDING TO FATHERS'
EARNINGS
COMBINED FIGURES FROM SEVEN CITIES STUDIED BY US CHILDREN'S BUREAU.
The baby death rate rises as the fathers' earnings fall.]
=Economic Aspects of the Father's Competency.=--The death-rate of
babies in families in which the mother has to earn outside the home
under factory conditions of labor in order to secure absolute
necessities is so high that it is seen to be not socially thrifty to
thus place a double burden upon mothers. The death-rate and
sickness-rate of families in which the children do not have sufficient
nourishing food, in which the mother is half starved and wholly
deprived of rest and pleasure, and the father is under terror night
and day lest the rent money will not be ready when the landlord's
agent comes, cannot give us ease of mind. The families in which
unemployment is frequent or overwork keeps the father as well as the
mother under the pressure of nervous exhaustion, are the families in
which the right of the child to two competent parents is grossly
denied. The aid given the mother, by even the best of "Maternity
Bills," insofar as it transcends the wider dissemination of knowledge
and gives actual financial aid in economic distress, seems only a
makeshift. The sick have a social claim for social care and the
ignorant of all ages have a special claim upon the community for
instruction, whether from separate Commonwealth or from the Federal
Government, it matters little. The financial aid given, however, the
"material relief" that must be rendered in family emergencies, should
not be needed by the healthy, law-abiding, thrifty, honest, skilled,
or even half-skilled workman. He should be able to earn a necessary
minimum for himself and for his family by his own labors. We cannot
here enter into the economic problems involved, but must register a
conviction that real social progress must include not only a competent
father for every child but also a fairer chance for every man to
become that competent father through fairer sharing in the profits of
industry. Widespread and careful inquiry as to reasons for dropping
below the self-supporting line list as one cause of "necessity for
material relief, having in the family more than three children under
the age of fourteen." This fact must give us thought. At fourteen in
many states the child may begin to earn something toward his own
support. The question may well be debated whether or not an average
man in ordinary economic general conditions should be unable to care
for more than three children below the earning period if his wife is a
competent housemother and thus earns her part. If such a condition of
restriction upon family increase is accepted as inevitable and
permanent in our industrial order, then surely the cost of rearing
children must be far more widely distributed. In such a condition
there would be needed social help for fathers and mothers far more
definite and inclusive than merely the aid to expectant mothers. If it
is true that it takes from three and one-half to four children from
each married pair to keep up the population considered necessary for
national well-being, and if there is an increasing number of men and
women deterred from furnishing even two of that quota by the expense
involved, then it is high time that we consider at least how the
family burden may be more equally distributed.
=The French Plan of Family Extra-wage.=--One plan of meeting this
unequal social burden of parenthood and the social danger involved in
too few children born, France has devised by the family extra-wage.[8]
This is simply a provision by which married workers with children are
preferred before married workers without children, and much preferred
before bachelors, in the matter of wages. French work-people with
families, irrespective of their station, rate of pay, premium or
bonus, receive:
1. An indemnity of 200 francs at the birth of a child.
2. A suckling indemnity, which is given to the wife, of 100 francs a
month during the first year.
3. An indemnity of 3 francs a day for each child under fourteen years
of age, which becomes a part of the family income. The Paris district
alone for the first four months of 1920 shows 39,266 families in
receipt of these allowances, with 62,176 children benefited, at an
expense of 4,115,014 francs. The money comes largely from a pooling of
funds by combines of manufacturers in many industries, so that
although business pays the extra charge it is distributed equally
among all engaged in the same industry. The trade unions have not been
wholly pleased with this discrimination in favor of fathers and
mothers. They work for the strict equalization of wages. The national
need for more children of strength and health, however, and the effect
of low wages upon mothers and upon infant life have led to this social
measure.
Surely, this is a way not wholly unreasonable by which a society can
help pay for the children it demands.
