Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1918 — CHILD WELFARE MOVEMENT ON [ARTICLE]

CHILD WELFARE MOVEMENT ON

Weigh Your Community by What It Can do for Its Children. More than two million babies — in town and country, rich and poor, well and sickly—are tipping the scales and standing up to the yardstick, unless they are too little to stand, in answer to the request of the children’s bureau of the U. S. Department of Labor and the woman’s committee o| the Council of National Defense that parents enter their children in the nation-wide test which began April 6, as the first step in the children’s year campaign to save 100,000 babies.

This weighing and measuring is a spring inventory of the welfare of the nation’s children. The draft took stock of the men who will go to the battle front in France. It found less than two-thirds of them physically fit for service. Many of these men were rendered unfit by defects which authorities declare could have been prevented If they had been discovered and cared for in childhood. The children who survive to/onnanhood and womanhood with bear the scars of diseases, injuries, and general conditions which have proved fatal to others. The infant death rate is nearly as great as that of men and women who have completed their allotted three score years and ten; nearly a fourth of the deaths that occur at all ages are those of babies under five.

Is it necessary that these little children run so great a risk of death? Newsholme answered that question when hd said that if children were born well and well cared for the infant death rate would be practically negligible. The weighing and measuring test is giving thousands of communities in the United States opportunity to find out whether their children are well born and well cared four. Weight and height are a rough index of the health of the growing child, and the test wjll show, individual parents just how each child compares with the average. Follow-up work will be planned the needs shown by the test, and will continue throughout children’s year; The bureau believes that individual mothers and fathers must realize how vitally war time conditions affect the welfare of their children if 100,000 lives are to be saved during children’s year.

First of all the test can give parents an indication of the health of their own children. In addition it can provide a basis for judging how adequately the community is guarding its children. The test can thus offer a starting point for bettering the conditions which affect children’s welfare. Some adverse conditions individual parents can remedy; others demand community; action; but the children's bureau believes that in one way or another children must be given increased protection if the baby death rate is to be reduced here as it was in England during the second year of the war. This test will begin in Jasper county next Monday. Weighing and measuring centers will be located in the post office in Rensselaer, in the library in connection with the Red Cross in Remington, and the in domestic science department in Wheat-

field, and a place to be arranged for in Demotte. Physicians and nursea will lie in charge and the work will be continued until every child that should be is registered. MRS. J. I. GWIN, Chairman Child Welfare Committee.