For Better Statistics on

Rheumatic Fever

Noting that rheumatic fever has "vast consequences and social effects on the health of the child and the adult," the Twelfth Pan American Sanitary Conference, held at Caracas, Venezuela, has approved a recommendation that physicians be required to report cases of this disease to the health authorities of their community. The recommendation was made by the Uruguayan delegation at the suggestion of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, as a result of a study of rheumatic fever made by the American International Institute for the Protection of Childhood.

Nebraska Legislative Council Studies Child-Welfare

Laws

The Nebraska Legislature in February 1947 passed a resolution recognizing the desirability of clarifying and strengthening the State laws to protect the interests of children and to promote their welfare.

It directed the legislative council to continue its study of Nebraska childwelfare laws, to compare them with those of other States, to seek the cooperation of public and private agencies and of individuals concerned with the welfare of children, and to hold public hearings to obtain the views of those interested.

The council is directed further to report to the 1949 legislature its findings on existing laws and its recommendations for the clarification of existing laws and for new legislation needed for the benefit of children within the State.

France Provides Health Services to Mothers and Children

(Continued from page 11) physician, who is himself responsible both to the educational authorities and the public-health authorities of the department.

The results of all examinations must be reported at definite intervals to the specified public authorities.

Special school health centers to be established

Under the regulations of November 1946, all medical and dental examinations are to be given in special "school health centers," one or more of which

must be established in designated cities and towns. At least one trained social worker must be attached to each center.

Supervision over the health of the teachers and other members of the school staff who come in contact with the children was ordered to begin October 1, dren was ordered to begin October 1,

1947.

A joint project

The cost of examining the children, teachers, and other members of the staffs is borne jointly by the National Government, the departments, and the communes. Aid is given by the National Government to communes for the installation of school health centers.

Annual inspection of all school buildings, public or private, must be made by the local school physician, and reports sent not later than December 31 of each year to the prefect of the department.

The school health work is administered jointly by the Minister of Education and the Minister of Public Health, with the participation of a national advisory commission, which was to be appointed under regulations issued in March 1947.

These plans and directives are being gradually put into operation with funds that were appropriated by law for the first quarter of 1947.

State Plans for Maternal and Child Health Services Show Expected Variations

(Continued from page 9)

when emergency maternity and infar care is discontinued the medical-social personnel will remain to give full tim to maternal and child-health services.

HEALTH EDUCATION

Twenty-one State plans provided for employment of a total of 27 healt educators. Of these, 4 were designate) as directors, 1 as an assistant director 9 as consultants, 3 as public-healt. educators, and 1 as school health educa tor; 9 were not designated. The serv

ices of these workers vary greatly Some specially qualified workers fund tion entirely as school health educators working closely with State and loca departments of education, teachertraining colleges, and the public schools. in the preparation of curriculums and special materials for the improvement of health teaching. The work of others is limited entirely to public-health education, which consists of the preparation of material used through the various publicity channels and in keeping the public informed of the service and progress of public-health agencies. A third group combines these two func tions.

This summary can give only a limited idea of the maternal and child-health services that the States provided for in their plans for the fiscal year 1947. It represents only such data as can be tabulated. The fascinating details of how these services are made available to the individual mother and child are given in the plans as prepared by the States. The plans show also the relation of these services to the total State and local health program.

Some of the gaps in service are due, not to lack of interest or of money, but rather to lack of trained personnel. One of the fields in which progress has been especially retarded by this condition is mental health. It is evident that a program of training is needed in a number of fields before enough competent personnel can be obtained to provide the health services that the mothers and children need.

Reprints available in about 5 weeks

FOR

WHEN I WAS A CHILD; an anlogy, by Edward Wagenknecht. E. Dutton & Co. New York, 1946. 477

Early childhood memories, as Walter la Mare says in his introduction to is collection of them, of people who t only are exceptional but who can ite, make fascinating reading. Not ly that, but they offer us a wonderful portunity to observe the workings children's minds. Even making alwance for the fact that such recollecons are seen through the colored glass

the writer's later experiences, we get me intimate flashes of insight into hat it is like to be a child-something y adult who has anything to do with ildren welcomes eagerly.

