eral responsibility in the Children's Bureau, thus continuing to make possible general planning and adequae correlation of maternal and child health and child welfare services to the end that they may effectively meet the needs of children whose lives cannot be divided into separate water-tight compartments labeled "health" or "welfare," but who must be viewed and served as living, growing human beings.

The Children's Bureau has prepared material in support of the Maternal and Child Welfare Act. We are dividing our testimony in two parts. Dr. Eliot will speak in support of the health features, and I want to devote my remarks to the child welfare provisions.

WHAT THE BILLS PROVIDE FOR CHILD WELFARE

The child welfare provisions of these bills (title III) are intended to make it possible for each State, with Federal and State funds (and local funds if provided by the State plan), to provide services in the public welfare department that will be available whenever a child needs help. These services, under the requirements of the bills, would be available in every part of the State not later than July 1, 1955. A child may need such service because conditions in his home are such that he is neglected or mistreated, or feels unhappy and unwanted, or because of orphanage, desertion, difficulty in getting along in school or with other children, juvenile delinquency, or mental deficiency. Experience has shown that children from all economic groups may have these problems, that many parents want help and advice in dealing with them, and that service should be available without any feeling that to receive help from a child-welfare worker carries any disgrace or stigma.

Every State, Alaska, Hawaii, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico now has a plan for child-welfare services authorized under title V, part 3, of the Social Security Act. Many States are putting in much more money for these programs than comes to them from the Federal Government, for the total annual appropriation authorized under the Social Security Act for this purpose is only $1,510,000. As will be shown later, however, only a small portion of the need is now being met. These bills would utilize the foundation of administrative machinery and experience developed in the 11 years since the Social Security Act became law, but would go much farther in the kind and extent of services authorized. It is time to make these advances, for the sake of our children and the future of our Nation.

In

Title III of the pending bills would make possible in every part of each State, in the numbers needed to serve children requiring such help, the services of a worker qualified by personality and professional preparation to understand children's needs and to bring to bear upon their problems all the resources of the community made available through public or through private initiative. addition, it would assist the States in providing suitable care and protection for children without parental care and supervision and children who are dependent, neglected, delinquent, or in danger of becoming delinquent. Provision for aid to dependent children would remain with the Social Security Board, through grants to State welfare agencies available for their public assistance services, but provision for care of children in foster homes and for other care as indicated below would be developed as part of the State's child welfare program, through funds made available through the Children's Bureau.

To be specific, the services authorized as defined in sections 301 and 305 of the bill are as follows:

(1) Individual guidance and social services for children in their own homes needing such service, to be available in all political subdivisions of cooperating States to all children in need thereof, not later than July 1, 1955;

(2) Care of children in foster homes;

(3) Temporary care in receiving, detention, or study homes of children who are in need of such care because they are waiting court action or the making of definite plans for their care, especially in areas where children would be detained in jail or deprived of necessary protection and shelter;

(4) Specialized services (such as recreation service, mental health service, the service of a social worker), needed to strengthen and improve the programs of public institutions caring for children;

(5) Day care for children who because of their mothers' employment or other conditions require such care, including care in foster-family homes or day-care centers;

(6) Payment of the cost of returning nonresident children to their own communities, if such return is desirable and the cost cannot otherwise be met;

and

(7) Cooperation with appropriate State and community agencies in improving conditions affecting the welfare of children.

To provide these services, an appropriation of $20,000,000 is authorized for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1946, and a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of the title for each year thereafter. For each of the first two fiscal years there is to be allotted to the States $10,000,000 which must be matched by State, or State and local funds on a variable matching formula (sec. 304). The remainder of the appropriation, which after the second year must not exceed onefourth of the total amount, is to be allotted to the States on the basis of number of children, special problems of child welfare, and financial need, and is not required to be matched. Other provisions of the bills are included in the summary presented as appendix A. It will be noted that all States, Territories, or possessions of the United States may participate in the program. It is in my opinion exceedingly important that the children of all these areas have access to the benefits contemplated.

