Address to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection.

SOMETHING more than a year ago I called together a small group of representative men and women to take the initial steps in organization of this Conference on Child Health and Protection. Under the able chairmanship of Secretary Wilbur, and the executive direction of Dr. [Harry E.] Barnard, organization was perfected and enlarged until by the fall of last year something over 1,200 of our fellow citizens were enlisted from every field of those who have given a lifetime of devotion to public measures for care of childhood. These skillful and devoted friends of children have given unsparingly and unselfishly of their time and thought in research and collection of the knowledge and experience in the problems involved. Their task has been magnificently performed, and today they will place before you such a wealth of material as was never before brought together.

I am satisfied that the 3 days of your conference here will result in producing to our country from this material a series of conclusions adjustments of unprecedented service in behalf of childhood, the benefits of which will be felt for a full generation.

I wish to express my profound appreciation to all those who have so generously contributed the time and thought and labor to this preparation, and to you for giving your time to its consideration. The reward that accrues to you is the consciousness of something done unselfishly to lighten the burdens of children, to set their feet upon surer paths to health and well-being and happiness. For many years I have hoped for such a national consideration as this. You comprise the delegates appointed by our Federal departments and by the Governors of our States, the mayors of our cities, and the representatives of our great national associations, our medical and public health professions. In your hands rest the knowledge and authority outside of the home itself.

In addressing you whom I see before me here in this auditorium, I am mindful also of the unseen millions listening in their homes, who likewise are truly members of this Conference, for these problems are theirs. It is their children whose welfare is involved, its helpful services are for them, and their cooperation is essential in carrying out a united and nationwide effort in behalf of the children.

We approach all problems of childhood with affection. Theirs is the province of joy and good humor. They are the most wholesome part of the race, the sweetest, for they are fresher from the hands of God. Whimsical, ingenious, mischievous, we live a life of apprehension as to what their opinion may be of us; a life of defense against their terrifying energy. We put them to bed with a sense of relief and a lingering of devotion. We envy them the freshness of adventure and discovery of life. We mourn over the disappointments they will meet.

The fundamental purpose of this Conference is to set forth an understanding of those safeguards which will assure to them health in mind and body. There are safeguards and services to childhood which can be provided by the community, the State, or the Nation--all of which are beyond the reach of the individual parent. We approach these problems in no spirit of diminishing the responsibilities and values or invading the sanctities of those primary safeguards to child-life--their homes and their mothers. After we have determined every scientific fact, after we have erected every public safeguard, after we have constructed every edifice for education or training or hospitalization or play, yet all these things are but a tithe of the physical, moral, and spiritual gifts which motherhood gives and home confers. None of these things carry that affection, that devotion of soul, which is the great endowment from mothers. Our purpose here today is to consider and give our mite of help to strengthen her hand that her boy and girl may have a fair chance.

Our country has a vast majority of competent mothers. I am not so sure of the majority of competent fathers. But what we are concerned with here are things that are beyond her power. That is what Susie and John take on when out from under her watchful eye. She cannot count the bacteria in the milk. She cannot detect the typhoid which comes through the faucet, or the mumps that pass 'round the playground. She cannot individually control the instruction of our schools or the setting up of community-wide remedy for the deficient and handicapped child. But she can insist upon officials who hold up standards of protection and service to her children--and one of your jobs is to define these standards and tell her what they are. She can be trusted to put public officials to the acid test of the infant mortality and service to children in the town-when you set some standard for her to go by.

These questions of child health and protection are a complicated problem requiring much learning and much action. And we need have great concern over this matter. Let no one believe that these are questions which should not stir a nation; that they are below the dignity of statesmen or governments. If we could have but one generation of properly born, trained, educated, and healthy children, a thousand other problems of government would vanish. We would assure ourselves of healthier minds in more vigorous bodies, to direct the energies of our Nation to yet greater heights of achievement. Moreover, one good community nurse will save a dozen future policemen.