Forty-one authors are gathered here, epresenting a wide range of backround. There is the lonely figure of ttle John Ruskin in the garden decked . . . with magical splendor f abundant fruit, fresh green, soft amer, and rough-bristled crimson lustered pearl and pendent ruby"lifferent from the Garden of Eden in hat "in this one, all the fruit was foridden." There is Middleton Murry, who "could not sleep without a knotted owel for company," to protect him from the frightful night terrors to which he was subject.

When Eric Gill's mother accused him of something he was not guilty of, he vas flabbergasted. For if with one's own mother it was impossible to put the ching right. what frightful

things might be possible in the world outside where no sympathy and understanding could be drawn upon..

It seemed as though the very earth were reeling and insecure."

Marjorie Bowen gives us another picture of insecurity, that of the bewilderment of a child whose parents were separating. Of her mother she says, "When I was with her I always seemed to be naughty." Her baby sister's "sweetness and beauty were supposed to be in painful contrast to my plainness and villainous disposition." Of her father, whom she adored, she mysteriously saw less and less.

Mary Ellen Chase, recalling a New England Sunday in the nineties; Kathleen Coyle, coming home to her Roman Catholic mother a devotee of the Salvation Army, after being hospitalized in Glasgow; Lizette Woodworth Reese, evoking the very smell and taste of Christmas-the "thick, sugar-topped loaves, fat and black with raisins"; Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, explaining,

IN

YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS CANADA; a reference manual, by George Tuttle (1946. 27 pp. $1.50); YOUTH AND AND RECREATION; new plans for new times (1946. 220 YOUTH pp. $1.25); AND HEALTH; a positive health program for Canada (1946. 93 pp. $1); YOUNG CANADA AND RELIGION (1945. 114 pp. $1). Prepared for The Canadian Youth Commission. The Ryerson Press. Toronto. This series includes also "Youth Challenges the Educators," and "Youth and Jobs for Canada," both of which were discussed in The Child, June 1946 (pp. 192-193).

THE OPERATION OF HOISTING APPARATUS. Report No. 7 on occupational hazards to young workers. Child Labor Series No. 11. Child Labor and Youth Employment Branch, Division of Labor Standards, U. S. Department of Labor. Washington, 1946. 37 pp.

This report, which was made available in mimeographed form in May 1946 by the Children's Bureau, served as the factual basis for Hazardous Occupations Order No. 7, issued under the

child-labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The investigation was made by the Bureau's Industrial Division, which under the President's Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1946 has since become the Child Labor and Youth Employment Branch of Labor's Division of Labor Standards.

Child Study Association of America Lists Pamphlets

The following pamphlets and reprints, among others, are available from the Child Study Association of America, 221 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York 19, N. Y., at the prices indicated: Discipline Through Affection, by Arline B. Auerbach (10 cents); Discipline, What Is It? by Helen Steers Burgess (15 cents); Looking at the Comics, by Josette Frank and Mrs. Hugh Grant Strauss (20 cents); Preadolescents: What Makes Them Tick, by Fritz Redl (20 cents); The Comics as a Social Force, by Sidonie M. Gruenberg (10 cents); The Kind of Parent Teachers Like, by Irvin C. Poley (10 cents); Today's Children-for Tomorrow's World, by Arline B. Auerbach (30) cents); What Makes Good Habits? (15 cents); When Children Ask About Sex, by the staff of the Child Study Association (25 cents).

Our new volume of The Child, volume 12, starts this month with a healthy, happy baby on the cover. Aiming to have every child born in the United States as fine as this one, all the States, in cooperation with the Federal Government, are providing maternal and child-health services under the Social Security Act. The photograph is by Philip Bonn for the U. S. Children's Bureau.

Other credits:

Page 3, Upper, Library of Congress photograph, by Arthur Rothstein for OWI; lower, photograph by Philip Bonn for U. S. Children's Bureau.

Page 5, photograph for U. S. Children's Bureau.

Pages 7-9, sketches by Alba Leiss. Page 11, Library of Congress photograph, by Howard Hollem for OWI.

