In the years which have passed since I led my child into her own world, again and again I have been able to find comfort in the fact that her life, with others, has been of use in enlarging the whole body of our knowledge. When one has learned how to live with inescapable sorrow, one learns, too, how to find comfort by the way.
When I speak of comfort I think now of other parents than myself. I think of those who bring me their children and ask what to do for them. Almost the first question they ask is, “Are private schools and institutions so much better than the state ones that we ought to make all the family sacrifice to the utmost for the sake of one?”
My answer is this: A good private school is usually better than the average state institution. There is less crowding and more individual attention. But even this depends somewhat upon the state. There are states where the institutions are remarkably good, the employees well paid, a pension system established and every inducement offered for good people to say. There are other states where the institutions are medieval. Parents must examine their own state institutions. Where there are ample family funds, a good private institution has advantages. Yet the weakness in most institutions is that often they do not continue beyond the lifetime of the person who establishes them. Some of the finest and most elaborate private institutions will close when the head dies, and the children then must be scattered and must make their adjustments all over again. It is essential in choosing your child’s home that you find an institution which is not dependent upon any one man, but which is controlled by a self-perpetuating board of trustees and has endowments to carry it through the hard years. The state institutions have, of course, an immense advantage in that they are permanent, and once a child enters he is secure for life.
I answer the parents by saying that where a private institution would bring severe sacrifice on every member of the family for the sake of one, I would find a good state institution, even if I had to move my home to another state, and there I would put my child.
When the child is safely in his new home, what are the further responsibilities of the parent? They are many. The child needs the parents as much as before. There should be regular visits, as frequent as possible. Do not think that the children do not know. I have to endure heartbreaking moments every time I go to visit my child, for inevitably some other little child comes and takes my hand and leans against me and asks, “Where is my mamma?”
The housemother whispers over her head, “Poor little thing, her folks never come to see her. Her grandmother came to see her two years ago and that’s the last.”
The little thing’s heart is slowly breaking. For these children are always children. They are loving and affectionate and they crave to be loved exactly as all children do. There are other children who come to tell me, eyes glowing, “My daddy and mommy came last week to see me!” Even the ones who cannot speak will come to show me a new doll that the parents brought.
Ah, they know, because they feel! The mind seems to have very little to do with the capacity to feel.
Another responsibility of the parent is to watch always the person in direct charge of the child. I said that I chose my child’s permanent home by finding as the head the sort of person whom I could trust. Today, were I to choose again, I would also go into every cottage and look at the type of attendant there. Were they the hard-faced professional type, the ones who go from institution to institution, callous, cruel, ready to strike a child who does not conform, I would reject that place. For the most important person in an institution, so far as the child is concerned, and therefore so far as the parent is concerned, is not the executive, and not the man or woman in the offices, not even the doctor and the psychologist and the teacher, but the attendant, the person who has the direct care of the child.
A cruel and selfish attendant who has not at heart the welfare of the child can undo all the work of the teacher and the psychologist. Your child cannot benefit by any teaching unless he is happy in his daily life in his cottage. The attendant must be a person of affectionate and invincibly kind nature, child loving, able to discipline without physical force, in control because the children love him or her. Whether this attendant is well educated is not important. He must understand children, for he has in his care perpetual children.
Any sign of cruelty or injustice or carelessness on the part of attendants should be at once reported by conscientious parents. Do not think that secret bribes or tips will protect your child from a bad attendant. He will take your money and when he is alone with the children, as he is so much of the time, he will treat your child exactly as he does the others.
A third responsibility which the parent has to the child in the institution is to see that the atmosphere in which he lives is one of hopefulness. I have observed that this atmosphere is best in those institutions which carry on research as one of their functions. A place where the care is merely custodial is apt to degenerate into something routine and dead. No child ought to be merely something to be cared for and preserved from harm. His life, however simple, means something. He has something to contribute, even though he is helpless. There are reasons for his condition, causes which may be discovered. If he himself cannot be cured or even changed, others may be born whole because of what he has been able to teach, all unknowingly.
The Training School at Vineland is an excellent example of what I mean. For many years it has maintained an active research department. As I said, it was the first institution in this country to use and adapt the Binet test, and there the Social Maturity Scale was developed. Its work with birth-injured children and cerebral palsy has been notable, and the vigorous men and woman who have spent their lives there learning from the children, in order that they may know better how to prevent and to cure, have infused vitality into the life of the institution, and into the whole subject of mental deficiency beyond.
Parents may find comfort, I say, in knowing that their children are not useless, but that their lives, limited as they are, are of great potential value to the human race. We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage — and indeed perhaps more. Not out of fullness has the human soul always reached its highest, but often out of deprivation. This is not to say that sorrow is better than happiness, illness than health, poverty than richness. Had I been given the choice, I would a thousand times over have chosen to have my child sound and whole, a normal woman today, living a woman’s life. I miss eternally the person she cannot be. I am not resigned and never will be. Resignation is something still and dead, an inactive acceptance that bears no fruit. On the contrary, I rebel against the unknown fate that fell upon her somewhere and stopped her growth. Such things ought not to be, and because it has happened to me and because I know what this sorrow is I devote myself and my child to the work of doing all we can to prevent such suffering for others.
There is one little boy in my child’s school whom I often go to see. He is little because he is only about seven in his mind. His body now is almost forty years old. He has a grave face and there is a forlorn look in his eyes. His father is a famous man, wealthy and well known. But he never comes to see his son. The boy’s mother is dead. When someone approached this father for a gift for a new kind of research he banged his desk with his fist and said, “I will not give one cent! All my money is going to normal people.”