Our problem falls into three groups: First, the protection and stimulation of the normal child; second, aid to the physically defective and handicapped child; third, the problems of the delinquent child.

Statistics can well be used to give emphasis to our problem. One of your committees reports that out of 45 million children:

35 million are reasonably normal.

6 million are improperly nourished.

1 million have defective speech.

1 million have weak or damaged hearts.

675,000 present behavior problems.

450,000 are mentally retarded.

382,000 are tubercular.

342,000 have impaired hearing.

18,000 are totally deaf.

300,000 are crippled.

50,000 are partially blind.

14,000 are wholly blind.

200,000 are delinquent.

500,000 are dependent.

And so on, to a total of at least 10 millions of deficients, more than 80 percent of whom are not receiving the necessary attention, though our knowledge and experience show that these deficiencies can be prevented and remedied to a high degree. The reports you have before you are not only replete with information upon each of these groups, they are also vivid with recommendation for remedy. And if we do not perform our duty to these children, we leave them dependent, or we provide from them the major recruiting ground for the army of ne'er-do-wells and criminals.

But that we be not discouraged let us bear in mind that there are 35 million reasonably normal, cheerful human electrons radiating joy and mischief and hope and faith. Their faces are turned toward the light-theirs is the life of great adventure. These are the vivid, romping, everyday children, our own and our neighbors' with all their strongly marked differences--and the more differences the better. The more they charge us with their separate problems the more we know they are vitally and humanly alive.

From what we know of foreign countries, I am convinced that we have a right to assume that we have a larger proportion of happy, normal children than any other country in the world. And also, on the bright side, your reports show that we have 1 ½ million specially gifted children. There lies the future leadership of the Nation if we devote ourselves to their guidance.

In the field of deficient and handicapped children, advancing knowledge and care can transfer them more and more to the happy lot of normal children. And these children, less fortunate as they are, have a passion for their full rights which appeals to the heart of every man and woman. We must get to the cause of their handicaps from the beginnings of their lives. We must extend the functions of our schools and institutions to help them as they grow. We must enlarge the services of medical inspection and clinics, expand the ministrations of the family doctor in their behalf, and very greatly increase the hospital facilities for them. We must not leave one of them uncared for.

There are also the complex problems of the delinquent child. We need to turn the methods of inquiry from the punishment of delinquency to the causes of delinquency. It is not the delinquent child that is at the bar of judgment, but society itself.

Again, there are the problems of the orphaned children. Fortunately, we are making progress in this field in some of the States through the preservation for them of the home by support of their mothers or by placing them in homes and thus reducing the industrial services.

There are vast problems of education in relation to physical and mental health. With so many of the early responsibilities of the home drained away by the rapid changes in our modern life, perhaps one of the most important problems we shall need to meet in the next few years is how to return to our children, through our schools and extra-scholastic channels, that training for parenthood which once was the natural teaching of the home. With the advance of science and advancement of knowledge, we have learned a thousand things that the individual, both parent and child, must know in his own self-protection. And at once the relation of our educational system to the problem envisages itself, and it goes further. The ill-nourished child is in our country not the product of poverty; it is largely the product of ill-instructed children and ignorant parents. Our children all differ in character, in capacity, in inclination. If we would give them their full chance they must have that service in education which develops their special qualities. They must have vocational guidance.

Again, there are the problems of child labor. Industry must not rob our children of their rightful heritage. Any labor which stunts growth, either physical or mental, that limits education, that deprives children of the right of comradeship, of joy and play, is sapping the next generation.

In the last half century, we have herded 50 million more human beings into towns and cities where the whole setting is new to the race. We have created highly congested areas with a thousand changes resulting in the swift transition from a rural and agrarian people to an urban, industrial nation. Perhaps the widest range of difficulties with which we are dealing in the betterment of children grows out of this crowding into cities. Problems of sanitation and public health loom in every direction. Delinquency increases with congestion. Overcrowding produces disease and contagion. The child's natural play place is taken from him. His mind is stunted by the lack of imaginative surroundings and lack of contact with the fields, streams, trees, and birds. Homelife becomes more difficult. Cheerless homes produce morbid minds. Our growth of town life unendingly imposes such problems as milk and food supplies, for we have shifted these children from a diet of 10,000 years' standing.