WHY IS A CHILD-WELFARE PROGRAM OF THE KIND AUTHORIZED BY THESE BILLS NEEDED?

Normally, children receive guidance, care and protection from their families and from the services afforded by the community to all children. A large number of children, sometimes described as socially handicapped children, have needs that are not met or cannot be met by their parents or by community services available to all children. These are the children whose parents do not make the right kind of homes for them, the children who have lost one or both parents, the children who have behavior difficulties or are emotionally disturbed, and the children with mental and physical defects.

Nearly 4,000,000 children have lost one or both parents;

Sixty thousand children are known to be orphans of servicemen who died in this war;

Seven hundred thousand children are in homes broken by divorce, desertion, or separaon;

Over 80,000 bbies are born out of wedlock each year, and nearly 50 percent of the unmarried mothers are under the age of 20 years;

More than 250,000 children each year are brought into juvenile courts as delinquent and several times that number come to police attention;

Twenty-five thousand of the children who come to juvenile courts are runaways from home;

Three hundred thousand children each year are detained over night or longer by police and juvenile courts, many of them in local jails or in poor detention homes;

Thirty thousand children are in training schools for juvenile delinquents;

Two million seven hundred and seventy thousand mothers of children under 14 were at work in 1944; after the war many of these mothers are still at work and others will enter employment;

Eight hundred thousand children under 18 years are feeble-minded.

To provide the care and protection that these children need is a public responsibility.

WHAT KIND OF HELP IS GIVEN THROUGH A CHILD-WELFARE PROGRAM?

An adequate child-welfare program provides for guidance and social services to children. Child-welfare workers are attached to local departments of public welfare or to regional or district offices of the State public-welfare agency. These workers give service in cases of individual children at the request of parents, teachers, public assistance workers, police officers, juvenile-court judges, and others.

Following are examples of requests for help received by the Children's Bureau that are typical of those with which a child welfare worker would deal:

A 12-year-old epileptic girl asks protection for herself. Her mother is mentally ill. She has been living with a grandfather who "scared me into doing things." A 16-year-old girl complains of the treatment she has had in the homes of relatives since her mother's death. She has been going from one to another and "they are getting tired of me."

A neighbor writes about his concern for the wife and baby of an 18-year-old youth who will not work and lets them go hungry.

An unmarried mother expects a baby in August. She wants to know of an institution or agency that will take care of the baby until she can make permanent plans. She does not want to give the baby up.

It is obvious that these are complicated problems that cannot be solved by financial relief alone, if, indeed, such relief is needed.

The child-welfare worker tries to find out the cause of the trouble, and what can be done to remedy the situation or get the care needed. She may help parents to understand the child's problems and difficulties, and to obtain outside aid that may be needed to correct a physical or mental handicap, to overcome school difficulties, or to obtain wholesome recreation and companionship. She may work with teachers and school principals when home problems interfere with the child's school adjustment. If financial help is needed, assistance would be given in obtaining it from appropriate sources. The child may need to be placed in the home of other people who can give him understanding and affection and good care. Perhaps arrangements for day care in a day care center or foster home may be needed while the mother is employed. The child may need special care in an institution, which the child-welfare worker would help to arrange. He may need medical care or psychiatric service. The child-welfare worker in trying to find a solution of the child's difficulties will draw upon the services of other organizations such as health, educational, mental hygiene, recreational, or law-enforcement agencies.

In an adequate child-welfare program guidance and social services for children are closely related to services for families and utilized in programs of public assistance when children present special problems. The program is also closely related to the work of health, education, recreational and law enforcement agencies, so that children known to any of these agencies as having special needs or requiring special service may be referred for the help and guidance the childwelfare worker can give.

The services of the child-welfare worker do not stop with helping individual children. She participates with other agencies of the community, public and private, in the development of community-wide plans to promote the health, education, and welfare of all children in the community and particularly of those suffering from special disadvantages.

Services of this type, if given at an early state, will prevent many children from becoming dependent, neglected, or delinquent. They will keep in their own homes many children who otherwise would be removed from them. They will save many children from damaging experiences and possible development into unhappy or maladjusted adults and even into criminals or mental patients.

