Childcare

“ Principle 4 The child shall enjoy the benefits of social security. He shall be entitled to grow and develop in health; to this end, special care and protection shall be provided both to him and to his mother, including adequate pre-natal and post-natal care. The child shall have the right to adequate nutrition, housing, recreation and medical services.
Principle 5 The child who is physically, mentally or socially handicapped shall be given the special treatment, education and care required by his/her particular condition. ”

“ Because the person who enjoys a healthy, happy childhood is most likely to become a healthy, well-adjusted adult, we do well to recall our obligation—as parents and as a Nation—to protect, nurture, and provide for our children.
Most parents are keenly aware of their responsibilities of providing food, shelter, clothing, and basic health care—the fundamental material support that is essential to every youngster's physical and emotional well-being. Yet parents also have a responsibility to nurture the spiritual and intellectual development of the child whom God has entrusted to their care. ”

“ Sound public policy must support the family in its mission of child care. To do so effectively, public policy must increase and strengthen, not narrow and dilute, the variety of child care options open to families. It must help ensure that child care serves as an adjunct and buttress to parental guidance and love; that it reflects as far as possible the actual preferences of parents for the personal care of their precious offspring ”

“ And Head Start continues to improve in other ways. Partnerships between local Head Start, child care and preschool are flourishing on the local level to further the goal of providing working parents with access to full-day, full-year high quality care. This innovation is critical — With welfare reform, Head Start parents are working parents and must be served accordingly.
Early Head Start continues to grow and meet the needs of babies and toddlers. ”

“ Perhaps the day will come when each college for women will have its endowed chair of motherhood, when the care and feeding of infants will be taught in our normal and high schools for girls. At present, certain colleges offer a course in psychology which prepares young women to guide, [Pg 3] mentally and spiritually, the children they will some day bear. In a few city schools, particularly in the congested districts, girls are now taught how to bathe, dress and feed infants, largely for the purpose of having the message of sanitation and hygiene carried home to the tenement house mother. ”

“ Babies and older children with special health needs such as severe chronic illnesses, birth impairments, and related conditions often require early intervention and highly specialized care. A family-centered, comprehensive program of medical, educational, and social services in the community and in the home may also be needed. ”

“ The proper management of children is a vital question,—a mother’s question,—and the most important that can be brought under the consideration of a parent; and, strange to say, it is one that has been more neglected than any other. How many mothers undertake the responsible management of children without previous instruction, or without forethought ”

“ The authority of the parent being thus fully established in regard to all those things which, being of paramount importance in respect to the child's present and future welfare, ought to be regulated by the comparative far-seeing wisdom of the parent, with little regard to the evanescent fancies of the child, it is on every account best, in respect to all other things, to allow to the children the largest possible indulgence. ”

“ In this effort to improve the well-being and future of our children, I earnestly call for cooperative and voluntary action from all those who make maternal and child health their profession, from the States through their health care resources, from the organizations of private citizens who devote themselves to the health of mothers and children, and particularly from parents themselves, whose attention to their children's needs and personal examples of healthful behavior are vital factors in the protection of child health. ”

“ But they have other things to do; and, while they are busy, the baby would be better off in the baby-garden than in the street. To those who prefer to maintain the private school and the private kindergarten, a private baby-garden would be equally available. "But we do not want it. We prefer to care for our children at home," they reply. This means that they prefer to have their little ones in their own nursery, under the care of the mother, via the nurse. ”

“ I am quite of opinion that if mothers were sound in constitution, and bestowed the requisite care upon the maintenance of their health, we should hear little of diseases of children. In children, as well as in parent, the rules of health must be carried out,” and their neglect cannot fail to bring with it a heavy retribution. ”

“ It is very important to most mothers that their young children should be removed from their care during certain school hours; and it is very useful for quite young children to be subjected to the discipline of a school, and to intercourse with other children of their own age. And, with a suitable teacher, it is no matter how early children are sent to school, provided their health is not endangered by impure air, too much confinement, and too great mental stimulus, which is the chief danger of the present age. ”

“ According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of all mothers with a child under one year of age work. Today one family in six is headed by a single, divorced, or widowed woman.
Americans have responded to these changes in a number of ways, reflecting the many options parents desire and need. Family members-a sibling or grandparents-and students provide both full- and part-time day care. Churches have developed effective day care programs that supplement custodial care with the religious atmosphere many parents seek. ”

“ For these nurseries attempt to minister only to physical wants. Although the needs of the child at infancy seem to be largely physical, we know, that from the day of its birth, the infant is getting impressions and forming habits. The manner in which we satisfy his needs, the habits which he forms under our care, shape his future character,—and yet, the training of the so-called trained nurses in charge of the average nursery, enables them to attend to the physical needs only. ”

“ In the nursery, children are taught the care of their bodies, the use of language, the nature and properties of the world around them, and many social and moral duties, all before books are used. Then it is a mother’s duty to select the school-teacher, and so to supervise, that health and intellectual training shall be duly secured. To this add the duties of training and controlling the helpers in the nursery and kitchen, and to a housekeeper and mother the duties of an educator stand first on the roll of responsibilities. ”