Nor is our problem one solely of the city child. We have grave responsibilities to the rural child. Adequate expert service should be as available to him from maternity to maturity. Since science discovered the cause of communicable disease, protection from these diseases for the child of the farm is as much an obligation to them as to the child of the city. The child of the country is handicapped by lack of some cultural influences extended by the city. We must find ways and means of extending these influences to the children of rural districts. On the other hand, some of the natural advantages of the country child must somehow be given back to the city child--more space in which to play, contact with nature and natural processes. Of these the thoughtless city cheats its children. Architectural wizardry and artistic skill are transforming our cities into wonderlands of beauty, but we must also preserve in them for our children the yet more beautiful art of living.

Even aside from congestion, the drastic changes in the modern home greatly affect the child. Contacts of parents and children are much reduced. Once the sole training school of the child, the home now shares with the public school, the great children's clubs and organizations, and a hundred other agencies the responsibility for him, both in health and discipline, from birth to maturity. Upon these outside influences does his development now very largely depend.

The problems of the child are not always the problems of the child alone. In the vision of the whole of our social fabric, we have loosened new ambitions, new energies. We have produced a complexity of life for which there is no precedent. With machines ever enlarging man's power and capacity, with electricity extending over the world its magic, with the air giving us a wholly new realm, our children must be prepared to meet entirely new contacts and new forces. They must be physically strong and mentally placed to stand up under the increasing pressure of life. Their problem is not alone one of physical health, but of mental, emotional, spiritual health.

These are a part of the problems that I charge you to answer. This task that you have come here to perform has never been done before. These problems are not easily answered, they reach the very root of our national life. We need to meet them squarely and to accuse ourselves as frankly as possible, to see all the implications that trail in our wake, and to place the blame where it lies and set resolutely to attack it. From your explorations into the mental and moral endowment and opportunities of children will develop new methods to inspire their creative work and play, to substitute love and self-discipline for the rigors of rule, to guide their recreations into wholesome channels, to steer them past the reefs of temptation, to develop their characters, and to bring them to adult age in tune with life, strong in moral fiber, and prepared to play more happily their part in the productive tasks of human society.

There has not been before the summation of knowledge and experience such as lies before this Conference. There had been no period when it could be undertaken with so much experience and background. The Nation looks to you to derive from it positive, definite, guiding judgments. But greater than the facts and the judgments, more fundamental than all, we need the vision and inspired understanding to interpret these facts and put them into practice. I know that this group has the vision and the understanding, and you are the picked representatives of the people who are thus endowed. It will rest with you to light the fires of that inspiration in the general public conscience, and from conscience lead it into action.

The many activities which you are assembled here to represent touch a thousand points in the lives of children. The interest which they obtain in the minds and hearts of our country is a turning to the original impulse which inspired the foundation of our Nation, the impulse to secure freedom and betterment of each coming generation. The passion of the American fathers and mothers is to lift children to higher opportunities than they have themselves enjoyed. It burns like a flame in us as a people. Kindled in our country by its first pioneers, who came here to better the opportunities for their children rather than themselves, passed on from one generation to the next, it has never dimmed nor died. Indeed human progress marches only when children excel their parents. In democracy our progress is the sum of progress of the individuals--that they each individually achieve to the full capacity of their abilities and character. Their varied personalities and abilities must be brought fully to bloom. They must not be mentally regimented to a single mold or the qualities of many will be stifled. The door of opportunity must be opened to each of them.

May you who are meeting here find in your deliberations new fuel with which to light this flame of progress so that this occasion may be marked with a fresh luster that will set us anew on the road through the crowding complexities of modern life.