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The Challenge For Children's Agencies

Creator: Gunnar Dybwad (author)
Date: June 15, 1949
Source: Friends of the Samuel Gridley Howe Library and the Dybwad Family

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Gunnar Dybwad, Supervisor, Children's Division State Department of Social Welfare, Lansing, Michigan

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-*Paper given at the National Conference of Social Work, Cleveland, June 15, 1949.-

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As I sat at my desk the other day musing the familiar problem as to how to phrase the introductory sentences to this paper, my glance fell on the posters of the National Mental Health Foundation which adorn my office walls. The one stated: "Some people still believe that mental illness is a disgrace..." Then it said in bold letters; "BUT SCIENCE TEACHES mental illness is no disgrace. Like physical ills it requires prompt medical care." The other poster said; "Some people still believe that mental illness comes suddenly..." And then again in bold letters: "BUT SCIENCE TEACHES mental illness develops gradually and shows warning signs in advance."

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What strength there lies in the words "BUT SCIENCE TEACHES" and how little of this strength is available to us at the moment as we pursue our respective responsibilities in the field of child welfare.

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Some people still believe that infants, deprived through death of their parents' care, are best provided for by spending their entire childhood, up until they graduate from high school, in orphans' homes. WE know that is wrong, but can we say SCIENCE TEACHES that orphanages of this type are harmful?

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Some people still believe that the kindest and most effective way to help children who are found in neglectful home situations is to remove them from their families and let them grow up in different surroundings. WE know that such broad statement is wrong, that the separation of a child from its family may often be more harmful than the neglect; and WE know that we have learned to deal with the underlying factors of such child neglect, helping parents to take better care of their children, but could we use the proud and strong words "BUT SCIENCE TEACHES"?

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Last year Benjamin Youngdahl, in his presidential address to the American Association of Schools of Social Work at St. Paul, made the following comments in a broad, critical analysis of the problems of the social work profession which he entitled "Shall We Face It?": "One of our weaknesses in social work is our public relation... At least one important factor in this handicap is our difficulty in giving objective proof of the validity of the things that we do... -While- we have hope, faith and charity in abundance, and we wouldn't subtract from it even a fraction of a degree, by the application of intelligence through research methods to human relations and human problems, we shall be able to gain knowledge, enlarge our sphere of influence and be of greater service." And a few months later Philip Klein threw out this challenge to last year's National Conference of Social Work, speaking at the first meeting of the newly-formed Committee on Research in Social Work, "Too much of our evaluation of behavior difficulties is still in the realm of individual speculation, and scientific research is needed to produce statements of general validity."

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If we then pose as our first question in this morning's discussion: Why do we need research? the simplest answer might be: To explain and evaluate what we have done in the past, to be able to defend or even understand what we are doing now and to plot the guideposts of future planful action.

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As we members of the Child Welfare League gather here together at our first meeting devoted to the problems of research in child welfare, we hardly can be proud of our progressiveness. To the contrary, we will have to run hard and long to catch up with business and industry and agriculture, who long since have recognized that it is to their own advantage to submit their present procedures and their future plans to the objective and penetrating scrutiny of the research worker.

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In its plea for national legislation to facilitate research in child life the American Parents Committee points out that in 1947 the army and navy together spent 500 million dollars for research, and the Department of Agriculture spent 13 million, of which no less than 1 million 300 thousand dollars' worth of research was spent on cows as contrasted with the magnificent sum of 50 thousand dollars available to the Children's Bureau for research (l/26th the amount spent for research on cows).

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Some of you may want to rationalize this by saying that we hardly can do the research in child welfare unless we first get the money for it, but it ill behooves us to wait for the public to do our planning. Agriculture is willing to spend millions on the testing of cows and sows because it has in years past been presented with research projects which provided in understandable fashion a practical answer to specific acute problems.

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Two years ago Arlien Johnson in her presidential address to this conference which she entitled "Science and Social Work", contended that since man's inherited human nature has changed little in thousands of years, common human needs persist and that the biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have produced a wealth of facts that document this statement. Yet, also, the one book which during the past two years has been attacked most viciously by the critics of the programs of Aid to Dependent Children in many states has been a publication of the Federal Security Agency entitled "Common Human Needs". Could the trouble be that this excellent volume contains our viewpoints, however well founded, rather than "What science teaches"? And to what extent can we point to "what science teaches" when it comes to the placement of handicapped children for adoption, the separation of the child born out of wedlock from his mother, or the group care of infants under three months preliminary to adoptive placements. We know that a worker who carries 35 cases can see his clients more often and write more pages of recording than a worker with a case load of 50 or 60, but is it not time that we determined through scientific procedures the results encountered by either one of these two workers and the factors on which these results are based?

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