The needs of children cannot be met through individual guidance and social service alone. A child-welfare worker, like a physician, must have tools to work with. The program must include resources for foster-family care of children who because of family break-down or for other reasons need to be placed in homes other than their own, and this foster-care program should be a part of child-welfare services, and administered by persons with special training and experience. It must also include day care for children whose mothers are employed or are otherwise unable to give daytime supervision to their children; temporary or detention care, especially in areas where children would otherwise be detained in jail; specialized services to strengthen and improve the programs of public institutions; and payment of the cost of returning nonresident children to their own communities.

Local child-welfare programs are supplemented or reinforced by the programs of the States, since under our form of government the major responsibility for the protection and care of children rests with the State. Historically, the States have provided institutional care or foster-home programs for children and institutional care for the delinquent and the mentally handicapped. Today, in more than 30 States the State public welfare agency has broad responsibility for administering or supervising all child welfare activities, promoting the enforcement of all laws for the protection of specified groups of children, or taking the initiative in matters involving the interests of children, and working with local child-welfare workers in the strengthening and extension of children's Fervices.

The local child-welfare worker who meets all kinds of problems in her daily contacts with children and families-placement of children for adoption, juvenile delinquency, care of unmarried mothers and their children, to name only a few

-obviously cannot be a specialist in all of them. Consultants on such special aspects of child welfare attached to the staff of the State public-welfare agency advise the child-welfare worker on especially difficult or complicated cases and supply information on new developments in treatment. The State agency also furnishes special services such as psychiatric and psychological services which only the large urban areas can hope to provide for themselves.

HOW NEAR DO WE COME TO HAVING AN ADEQUATE CHILD-WELFARE PROGRAM? The framework for a sound program of child-welfare services exists in the local and State departments of public welfare and in the cooperation developed between the Children's Bureau and the State public welfare agencies under the Social Security Act. Under this act State services to aid in the development of child-welfare programs are provided in every State, and Federal funds are used by the States to assist in providing full-time child-welfare workers in 216 of the 3,100 counties in the country. The amount and type of service, however, is still far from what is necessary to meet the need.

In no State or city is there complete coverage of well-rounded, well-developed, and comprehensive programs of child-welfare services. In some places the program is chiefly one of foster care with little protective or preventive services to children in their own homes; in other places there is service to children in their own homes but little provision for foster care. Private child welfare agencies, although carrying a heavy load are unable to do the whole job. They have been pioneers and active participants in developing programs of services to children and the concepts upon which sound programs are built. For the most part they are established to serve children of a particular faith, age, race, or with some special type of problem. Their services, as a rule, are confined largely to urban communities.

Approximately five-sixths of the counties of the United States have no fulltime child welfare worker paid from Federal, State, or local funds. Even where there are workers the number is usually far from sufficient. In addition they are unevenly distributed among the States and between rural and urban areas. On June 30, 1945, more than half of all full-time child-welfare workers (1971) paid from public funds (Federal, State, or local) were in 8 States, and 43 percent of such workers were in 61 counties having cities of 100,000 or more population. In many counties lacking specialized child-welfare workers, public assistance workers give what help they can in children's cases. Generally, however, they lack special training in child welfare and carry heavy case loads so that they can act only in emergencies and can give only restricted service.

The lack of qualified child-welfare workers, as well as the lack of funds, has held back the expansion of child-welfare services. State public-welfare agencies have had to take on inexperienced people and train them through programs of in-service training and educational leave for professional study.

Many children who need care in a foster home are deprived of this kind of service because of lack of funds to pay for their board in family homes. Provision for foster care is often lacking in rural areas. Reporting to the Children's Bureau in 1945 on unmet needs in their child-welfare services, 39 States mentioned inadequate provision for foster care.