=The Endowment of Mothers.=--In England, a different plan has been
developed, although not yet applied. _A Proposal for the National
Endowment of Motherhood_, advocated by K.D. Courtney, H.N. Brailsford,
Eleanor F. Rathbone, A. Maude Royden, Mary Stocks, Elinor Burns, and
Emilie Burns, has been published. In this plan the ideal is "that
within each class of income the man with a family should not be in a
worse position economically because he has a family than the single
man in that class." They demand that "the standard of living be not
lowered by children." The authors of this plan declare that in the
present system "The mother is still the uncharted servant of the
future who receives from her husband at his discretion a share in his
wages." They want the mother to receive from society, through the
Government, "a weekly allowance sufficient in amount to cover the
primary cost of physical subsistence, paid to the mother for herself
and for each of her children, throughout the period when the care of
the children necessarily occupies her whole attention." They claim
that such a plan would, in the first place, make "equal pay for equal
work" for men and women really possible, since the argument that "men
should be paid more because they have families to keep" would be
outgrown. They claim also that such a plan would remove economic
restrictions on parenthood which now often work social harm. They also
claim that the health of children requires this public allowance for
their care.
The authors of this plan, although frankly stating objections to this
point, claim that the payment of this allowance should be directly to
mothers "as the first step toward raising the status of women and
blotting out, in what has been called the noblest of professions,
those conditions which compare only with the worst of sweated
employments." The whole discussion of this plan is worthy most serious
attention of all interested in preserving the family from injury
through economic inequalities.
=Does This Plan Make Too Little of Fathers?[9]=--There is one
question, however, among others, to be asked of the authors of this
plan, and that is, Can not some means be devised to make the father's
share in the care of the children more definite and better rewarded,
less often shirked or incompetent, in any scheme for state subsidy for
the care of young children? The difficulties that inhere in all
subsidies for children are chiefly those that make people of small
intelligence and little conscience trade with the state for larger
subsidies for larger families, begotten by the less fit for parentage
and with an eye on the public purse. This catastrophe, not unknown in
the past history of England, must be avoided. If there shall develop
any scheme for equal sharing by all the community in the expense of
raising the coming generation then there must surely be no special
honor paid to those that have very large families. Better, for social
purposes, that no children above a reasonable number should in any
family receive a special allowance, even if older brothers and sisters
did do so. It may be that in France large families are desperately
needed. Not so in the United States. The number of five or six should
certainly be the limit for which any just scheme of family subsidy
should mulct the taxpayer.
=Just Limits to Number of Children in Subsidized Families.=--The
difference between the three under fourteen years which in so many
cases can be cared for unassisted by the average workman, and the four
and more that bring the family down to the danger-point of financial
dependence, might be a subject for consideration in any scheme of
family subsidy, and some clear idea of social need in family fertility
should be a part of any proposition to make allowance from the public
funds for each child under the earning age. In any case, the father's
share in the self-sacrifice and burden of parenthood should have some
clear recognition in any law dealing with such state aid. In the last
analysis, unless some extreme form of socialism is better than the
present industrial order and to be sought, the best way to help the
family is to make fathers and mothers competent to take care of their
own children without too great effort for themselves and without
injurious consequences to the children. Those Trade Union leaders may
be right in principle when they hesitate to accept any public family
aid scheme lest it make wages less rather than more and bring on a
condition in which heroic struggle for one's own, the very pith and
marrow of manhood in its relation to the family, be less esteemed and
less practiced.
We are confronted, however, both in the movements for aid to maternity
in care before and after childbirth, and in all the many provisions
for child-saving that publicly supported Boards of Health are
everywhere inaugurating, with a tendency of the greatest strength and
social appeal, tendencies toward a sharing by all of the burdens
heretofore borne only by the heads of families. Some way must be
devised by which such sharing will not cheat society of any gains to
character and to sense of family responsibility which old systems of
economic support of children have given the race. Some way must be
devised to recognize as economic assets of society the special
sacrifice and service of the housemother in her function of life-giver
for the coming generations and yet not ignore the father but rather
bring him nearer to competent fatherhood as social conditions make it
easier for him to bear his part of the family load. The place for full
discussion of these important considerations is not here, but the need
for the child to have a father who can be the efficient partner of the
competent mother in the task of rearing him must be always insisted
upon, else reform measures that help the mother will only take us
backward instead of forward.
=The Right of a Child to be Officially Counted.=--The next right of
the child we must consider is the right to be listed as a member of
the population. A registry of facts concerning himself and his
condition that will enable the community to see where he is, what he
is doing, and how he, in general, fares, is essential. The fact that
only about one-half of the Commonwealths in our Union have full
registration of births, deaths, health conditions, school attendance,
and other vital matters concerning each individual, and of immense
importance to society as a whole, is a confession of social
incompetency too shameful for a nation that calls itself civilized.
