Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

340

THE HOME

light on a present problem, to see what the omission of certain information means to her
work.
The years have taught us that knowledge of a child's family background is the
first essential of good case work. What kind of people are his family? What is their
real feeling toward their children? What is the physical and mental health, at least
as interpreted by the community in which they live? What is their moral character?
What has been their education and their standards of living? In other words, what
influences have surrounded this child up to the time we have known him? Such
detailed information was not on our earlier records.
The use of psychology and psychiatry has taught us to recognize the tendency to
suspicion and fear, the presence of which a careful case worker should always be aware,
for these things are the direct cause of many failures to adjust in new environments.
This is especially true of the dependent child who has been separated from all that
really belongs to him-the little boy of nine, whose face lights up with delight when
invited to go to the circus, only to cloud over immediately as he asks if his boarding
mother may go with him. The worker knows all too well that it is not an unselfish
desire to share his pleasure which prompts the child's invitation for his boarding mother,
it is his dreadful fear of not returning to the same home; of losing what he has for something still more uncertain.
We have outgrown our old method of superimposing our ideas on the child. The
successful case worker spends endless time learning to understand her child, what he
thinks and feels, and then guiding him to make his own decisions and plans. It is the
longest way round, but the shortest way home in the end, as it is the only way to develop
a child's sense of responsibility, as well as to gain his co-operation.
What to me is one of the strongest evidences of progress in social case work today
is the recognition of the inter-relationship of the different fields and their dependency
one upon the other. The children's field seems especially dependent on the other
related fields and reflects much of their progress. If the children's agent who worked
single handed in the earlier days could see our health clinics, our psychiatric clinics,
the work of the visiting teacher, and the mental testing, she would surely say, "To
whom much has been given, much shall be required."
We are each year relating our work more closely to the scientific. All of this means
that the case worker should be, if possible, a person with professional background, and
she should add a specialized training in family- and child-welfare work before entering
this field. It seems to me that whatever helps to increase the more accurate and intimate knowledge of the child, contributes to a deeper understanding of him, and therefore a more human, as well as intelligent, approach to him.
The case worker must not only have knowledge, but she must know how to apply
this knowledge. We cannot progress unless we use the knowledge we have gained.
Twenty-five years ago when the juvenile court came into existence we took a big
step forward. A child was no longer to be considered a criminal to be punished, but
an individual to be protected and trained under a person especially qualified for such
work. Due to more careful methods of case work, children are now put on probation
and studied, instead of hurried off to reformatories, as in the early days.
On the whole, our work has shown much unevenness. We have had health slants,
educational slants, and psychiatric slants, and because of them it has been hard to keep
always in mind the development of the child as a well-rounded individual. However,