Before the war, no city had adequate day-care services for children whose mothers were employed. The majority of places outside the large cities were entirely without such service. At the peak of the day-care programs financed in part by Lanham Act funds, 3,102 centers were caring for 129,357 children. Termination of the use of Lanham Act funds for this purpose means that practically no Federal funds are available for day care. Only a few States have made available State funds for this purpose. Without adequate day-care services most mothers will have to turn to homes of neighbors or strangers, where the child is without sufficient supervision to assure adequate care. Many cases of extreme neglect occur under such circumstances.

Many communities are completely lacking in facilities suited for detention care. There is ample evidence in studies and reports that when provision for such care is lacking or inadequate children are held in jail. This occurs in practically every State. In some States the number of children held in ii's during the year runs into the hundreds, or even thousands. Many of these children are very young-many are under 12 and some only 8 or 9 years of age, The jails in which children are held are often deplorable places, filthy, with no provision for segregation or supervision. Sometimes the detention homes provided are little more than juvenile jails.

Many public institutions caring for children are without specialized services such as social services, psychiatric, psychological, and recreational services. When these, as well as education, vocational, medical, and other services, are lacking or inadequate the institution program can be little more than custodial. Without these services many institutions fall far short of meeting children's needs for growth and development, as well as the specialized treatment that their physical, mental, or emotional handicaps may require.

State public-welfare agencies need increased staff to give consultation to local workers, develop training programs for both State and local staffs, license and supervise independent boarding homes and child-caring agencies and institutions, and make studies of the effectiveness of child-welfare programs and additional provisions needed.

WHAT COULD BE DONE UNDER THE PENDING BILLS?

The bills would make possible the development of a comprehensive program of child-welfare services in every State, Territory, and possession of the United States. Under the provisions for matching part of the funds, the initial appropriation of $20,000,000 for the first year would be supplemented by an estimated $8,000,000 from State or State and local funds, thus making a total of $28,000,000 available for expenditure in that year.

Under a tentative break-down as follows of this sum: It would be possible with $12,000,000 to provide 500 additional full-time child-welfare workers to serve local areas, as well as to expand State and local advisory and consultative staffs. According to such a break-down $9,000,000 could be used for foster care, providing for approximately 17,000 children not now receiving such care. Approximately $5,000,000 would be used for day-care services including counseling services, foster-family day care, and group care to meet needs not now provided by the public schools. With $1,000,000 temporary care of dependent, neglected, or delinquent children would also be provided, especially in areas where children are now being held in jails or in other undesirable places of detention. About $500,000 would be provided to meet the cost of returning children who run away from home. An additional $500,000 would also be available for programs for training personnel to meet the increased need for workers.

The amount of funds required for the program in subsequent years would be dependent upon how the program develops. The objective is a comprehensive child-welfare program everywhere available and properly coordinated with other parts of the State welfare programs within a 10-year period.

APPENDIX A. PROVISIONS OF TITLE III OF THE MATERNAL AND CHILD WELFARE ACT

TITLE III. CHILD WELFARE SERVICES

Purpose. The purpose of this title is to develop effective State-wide child welfare programs and measures through guidance and social services for children who are dependent, neglected, or delinquent or in danger of becoming delinquent; placement, supervision, and maintenance of children in foster-family homes; day-care programs, temporary care of children who are dependent, neglected, or delinquent, or in danger of becoming neglected or delinquent; specialized services to strengthen and improve programs of public institutions caring for children; and return of nonresident children to their own communities. Provision is made for cooperation with appropriate State and community agencies and for training of personnel. The specific services to be provided in each State would be in accordance with the State plans submitted by the State public welfare department and approved by the Children's Bureau.

Conditions for approval of State plans. For the approval of State plans it is required that there be financial participation by the States; State-wide coverage or plan for extension of the program each year until at least guidance and social services are in effect in all political subdivisions of the State by July 1, 1955; availability of services to all children without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin and without residence requirements; administration or supervision of the plan by the State public welfare agency and appropriate coordination of the plan with the agency's public welfare program; inclusion of the State plan as part of the State plan for child welfare services under title V, part 3, of the Social Security Act; such methods of administration as are necessary for the proper and efficient operation of the plan including maintenance of personnel standards and selection of personnel on a merit