Where there is no adequate registration babies may be easily lost
sight of altogether. Children may escape the call to school and child
labor be unchecked. When an investigation of conditions in almshouses
and remote country districts of a certain southern state was made the
numbers of defective and blind and crippled children brought to light
was appalling. Yet one political leader of that state, at least,
declared when the investigation began that "it was not only
unnecessary but an insult to an enlightened state." The enlightened
state simply did not know how many children were born dead, how many
died the first month or year of life, how many went to school later
on, how many were not able to profit by instruction because of
congenital defectiveness, how many needed special care and training by
reason of some special handicap, and how many ran away from such
public institutions as gave poor harbor to those without family
protection. One of the fundamental rights, surely, of every child is
to be counted, to have the community of which he is a part know
something about him, and have his record kept where those interested
in his protection and care, in his health, his schooling, his
vocational training, may find out what they need to know in order to
aid his progress or check his wrongdoing.
=Every Child Should Have Social Protection.=--In the next place, the
demand of every child must surely be for community protection against
those who for greed or evil purpose would exploit his life. The first
law passed for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which aimed even
at parents who did not act a parent's part, was the Magna Charta of
child rights. After that the door was opened for all manner of
protective legislation for the benefit of the young. Yet we still have
many men and some women whose business it is, and a very profitable
one, to debauch youth or despoil children.
Surely the time has come when all decent people should unite to
abolish such evils.
=Child-labor.=--In the field of child-labor we have model laws, not
always well enforced, laws that aim to keep inviolate for childhood at
least a few years of schooling.[10] We have health laws which aim more
and more at reducing the diseases of children and making it possible
for all to share in the power and joy of normal existence.
Yet, although something has been done for the child who would
otherwise be at work in factory, shop, or sweated trade at home, there
are, it is said, still "Two Million Overworked Farm Children." In the
South, in some sections, the little black children still pick cotton
for the little white children to weave in mills. In the North
undersized and mentally undeveloped youth still testify to industrial
exploitation even where laws against child-labor are on the statute
books. The agricultural workers, numbering more than any other class
and spread all over the United States, count too many little children
in their lists. It is estimated that in our country there are
38,000,000 living on farms, and of this number only 8,000,000 adult
men are listed as laborers; we hence can well believe that children
and youth are a disproportionate element in the working of those
farms. This makes the slogan proposed by Owen E. Lovejoy, the
Secretary of the National Child-labor Committee, "Keep the Farmer
Through His Children," a highly compelling one. In the tobacco fields
of Connecticut, boys and girls ten years of age and over; in the truck
gardens of Ohio among the onion beds; in the Michigan sugar-beet
fields; in the California asparagus beds; in the Southern cotton
fields, where children as young as three years of age have been
found--in all these and on lonely farmsteads doing general work we
find these children. Cut off from regular schooling, herded often in
the poorest substitutes for homes, moving about from place to place
with fathers and mothers unskilled or handicapped by weak character,
these children are defrauded of every right of a child at every turn.
It is not true, as some complacently assert, that all is done that
should be to prevent the sacrifice of young life to the industrial
demands for large returns for investment. It is not true that such
organizations as the Child-labor Committee can rest content with
accomplished tasks and disband.
The exemption of agricultural labor from the legal protection of
children given in many states in the field of manufacture, and the
total lack of realization by the general public of the newer
conditions which specialized and scientific farming make for the
tenant hands, make this particular form of child-protection in farming
a question of supreme importance.
As this book goes to press the Supreme Court decision which declares
the Federal Child-labor Law unconstitutional places upon those working
through state channels a still heavier burden of effort at
child-protection. This decision of the Supreme Court may well be
understood as indicating no indifference to child-welfare but rather
as a call to clear the method of child-labor reform from any
entanglements of taxation or doubtful alliance with Federal
officialism. The principle of child-protection, whether by national or
state laws, holds the moral devotion of our citizenship more firmly
than ever before.
=Children Must be Protected in Recreation.=--The need for the
protection of children from commercialized recreation with its centres
set near all manner of vicious influences has aroused the conscience
of the nation. The investigations of social conditions near the Camps
of Training for our army in the Great War and many forms of social
service carried on by men and women in connection with the Red Cross
have given impetus to the general movement to "clean up the cities" to
make the rural communities and village centres more helpful to moral
living, and to make the streets safer for "the spirit of youth."
