The house on Henry Street

by Lillian D. Wald

In no instance where we have prevented the disintegration of the family because of poverty have we had reason to regret our decision. Of course, the ability of the mother to maintain a standard in the home and control the children is a necessary qualification in any general recommendation for this treatment of the widow and orphan, and competent supervision is essential to insure the maintenance of these conditions.

At the famous White House Conference on Children, held at the invitation of President Roosevelt, there was practical unanimity on the part of the experts who gathered there that institutional life was undesirable and that wherever possible family life should be maintained. Testimony as to this came from many sources; and keeping the family together, or boarding the orphan with a normal family when adoption could not be arranged, became the dominant note of the conference.

The children, in this as in many other instances, led us into searching thought many years ago. Forlorn little Joseph had called upon me with a crumpled note which he reluctantly dragged from a pocket. It was from the admitting agent of an orphanage, explaining that Joseph could not be taken into the institution until his head was “cured”; and it gave some details regarding the family, the worthiness of the mother, and her exceeding poverty. The agent hoped that I might relieve her by expediting Joseph’s admission.

I tried to make the child’s daily visit to me interesting. The treatment was not painful, but the end of each visit—he came with patient regularity every day—left me as dolorous as himself. One day I tried, by promise of a present or of any treat he fancied, to bring out some expression of youthful spirit—all unavailingly. “But you must wish for something,” I urged; “I never knew a boy who didn’t.” For the first time the silent little lad showed enthusiasm. “I wish you wouldn’t cure my head, so I needn’t go to the orphan asylum.”

Unscrupulous parents, I am well aware, often try to shift the responsibility for their children upon public institutions, but there are many who share Joseph’s aversion to the institutional life, and we early recognized that the dislike is based upon a sound instinct and that a poor home might have compensating advantages compared with the well-equipped institution.

There have been great changes in institutional methods since I first had knowledge of them, and much ingenuity has been shown in devising means to encourage the development of individuality and initiative among the orphans. The cottage plan has been introduced in some institutions to modify the abnormal life of large congregations of children. But at best the life is artificial, and the children lose inestimably through not having day by day the experiences of normal existence. Valuable knowledge is lost because the child does not learn from experience the connection between the cost of necessities and the labor necessary to earn them. It was somewhat pathetic, at another conference on child-saving, to hear one of the speakers explain that he tried to meet this need by having the examples in arithmetic relate to the cost of food and household expenditures.

The lack of a normal emotional outlet is of consequence, and as a result astute physiognomists often recognize what they term the “institution look.” Maggie, an intelligent girl, who has since given abundant evidence of spontaneity and spirit, spent a short time in an excellent orphanage. She told me the other day, and wept as she told it, that she had met no unkindness there, but remembered with horror that when they arose in the morning the “orphans” waited to be told what to do; and that feeling was upon her every hour of the day. In fact, Maggie had stirred me to make arrangements to take her out of the institution because, when I brought her for a visit to the settlement, she stood at the window the entire afternoon, wistfully watching the children play in our back yard, and not joining them because no one had told her that she might.

One is reluctant to speak only of the disadvantages of institutional life, for there are many children rescued from unfortunate family conditions who testify to the good care they received, and who, in after life, look back upon the orphanage as the only home they have known. For some children, doubtless, such care will continue to be necessary, but the conservative and rigid administration can be softened, and the management and their charges delivered out of the rut into which they have fallen, and from the tyranny of rules and customs which have no better warrant than that they have always existed.

Perhaps these illustrations are not too insignificant to record. Happening to pass through a room in an asylum when the dentist was paying his monthly visit, I saw a fine-looking young lad about to have a sound front tooth extracted because he complained of toothache. No provision had been made for anything but the extraction of teeth. An offer to have the boy given proper treatment outside the institution was not accepted, but it needed no more than this to insure better dentistry in his case and in the institution in future. The reports stated that corporal punishment was not administered. When a little homesick lad displayed his hands, swollen from paddling, a request for an investigation, and that I be privileged to hear the inquiry, put a stop, and I am assured a permanent one, to this form of discipline. These are the more obvious disadvantages of institutional life for the child. The more subtle and dangerous are the curbing of initiative and the belittling of personality.