NEW VALUES IN THE FIELD OF CHILD WELFARE A. IN TERMS OF CONVENTIONAL CHILD-CARING WORK Homer Folks, Secretary, State Charities Aid Association, New York I take it that the chairman desired me to get an entirely objective view of our ordinary child-caring activities, to lay aside all considerations of sentiment, all the natural inclination to take pride in one's own work, and to make a perfectly coldblooded, even hard-boiled, estimate of our work in its proper perspective. So far as I can see, the only way to get a new perspective of it is to try to see it, not as an isolated set of activities, but as part of the general subject of child welfare. We have not been very successful in reaching a consensus of opinion in our field, and I think the reason is that we have not seen our work objectively. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the nearest we have come to the consensus of opinion is to believe in one set of principles and to practice the opposite. When we take into account the full cost of caring for children apart from their own homes including necessary supervision, the question should always occur to us: Would this amount of money, if spent in aiding the child in its own home, accomplish as good or better results? When I wrote the little volume on The Care of Destitute, Neglected and Delinquent Children, in 1902, I said, "The forces which produce poverty, neglect, and crime seem to be beyond our reach." I wish now to publicly retract that statement, and perhaps this change registers a change on the part of many of those who have been engaged in child-caring or child-welfare activities. It is perfectly evident that many of the forces which tend toward poverty, neglect, and crime are, to a substantial degree, within our control. Every day children are being saved from becoming homeless; every family-welfare society, every mother's aid worker, every probation officer, every health and clinic visitor, every nutrition worker, is reducing the number of children who otherwise would have to be removed from their own homes. The fundamental divergence in the child-caring field is not between those who care for children by boarding out and placing out systems on the one hand and those who would care for them in institutions; the real, fundamental divergence is between those who readily, or even lightly, remove a child from its own home and those, on the other hand, who do so with the most reluctance and only after all other efforts have failed. must not, however more valiant in removing these dangers when she sees them than we would be. Second, a mother always believes in her child to the end, always has confidence that there is good in him, always is ready to help him to regain lost ground. This attitude of confidence toward an individual is one of the essential conditions of rehabilitation. Whenever the question arises of removing a child from its home, I wish that three questions might be asked and objectively answered: first, is there any real and conclusive reason why the child should not stay where it is? Second, what is lacking in his present home which we deem necessary for the child's care, and just how is that particular thing going to be provided under our proposed plan? Third how much will our proposed plan cost and would that sum, if used to assist the child in his own home, secure better results? I wish that the charters of societies and institutions for aiding children and the terms of all bequests for child-caring work could be so altered that the agency would be equally free to assist the child in its own home or to assist it elsewhere, and that the money would be equally available in one case as in the other. with "Ev det to 1 gro ma m of 0 S 1 B. IN TERMS OF A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF PERSONALITY AND William Healy, Director, Judge Baker Foundation, Boston. New values and new standards in our field have recently been set forth clearly enough by a number of authors. We are attempting nowadays to gain more knowledge through digging away at the facts as they may be unearthed, the real facts of child life, with the directly consequent development of an altogether better understanding of the causes of the special problems that we have to meet. One of the main contributions has been in the appreciation of individual differences and in the formulation of these as they show in abilities, mental balance, and in the content of inner mental life. Yes, and now we are studying the varieties of mental experiences, even as they differ among children in one family, and ideational differences, and the differences in mental habits, and altogether in reactive tendencies. In illustration, we had the chance to study two brothers, a very interesting case in which the reaction to evil communications was totally different-one of the brothers developing a mental conflict and bad behavior which made him impossible at home and made him feel great disgust with the brother who readily communicated, in turn, the bad phrases heard. The first boy, on account of his overt misconduct, had to be placed away from home and only after a considerable time made a recovery, the other boy said what he pleased under his breath and was regarded as the good one. Experience by this time has taught us very thoroughly that the ordinary formal mental examination is only one small part, and often the least important part, of a real mental study. We might know by looking inward ourselves that the essential features of our own life, and consequently of a child's life, are concerned with matters of ideation, particularly habitual and recurrent ideation, and with imagery and with definite mental traits, such as susceptibility to emotional reactions or qualities, such as suggestibility. Consider, by way of example, the potency of the instinct of imitation and what it means for character formation. And we may here only consider it in connection with one aspect of life, that of the influence of parents. A philosopher has said, "Everyone bears within himself an image of woman, derived from his mother; it determines his attitude towards women, whether to honor them, to despise them or to remain indifferent to them." The mother image is a vitally potent affair-a whole group of modern students of psychology insist. This, then, is a mightily important matter for mothers to know and for social workers to think of in providing foster mothers. "Children have to imitate someone in order to develop their own standards of behavior." Institutional life has to be viewed in the light of the foregoing thought. Many of us have observed the results but few have thought clearly to the causes. One author suggests that teachers and caretakers cannot lavish on a large group of children the love of parents—and, of course, even the love of good foster parents. This leads to a sense of inferiority. Such children do not know that they are important, for they have never seemed important to anyone. Imitation of parents is the natural thing in family life. Who have these institutional children to imitate?