Yet the rural schoolhouses are so many of them lacking in provisions
of decency and of playground supervision, and the village
lounging-places are so often the scenes of vicious association, and
the absence everywhere of sufficient provision for healthful and
safeguarded recreation is so obvious, that we know we have still a
long and heavy task before us to accord children their admitted right
to social protection from moral evils against which even the best of
parents can not adequately stand alone.
=Standards of and Aids to Health.=--Health standards in the community,
fixed by experts and maintained, at least in minimum essentials, by
public provision, is the seventh right of children which society
should insure to each one.
The difficulties and dangers which inhere in any form of financial
payment to parents, either fathers or mothers, in aid of their
parental tasks, are not so clearly present, if present at all, in
special aids given to all the population in matters of public
sanitation, personal hygiene and the care of the sick. If we make our
public aid topical rather than by classes, and to all citizens alike
in definite aid, we avoid much of the taint of charity. Few, if any,
propose, for example, to give maternity aid to the rich. Fewer still
advocate old-age pensions for those of independent incomes of moderate
size. Many see, however, that health aids should be so distributed
and so universally offered and used that the standard of health may be
equally raised thereby for all. The idea that there are no people
between the rich, who can pay anything asked, and those poor who can
pay nothing for hospital care, diagnosis, or general medical and
nursing service, is becoming an exploded one. There is general
agreement among those most intelligent in such matters that what is
needed more than anything else in the field of physical culture and
physical care is provision for the people of small incomes who desire
to be self-supporting. It is a common saying that no one but a
millionaire or a pauper can afford a surgical operation or a trained
nurse. We are moving, too slowly, but still moving, toward some form
of provision of doctors, nurses, hospital and convalescent care, to
which people of refinement, of independent feeling but of limited
purse, can resort when they need such aid without a sense of
humiliation or incurring the danger of wholly unsuitable
companionship. Whatever difficulties there may be in securing adequate
aid of this sort to adults, there can be none in the case of children.
When we started Boards of Health we definitely outlined a path from
the doctor's office and the nurse's service to the public school and
from the public school to the home. We saw more clearly as the years
went on that that path must be worn by many feet if we would have
adults strong and well and ready for the work of the world. We have in
many Boards of Health (as so efficiently working in New York City
under Dr. Josephine S. Baker) Children's Departments, officered by
those specially engaged in baby-saving, in child hygiene, in the
health of school attendants, and in the general instruction of mothers
in the care of children. This is an achievement which needs only to be
more widely understood, applied and supported to be of the greatest
social value. We have now the Federal backing in these matters in many
provisions outside that of the special Maternity Aid Bill with its
fifty-fifty financial plan to make the general government partner with
the states and with the various local communities in health aid to all
the people. What we need now is to make the care of the minor child
seem to all, as it now does to so many, a duty that can be isolated in
the mind from any doctrinaire socialistic plans, a duty to include all
the population in wholly free health-service from the state. There
are differences which may well be stressed between schemes for placing
medical service of every sort under state regulation and wholly
supporting it by public tax, and any plan for radically abolishing the
capitalistic regime.
We are fast coming to a united conception of social duty as requiring
help to all parents that they may bring up their children in health
and give those children the physical training which they need. Let us
all, then, push hardest first for the standardization of health in the
case of children and youth and the best possible arrangements of
tax-supported aids to the realization of that standard. That is surely
one of the ways in which the parental burden of child-care can be
socially shared without starting embarrassing questions of radical or
conservative theories of logical next steps.
=Health Boards Should Help All Alike.=--We can, however, thus divorce
health activities from economic disputes only by making the
investigation of children, the provisions for free examination and
treatment, and the establishment of hospital and clinic facilities
exactly the same for the children of the rich and of the poor. A
recent investigation of the diet of children deduced from reports of
undernourishment furnished by doctors specializing in children's
diseases, showed that in some cities, at least, the children of the
well-to-do were as often underfed or wrongly fed as were the children
of the poor. Sometimes the fact that a family is financially able to
employ a nurse, but not intelligent or conscientious enough to employ
a competent nurse, results in worse conditions, as to food and other
particulars, than are found where poor mothers do the best they can
with limited means.
