The Child in the Midst / A Comparative Study of Child Welfare in Christian and Non-Christian Lands

by Mary Schauffler Platt

But a nation to be truly great and to be sure of future development and success must realize that its greatest wealth lies in its children, its highest possibilities are wrapped up in all its little ones, its one hope for the future is in the childhood of the nation. Many earnest writers of to-day are emphasizing in one way or another this great truth in relation to children.

Mrs. Frederick Schoff in an address at the National Congress on Hygiene and Demography makes a most practical application of these principles, showing some ways in which the desired results may be attained.

It takes time to battle down the old wall of belief that mother instinct teaches a woman all she need know about child nurture.... The great functions of fatherhood and motherhood should not be ignored in the training of children for life. They should be held up as the highest and most far-reaching functions of human life....

“One generation, one entire generation of all the world of children understood as they should be, loved as they ask to be, and so developed as they might be, would more than begin the millennium,” has been truly said by that lover of childhood, Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Child Welfare is at the foundation of world-welfare. Child nurture is the greatest science of the age. To arouse the whole world to a realization of its duty to the children ... is the propaganda in which all who see the infinite possibilities of the child should unite.[3]

Eugenics and Heredity.

In a study of Childhood such as this, undertaken by Christian women in their missionary societies and mission study classes, it is not enough to begin with the child at the day of his birth, but we must consider also the pre-natal influences, the history of his parents, and, in fact, all those deep and far-reaching subjects which are engrossing the attention of students in America and England and on the Continent of Europe. In studying the subjects of eugenics and heredity, in watching the social investigator as he shows us how from one drunken, vagabond woman in Germany there were 834 known descendants, the great majority of whom were prostitutes, tramps, paupers, criminals, and murderers, let us remember that the principles arrived at apply with equal significance to the future of the citizens of China and of Turkey.

A missionary mother from China tells us that Chinese mothers make no preparation for the coming of their babies because of foolish superstitions, fearing that, if they prepare, it will bring bad luck and the baby will die. “So,” she continues, “Chinese mothers miss the delightful months we American mothers consider the best in our lives, and the babies are deprived of the right sort of pre-natal influence.”

One missionary draws our attention to the fact of the awful fears and deadly terror that haunt the lives of so many people in India, and asks if this may not well be the result of the fact that their mothers are the little, shrinking, frightened child-wives of India. “The wrongs of Hindu womanhood in all past ages,” says Edward Payson Tenney in his volume on “Contrasts in Social Progress,” “have been avenged by the propagation of a race inferior to that which would have peopled Hindustan to-day, had the domestic and social status of the mothers of a great people been of a different character.”

Dr. Charles C. Selden, assistant to Dr. John G. Kerr in the Asylum for the Insane in Canton, says that there are no statistics that will allow comparison between the number of insane in China and America. “If conditions are in any particular worse in China than in America, it is along the line of imbecility resulting from bad heredity. Under the social ideals of China every man is anxious to marry, but no man is permitted to seek a wife for himself. The contract of marriage is always made by a third party, and often a man finds himself bound to an imbecile, insane or chronically diseased wife whose father has paid the marriage broker a high price to get her a husband. There is surely a great need for the study and practice of eugenics in China.”

Protection of motherhood.

It is only within the last few decades that the protection of motherhood has been recognized in civilized lands as an economic principle. In the protection of the mother lies the welfare of the nation. But alas! the light of this knowledge has not yet begun to penetrate into the darkness of heathen and Mohammedan lands.