The Children of the Family : Part 5

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 13 of 23)

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. 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."

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.