=Items of Work in Child Hygiene.=--The standards of health and the
public provisions for their realization, which even now in the crowded
city of New York are so ably enforced by "The Division of Child
Hygiene," show that "the hazardous business of being a baby" is much
reduced in risks. The list of details of work undertaken by that
Division of Child Hygiene as so fully reported in the document of 1914
and in later publications may be of use if here repeated. They are as
follows:
I. Control and Supervision of Midwives.
II. Reduction of Infant Mortality.
III. Supervision of Foundlings Boarded in Private Homes.
IV. Inspection and Supervision of Day Nurseries.
V. Inspection of Institutions for Dependent Children.
VI. Medical Inspection and Examination of School Children.
VII. Vaccination of School Children.
VIII. Enforcing of Child-labor Law in Issuing Work Certificates.
For this many-sided work physicians, trained nurses, and various other
helpers are required. Could the public purse be drawn upon for a more
vital public necessity than this list indicates?
When it is remembered that from forty to fifty per cent, of births are
in charge of midwives in the foreign-born population and that the
condition of housing and of water, air and food supply are deplorably
inadequate in manufacturing centres, and that in rural communities
there are few doctors and nurses and little hospital service, it will
be seen that the idea of having Federal aid for this large health
requirement was not one of concentration of power in the Government
(as some have thought), but rather of a diffusion of standards and
better sharing in all parts of our country. The health crusade is not
bounded by state lines, diseases may cross those lines without
consciousness of any check. The help toward the abolition of all
preventable illness, the protection of child-life from all manner of
preventable weakness, abnormality and suffering, seems to be the
business of society in general, if anything can be so called. The
children must be saved if the nation is to prosper. It used to be
thought that a high birth-rate was a sufficient indication of national
well-being. It is now seen that a low death-rate and a high level of
strength and vitality, of health and mental power, are still more the
required national asset.
As Dr. Helen D. Putnam well says, "Democracy must finally depend on
its department of education for establishing the right: for mothers,
intelligence, health, economic opportunity to care for their babies;
for babies, either rich or poor, intelligent, physically competent
caretakers," If this be true, then the work of Health Boards and
kindred agencies is a part of general education as it has long been a
part of accepted charitable duty. The children stand first in line for
receipt of that health education because they are the promise of the
future.
We must take humane care of all the misfits, all the crippled, all the
weak, all the defective, all the abnormal and the insane. This is now
admitted. We must prevent, so far as we are able, such weight and
burden falling upon our children and our children's children, as
charity now presses upon us. In this matter, at least, "we must begin
with the grandfathers if we would reform the world."
=The Educational Rights of All Children.=--The right of every child to
a minimum of education, which was our eighth point, is also conceded,
and the duty of making public provision in tax-supported schools for
these essentials of reading, writing, fair knowledge of arithmetic and
the rest, is acknowledged. The idea, however, that some people have
that all the children in the United States have an elementary
schooling is erroneous. This is not a treatise on education, and
elsewhere the statistics of length of schooling per year for the
different parts of the country and of dearth of school seats in cities
and famine of teachers everywhere must be considered. From the side of
the family, however, the claim must be made that equal rights in some
accepted minimum of school training, and that determined in quantity
and quality of teaching by those who know what education means, should
be the demand of all fathers and mothers. In the older time young men
going through college on the way to one of the three learned
professions then listed, law, theology, and medicine, taught often in
the country school to earn an honest penny. Such teaching on the way
to some form of vocation deemed far more honorable was not of a sort
to make teaching a profession in itself. Later, some measure of higher
education was given young women in Normal Schools to fit them for
teaching little children, and the teacher of the elementary school
became, thereby, a professional. To-day few young men teach to help
themselves through college and only a few choose teaching as a
profession. To-day, also, the profession of teaching, which once was
almost the sole opening for higher vocational work for women, now
competes with a large number of professions or types of business or
applied art, and fewer women proportionally are headed for the
schoolroom when they leave college or normal school.
This tendency to take other lines of work increased to unprecedented
extent during the Great War, which opened new worlds of paid work to
women. This gives us the present teacher shortage, which all who know
conditions feel to be the most serious menace to universal education.
There are not only not enough teachers to go around, there are still
fewer teachers fit to teach. If it is the right of every child to have
a good education in essentials, to be well taught as far as he goes in
schooling, how shall that right be realized if the teacher famine
continues?