“ Our steadfast commitment to the health and welfare of our children is especially important for those who have special health care needs. Children who suffer from chronic physical, developmental, behavioral, and emotional conditions require specialized services in their communities. I encourage parents and caretakers to recognize these health problems, to obtain specialized care as necessary, and to monitor their children's conditions closely in order to give them every advantage toward leading a successful, fulfilling life. ”

“ An ambition to promote the welfare of children reconciles parents to part with them at that tender age when they ought to command more constant care than they generally need at a more advanced time of life; and this ambition is so strong that it will even cause little girls to be consigned to the blighting atmosphere of a crowded schoolroom, there to bewail the loss of the warm hearth, or the airy room of their own homes, and all the comforts which depend upon a mother's solicitude. ”

“ The prospective and nursing mother should receive especial consideration. It should be known and recognized that her requirements for wholesome food, and above all wholesome surroundings, are necessary for the normal development of her child and for her own physical safety. How can she,—perhaps already a mother of several children, have the needed rest and time to read or walk in the fresh air, unless the family co-operate with her? It is so easy for the husband to direct the children at these times and at all times, as to the care the mother is deserving. ”

“ The records of our medical examinations of school children bring out the same fact, and emphasize the necessity not only for school clinics on an immensely larger scale than at present, but also for additional medical and nursing care in connection with child-bearing and during the pre-school period, which would discover defects and disease at an earlier stage, and would secure the provision not only of early preventive treatment, but also of more systematic improvement of the sanitary environment of maternity and childhood. ”

“ Let every parent of every child make it his business to learn and heed the laws of physical and mental hygiene as applicable to his child, with a view to insuring that the child shall not be afflicted with preventable mental backwardness. ”

“ Think for a moment of the contrast between the working-class mother of five children living in a small city tenement, and the mother of an equal number of children in easy circumstances, [Pg 154] living in a residential suburb, and having domestic servants, a nurse, and a physician always available. The two mothers probably differ but little in their knowledge of the hygiene of infancy; but the one has helpers to ensure scrupulous cleanliness, to prevent over-fatigue of the nursing mother, to detect the first sign of infantile illness and provide the needed action ”

“ And in the prevention of infant mortality and of the even more serious handicapping of the up-growing child produced by the factors of infant mortality, we need to bring to bear all our medical and hygienic knowledge, and to realise that until every mother in the land is furnished with the elementary requirements, domestic, sanitary, social, and medical, for rearing a healthy family, we have no right to mental comfort [Pg 156] while enjoying these elementary needs of family life ourselves. ”

“ Wouldn't you build an elaborate nursery for those children? Wouldn't you engage the very best nurses and teachers? Wouldn't you want the cleanest, quietest garden for them to play or sleep in? Of course you would.
"That is our attitude. We have at last recognized babies as a permanent class. They are always here, about a fifth of the population. And we, their mothers, have at last ensured to these, our babies, the best accommodation known to our time. It improves as we learn, of course." ”

“ The very fact that children are born at longer intervals is not only beneficial to the mother's health, and therefore to the children's general welfare, but it has been proved to have a marked and prolonged influence on the physical development of children. ”

“ Such few data as we have of babies and young children in properly managed day nurseries, give a far higher record of health and happiness. Not the sick baby in the pauper hospital, not the lonely baby in the orphan asylum; but the baby who has not lost his mother, but who adds to mother's love, calm, wise, experienced professional care. ”

“ Verging as they were on the threshold of manhood and womanhood, they scarcely needed the care and attention due to smaller children, but I realized I think to the full, what so many parents have realized—that the responsibilities for the training of children of an older growth are greater and more burdensome than the physical care of the infant. ”

“ Our children's state of health is, in many ways, a measure of our success and character as a people. Thus, on Child Health Day, we reaffirm our commitment to helping every American youngster enjoy the best possible start in life—beginning with high quality health care throughout pregnancy for expectant mothers and extending through each child's formative years. ”

“ At the age of two years the child is placed in the infantile department of the national school, but still continues under the special care of its nurse and parental censor. When the child reaches the age of five years full matriculation takes place, as with the expiration of the infantile term, self-care as well as self-control have become sufficiently impressed for emulous improvement under the exampled lead of their elders. With the full accomplishment of ten years, the youthful term commences, with an easy initiation into the life sustaining responsibilities of community association. ”

“ In early infancy, as in advanced old age, the hold on life is slight, normal and abnormal are soon interchanged, and there is needed not only more knowledge on the part of mothers and nurses, and even of physicians, of the hygienic side of medicine as applied to the physiological life of the mother and her infant, but also personal care and assistance to enable the mother to apply the useful information and advice given by the public health nurse. ”

“ Only those of us who have followed the work of specialists in children’s diseases—pediatrists, as they are known in the medical profession—can appreciate what marvels have been worked in children born without the birthright of good health. Now these men are going farther. They stand behind the twentieth-century campaign for public education among women in the care and [Pg 84] feeding of children. They have rent the veil of mystery which so long has surrounded medical learning ”