The Public and Private Care of Infants (1912)

• 54%
• 1912
• Charles M. Seay
• Carlton King

The hardest of all work for a widowed mother, who has to make her own living, is to care for her children while doing her work. What mistress of a home would want a cook or maid with her young infant around, the mother having to divide her time with her young and her work? Yet when the mother has to work, what is she to do with her young when she is so handicapped? She should board her baby with someone who is capable of caring for and feeding another child than her own. Individual attention is what the infant needs. In this picture the mother has twins, one she boards with a foster mother and the other is put into an institution because the foster mother will take only one. The mother of the twins is compelled to do this because she cannot get work so handicapped. The work of the care of infants in an institution is shown and the only fault to be found is that the individual attention that an infant must have is lacking, owing to the fact that a nurse in an asylum often has as many as fifteen babies to care for alone. That is where the infant suffers. It is not, however, due to any fault of the nurses', but to conditions. In this case the fostered child lives while the institution child does not. Seventy percent of asylum babies succumb while seventy out of a hundred live where individual care is exercised.