The Children of the Family : Part 6

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 14 of 23)

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.

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.