WILL YOU HELP?

I have just come back from Europe after looking in the faces of hundreds and thousands of big and little children. They were children in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and France. They were children who passed me on the streets, children in schools, clinics, hospitals, in war orphanages and other child-care

centers.

I went to Europe to find out for the International Children's Emergency Fund what these children most desperately need. I know, now, what that is.

The children in the cities and villages of these war-stricken countries need many things, but of all their needs milk comes first. They need milk in great quantities. They need it now. Since the war, almost the only milk they have had has come from UNRRA. But UNRRA's food has already stopped coming in many places. On June 30, it will cease altogether. Unless great volumes of milk start to move from countries such as ours that are lush with supplies, there are going to be millions of children who may be brought down to starvation levels that were all too common before UNRRA started.

Milk is first; then come many other needs. Shoes, for instance. I never saw so many poorly-shod or barefoot children in a city as I saw in Warsaw. Drugs and medical equipment are seriously lacking. Children's hospitals need beds and bedding. Doctors and nurses need coats and uniforms. Almost everywhere I went I heard a plea for diapers. "Ship us bolts of cloth," one medical director asked, "and we will make up the diapers ourselves." In many places there is little or no cod

liver oil.

This is the report I brought back to the International Children's Emer

gency Fund. This fund was created by the General Assembly of the United Nations to be the channel through which contributions from governments and citizens can flow to the relief of children in war-stricken countries.

The fund will use its money to buy foods, medical supplies, and other things, and help these countries extend and improve their health programs for children. Because the needs are so great, a priority plan for relieving them has to be agreed on. As a step toward such a plan, I went abroad to learn what children's workers on the

job say are the most urgent needs of children.

Already the United States Congr has authorized a minimum of $15.00 000 and a maximum of $40,000.0 this Government's contribution to fund. A number of other countries. cluding Australia, Canada, New Z land, Norway, Switzerland, and United Kingdom have agreed in pr ciple to support the fund and are L deciding on how much their contrib After the governmen tion can be. have made their decisions, an app will be made to citizens throughout t world to open their purses and po out their money for the rescue of more than 3,000,000 war orphans a the many other millions of children whom the war has left its deep scars I know, when that appeal is made the fathers and mothers and childre on this side of the Atlantic, there wi be no hesitation, no begrudging. Eve though few of our people have seen the stunted bodies, the listless spirits of th little boys and girls of Europe wh need our help, our imaginations an quick and our hearts are large.

Marths M. Elian

MARTHA M. ELIOT, M. D.,
Associate Chief.

U. S. Children's Bureau,

U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1947

E

VERY experienced child-welfare worker is sometimes tormented

by doubts of the efficacy of fosterhome care for a child who must be cared. for away from his own home. In fact, a worker viewing the end result of years of foster care for a child will sometimes remark that the child could not have been much worse off if he had remained in the home from which he was removed.

It is true that many children in foster homes have grown up happy and well adjusted; these help to preserve our faith in what we are trying to do. And some are never able to adjust at all.

There are other children, however, who for some years after going into a foster home seem to be well adjusted to it until adolescence. At about that time the boy or girl becomes more than normally moody, irritable, and defiant. Often such a youngster, who for years has had only a desultory contact with his own kinfolk, or none at all, will suddenly go to great lengths to look them up, and sometimes will even begin to act like one of his parents.

One such child is Mary, who was placed in a boarding home at the age of 4. Her father had left home some time before, and no one knew what became of him. Her mother, a promiscuous woman, had often entertained men at home even before her husband left her. This continued afterward, and there is no doubt that the child knew much of her mother's intimate affairs.

Mary adjusted fairly well to her foster home, was sweet, obedient, never a real problem. To everyone's relief the mother visited her only rarely. The child seldom, if ever, asked about her mother. The social worker rarely mentioned the mother to the little girl, and the foster mother did so only when she expressed her disapproval of the mother's visiting.

Condensed from paper given at the New York State Conference of Social Welfare, New York City, November 1946. Copies of the complete paper may be had by writing to the U. S. Children's Bureau.