=The Use of Married Women as Teachers.=--The interest of the family is
specially concerned in one way to ease that shortage of teachers. That
way is the use of married women in the public schools. All women who
have "verified their credentials" as good teachers should be held on
to when they marry with all possible strength of appeal to fulfil a
social duty as a part of the teaching force of the locality where they
live. The old absurdity of making women resign from the teaching force
when they issued wedding cards, or conceal the fact of their marriage
if they were not scrupulous, so as to keep their positions, is fast
passing. Few communities hold on to this penalizing of the woman
teacher when she marries, but many school boards retain a sentiment
against urging the continuance of any married woman on the staff. This
must give way to an intelligent understanding of two things: one, that
experience in teaching is an immeasurable asset to the schools and
must not be lost in so great proportion of women as it has been; and,
in the second place, that teaching lends itself in unique manner to
half-time work, to vacations for maternity duties, to combining of two
or three married women in positions that might be filled by one
spinster, and to other social expedients favorable to married life;
and that all that is needed is good sense and some skill of
administrative adjustment to keep the larger majority of good teachers
in the field after they are wives and mothers.
Moreover, from the point of view of the family, it is injurious for
social practice to keep women who have the qualities of good teachers
from marrying lest they lose their beloved profession. It is one of
the best, although one of the least tried, ways of bringing the school
and the home together by giving a good many teachers a clearer idea
from personal experience of what the home needs from the school, and
giving mothers a clearer idea of the reasons for school rules by
having them serve in both capacities. The normal school education of
women was obtained by appeals based on the fact of the first half of
the nineteenth century that unless women teachers were secured and
trained for the task the elementary school could never be enabled to
fill the need of the public school system. The fact of the early part
of the twentieth century should be as deeply pressed, the fact that
there are not enough women teachers of education and character for
elementary school service unless we mix teaching and marriage for many
of them. This fact should make a social appeal to-day equal to that of
Horace Mann's great mission.
If we are to have enough elementary school teachers and continue to
increase the number from the most fit women for the task, we must also
institute a new social backing for the profession. In this connection
one is obliged to deal with the disrespect shown the average teacher
of little children and even of the high school and college instructor
as compared with leaders in other professions. The teacher of little
children is most often a woman, and if a woman away from home and
especially in some rural communities is very nearly a social outcast.
The "teacherage" is just beginning to be called for as the suitable
home for the teachers of a school; a "teacherage" which can become a
social centre if near the school building, and thus be uniquely
useful. The jointure of all the best homes in a community with all the
wisest teachers in that community, not alone for the occasional
discussion of "School Problems" or "Home Problems," but for some
common public work which will link both teachers and parents to the
larger life of the community--this is a necessity if we would have
enough teachers of the right sort.
The attention to the physical details of school housing, school
gardens, school playgrounds, school lighting and seating, all these
the family life which furnishes the children must be keen about in
the interest of each child. The curriculum must not be left to a
school board chiefly interested in other matters than text-books,
except it may be for a business interest in the latter. The supply and
testing of teachers must not be left to a body more concerned in
getting places for relatives and friends than for securing the best
available teaching staff.
In all the things that experts should direct, and in all the things
that mean health and comfort and happiness to individual children,
parents, even if not very learned, should have a voice and seek to
make their convictions work to actual progress.
=Individual Sharing in the Social Inheritance.=--For the last point of
our list, namely, the right of every child to be made a conscious heir
to the social inheritance of his time and place in the world, little
need be said. The tendencies in American life which give thoughtful
people the most satisfaction are the tendencies toward extension of
culture privileges in public libraries, lectures, tax-supported and
educationally supervised playgrounds, in young people's organizations
like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, in summer camps (not all for the
rich), in vacation houses full of the flavor of the best of life, in
the varied clubs and classes of the settlements, in the pageants and
other forms of pictured world-life--all these, and more that might be
named, show an exuberance of effort to share with utmost speed and
fullest generosity the things that seem to the privileged few the most
precious heritage of our race.
Yet, with all our effort so much more needs doing that multitudes live
and die wholly ignorant of the world they have come to or of the
race-life of which they are a part. Doctor Du Bois, in his classic
appeal for human comradeship for all, _The Soul of Black Folks_, has
shown what suffering comes to the cultured black man who finds all
cultured men and women of white races forcing him to be an alien
because of his skin. There is a sadder and more terrible, because
unconscious, deprivation; it is that of any one, white or black, rich
or poor, who loses the chance to partake of the culture of the past.