-only distant models, perhaps dwelled on in the imagination. Perhaps, as this author suggests, this is really one of the great causes of the stunting of mental growth. He points out that in an institution there is wholesale imitation of children by children. And another standard of child welfare work has to do with the effect upon children of the untruthfulness of parents and elders. Our collected material shows many examples of disastrous influences, and we feel sure that not nearly enough public attention has been drawn to the very definite results. The very dilemma that a child is in with the lying parent is significant. If the child does not take to lying itself then in its better standards there is already criticism of the parent. And if it does lie then its behavior in this respect is misconduct. We shall not soon forget the bitter statement of a girl, years afterwards, who was brought to an institution door by her mother under a misrepresentation, and was left inside. Probation officers and social workers of all kinds who would have a good influence upon children should never forget their own integrity in this matter as a bulwark of faith and respect. Day dreaming so frequently indulged in, is looked at as a bare fact, possibly somewhat interesting, but with little thought of the world of ideation that is being built up as a structure, often a firm structure through the formation of habit, in mental life. We are learning to know the value of inquiring into this ideational world and of directing it. Heaven knows that day dreaming is not to be looked at askance, as one newspaper writer recently suggests in a fearful frame of mind, it has been a force in many of us in the building up of fine ideas and has afforded much worthy mental satisfaction. Childhood fears are well recognized among specialists in mental hygiene for the dangers that they are, and the common sense of many mothers has led them away from the practices of a generation ago, but still the great public remains to be reasonably educated about this. The contagiousness of fear is very real. There is danger, not only in the sort of communications that ignorant servants indulge in, but also in the atmosphere that is engendered through the timidity of weak and neurotic mothers. There can be no doubt that fear is one large cause of the neuroses, and that the evil influences of the emotion of fear may be largely prevented by rational upbringing. Is it not a fact that Christian Science and other religious or semi-religious organizations are very largely successful through their consciously directed combatting of fear idea CHILDREN tions? On my way to this conference I saw an exquisite example of the effect of engendering fear through the modern method of health campaigning in the schools. A most intelligent and very healthy little girl has her weight chart, and the person in the school who reviews these charts calls her attention to the fact that she is in the "D" class, she is in some danger because she has lost weight in the last month, the last hot month of the school year. The child goes home in a perfect panic, the unnamed danger preying upon her imagination. To this I say, most emphatically, that no child health work can be decently carried on, in this day and generation unless one remembers that human beings are minds as well as bodies, and that children's minds are tremendously plastic and to be thought of in terms of hygiene as much and perhaps more than their bodies. Perhaps a good illustration of the recent more scientific attempt to understand processes, in sociology as well as in mental life, might be to consider the studies that some of us have attempted to make of why gangs of boys hold together, definite gangs. We used to say a good deal about boys being naturally gregarious and about this being an age of gang life and so on, but one finds such general considerations to be of very little help in understanding what gang life frequently brings forth in the way of conduct. If one does, then, make a real inquiry, one frequently finds quite subtle factors, bonds of union which are quite unsuspected. And the alleged fact of universal gregariousness hardly looms so large under these circumstances. One finds the bond to be very specific matters, secret practices, as well as possibly some hidden habitat or mutual possessions. And this brings us to the whole matter of sex ideation in childhood. The newer point of view in this matter is that we are dealing with affairs, most frequently, of mental life, of ideation, of imagery, and not merely with physical feelings and habits. This is not the place to enter into this most vital subject, but I do want to insist to you that what we have learned in recent years that the very greatest of value for the correction of sex misconduct has to do with the finding out of what the mental content is and the ascertaining of, not only the sources of mental contamination, but also the actual form of the contamination. It is a truism to state that if parents do not instruct children in sex matters someone else will, but we ought not to rest content until parents generally appreciate the fact, and then the next step is to gain better understanding of what makes for a healthy mental content in these matters, or, if there is trouble already, how to uproot and supplant acquired unfortunate ideation. Nowadays I wonder if we insist enough upon mental rest—in these days of quick transportation and many public amusements and the vast experiences that our children have through the movies and the modern bustle of life. "A child's mind is burdened with so many problems of adaptation and conduct while society is shaping instinctive nature," as Tridon says in his little book which contains so many suggestions for a healthy child life, that we should take special pains to see the values of quietude and thoughtfulness. And all through one does very clearly see the great necessities for insisting on the constructive aspects of developing children's character, emphasizing the do rather than the don't. Again, I like what Tridon says, "People with the puritanical ideas harp on the protection needed by immature minds, but they never make any positive suggestion for developing minds to some greater maturity so that the world can be withstood." Of course this paragraph could be expanded to a whole paper dealing simply with this idea. e effect of eschools. Derson in he "D" last hot danger health rs that ously their S a S bi fir SOI ho! dot life, gatl gath the thirt V VALUES IN PSYCHOLOGY OF CHILD LABOR-FULLER 85 adamental point that I would insist on over and over, as a general point, We are not nowadays, at least very few of us, asking for any great extension of bed, A hospit OF CHILD LABOR Raymond G. Fuller, Director, Department of Publicity, National Child Labor Committee, New York. With progress in child labor reform the conception of child labor has broadened, and with the broadening of this conception the program of reform has expanded. The field of vision in child labor reform includes much that was not there, and much more that was not there conspicuously, at the beginning of the century. This is partly due to accomplishment of first tasks, partly to enlightening experience, and partly to increasing knowledge about the child himself. A rough outline of child labor and its problem would run somewhat as follows: 1. Direct effects (or hazards). These group themselves into physical, mental, moral. 2. Indirect effects or deprivations. These are chiefly loss of schooling and loss of play, constituting together an educational loss, if we take "educational" in its broadest sense. Child labor might be defined as the 3. Substitutes for child labor. The principal substitutes are play, schooling, and suitable work. These are all educational. absence of its substitutes. 4. Methods of reform may be classified as prohibitory, preventive, and substitutional. Methods of each kind are necessary. Establishment of the substitutes for child labor in the lives of all children is both a goal and a method of child labor reform -the method of overcoming evil with good. Vital to the solution of the child labor problem is an increased popular appreciation of childhood itself, and this presupposes, of course, a better understanding of childhood. In spite of parental love for children, in spite of the claim on the part of society to have a special place in its heart for children, children even today are visited with vast cruelty and abuse-not a conscious cruelty and abuse, not a brutal cruelty |