The broad ax., 1916-03-11
TIE CHMDREN's BUREAU AND
BABY WEEK
Julia @. Lathrop, Chief, Children
Bureau

lis Baby Week the business of
Government Bureauf" The observing
taxpayer is perhaps asking this ques-
ton.
Ever since last October when the
General Federation of Women's Clubs
announced its plan, an increasing pro-
portion of the Bureau Is Office force has
been detailed to the correspondence
required by the growing interest in the
nationwide observance of Baby Week.
The soeiologist and the statistieian
will remind US that the Bureau was
created to make investigations per-
tanning to the welfare IF children and
that Baby Week is not an investiga-
ton and is not statistics.
To all these groups we are account
able. What is our reply7
For the three years the Bureau has
been In existence it has put a consider
able share of its energy into a statist-
lcal study of the social and economic
causes. of infant mortality, planned
with the greatest care and conducted
by trained field agents with all possible
precision. The results of this inquiry
are being published, as the law re-
quires, in a series of reports which con-
sist of statistical tabulations accom-
panied by descriptive text.
There are many million fathers and
mothers in the United States, including
many of the best educated fathers and
mothers, who have never read statist-
zeal table and never will. Yet hidden
within the figures of the Bureaus re-
ports on infant mortality, the reading
of which they will successfully evade,
lie stern facts about the dangers which
beset American babies.
These figures give a clue to the rea-
sons why, on the great average, one
baby in eight dies before the end of
the first year of life. They show that
this average obscures a wide gamut
with comparative immunity from in
FAINT loss at one end and with fearful
| lHIdnC waste at the OJn6r.
If the Bureau is to investigate and
to report as the law directs, then it
must try to find ways of reporting
which will be heard by the whole
public which it was created to serve.
The popular methods of the Baby
Week, which are those of all astute
advertisers, form an invaluable method
of reporting to the parents of this ma
tion those standards of infant welfare
which experts are endeavoring to make
clear.
The Baby Week emphasizes the con-
structive side of infant care. 1t ad-
dresses not only individual parents but
communities.
The best test of its value will be the
work that follows it,
Undoubtedly every State Board of
Health should secure what only six
States have at present "a special
division of child hygiene. No city or
town should fail to provide instructive
nursing service and to pay constant
heed to the problems of hygiene and
sanitation, of proper housing and of
recreation spaces, since all these i'm
mediately affect the welfare of infants.
There are 5000 counties in the
United States. In every county seat
there should be a center for the health
work of that county, station for ex-
aiming babies, and older children,
and for furnishing expert advice for
keeping them well-in short, a health
teaching center.
We must have complete birth regis
tration.
All these will be institutions for the
common use-nO more revolutionary,
no more eleemosynary, than public
schools and weather bureaus and agri-
cultural experiment stations.
The New Zealand infant mortality
rate is less than one-half of ours and
is being further reduced.
Why take less pains for American
babies than New Zealand takes2