The man or woman, whether able to accomplish much or little on the
practical side of vocational service, whose outlook is bounded by the
narrow, the superficial, the personal, the ephemeral, is missing the
best part of his social inheritance, the capacity to "look before and
after and pine for what is not."
Such a little time we are here! Even a Methuselah might wish to have
in his mental furnishings the glory of the past and the prophetic hope
of the future. All children, not merely a fortunate few, should have
this sense of a group-life of which each is a part, should be able to
see life and see it whole in the social inheritance that belongs alike
to each one of us. Children make a large order upon each generation as
they come into a vast group of all that have been and reach
consciously toward the expanding life of the coming time.
The family must begin that culture by which the order shall be filled,
but no family can answer even the least of the social demands by
itself. "Culture," says Emerson, "shall yet absorb chaos itself,"
Every child has a rightful citizenship in that order-giving world of
thought, of history, of poetry, of art, of science, and of religion.
What a nation we might become if only every child had this, its right,
recognized and fulfilled!
QUESTIONS ON THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY
1. The eighteenth century was called the century of man, the
nineteenth century, of women, and the twentieth, that of the
child. What facts justify this statement?
2. What are the main elements in the modern standard of
child-care, child-protection, and child-nurture?
3. What of these elements can and should the private home supply,
and what must be the community provision and control?
4. In trying to effect both private and public conditions
favorable to the best development of child-life, what should be
the scale of values used, or what should be the order of
effort?
5. Dr. Alice Hamilton, in a Chicago study of I,500 families, found
that the infant death-rate in large families of six children
and over was two and one-half times greater than in small
families of four children or less. Was that an indication that
infant mortality rises with fecundity or was it one of many
indications that the better-to-do have smaller families? In any
case, should such statistics always include the statement of
the social standing and the income of the groups studied?
6. In _The Child_ of August, 1920, Miss Julia C. Lathrop
summarizes the Child-welfare Standards proposed by the
Children's Bureau as follows:
(1.) Minimum standards for children entering employment:
A. Minimum age, sixteen years in all employments;
eighteen years in mines and quarries; twenty-one
years for girls as telephone or telegraph messengers;
twenty-one years for special-delivery service of U.S.
Post Office; prohibition of minors in dangerous,
unhealthy, or hazardous occupations.
B. Minimum education, compulsory education for all between
seven and sixteen years for nine months of every year.
Between sixteen and eighteen years those legally
employed to attend Continuation Schools at least eight
hours a week.
C. Physical minimum, annual examination of all working
children under eighteen years of age; prohibition of
work unless found to be normal in physique and health.
D. Hours, minors not more than eight hours a day or
forty-four hours a week, and prohibition of
night-work. Continuation School attendance to count as
part of working-day.
E. Wages, minimum determined by wage commission or similar
agency.
F. Vocational guidance and employment supervision.
G. Employment certificate as needed protection against
industrial exploitation.
(2.) Minimum standards for public protection of health of
mothers and children:
A. Maternity aids; B. Infants; C. Pre-school children; D.
School children; E. Adolescent children.
(3.) Minimum standards in relation to children needing special
care:
A. Adequate income; B. Assistance to mothers; C. State
supervision; D. Removal of some children from their
homes; E. Home care; F. Principles governing
child-placing; G. Children in institutions; H. Care
of children born out of wedlock; I. Care of
physically defective children; J. Mental hygiene and
care of mentally defective children; K. Juvenile
courts; L. Rural social work; M. Scientific
information.
(4.) General minimum standards:
A. Economic and social; B. Recreation; C. Child-welfare
legislation.
Read the above and compare your local conditions with these
standards. Do you think all these demands necessary?
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Described briefly in _The Survey_ of November 12, 1921.
[9] In New Zealand, which has so many "modern improvements" in
government, the proposition has been made to fix a basic wage for a man
and wife without children, and make it the same as for a single man. In
addition to this sum, each employer would be required by law to pay
into a State Fund a sum slightly in advance of this wage for the single
man and the childless married man, and that excess sum would be
distributed in the form of a children's allowance to each parent
according to the number of children. It is estimated that under this
plan the total sum paid out in wages would not exceed that now
distributed, but the receipt by the workers would be proportioned to
responsibilities.
[10] See publications of the National Child-labor Committee.