Unhappiness In Children “A Preventable Disease”

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29766, 8 March 1962, Page 13

Unhappiness In Children “A Preventable Disease”

"Unhappiness in the child is as much a preventable disease as rickets, but it will be a long time before we have as simple a remedy as cod liver oil,” says Dr. Alice M. Bush, of Auckland, in the “New Zealand Medical Journal.”

“The majority of unhappy children are brought by wellmeaning mothers to the doctor’s surgery asking for help, and all too often they are turned away with meaningless words of reassurance and strictures upon the mother that she should not worry so much,” says Dr. Bush.

"The child who grizzles, the child who doesn’t eat his food, the child who wets his bed or his pants, the child who teases or destroys and the one that has excessive temper tantrums these are the uphappy children, and the true causes may be as difficult to find as the real murderer in an Agatha Christie. "It. is my experience in New Zealand that most people abandon the struggle to help their children to grow up at just about the age when they should be beginning it.” Dr. Bush lists five things she considers essential to a child’s physical and emotional well-being. “A child must have enough of the right kind of food,” she says. “It is well to remember there is no food that cannot be a poison to some child. At the top of my own list of poisons I put cows’ milk, although this may not be true in other conditions. The right kind of food for any one child can be established only by trial and error, and the amount of it he should have is usually best left to his own judgment. “The child should have enough haemoglobin in his blood. This should be measured, not guessed at. “He should be free from harmful infection. The ears, nose, and throat leap to mind here, but it is also important to remember the urinary tract. “He should be free from

discomfort. Children may suffer from the same sort of discomforts as adults—pains for which there is often no organic explanation but which are still real pains: headaches, earache, toothache, tummy-ache, sore throat. The child may be too hot or too cold; he may have the sort of skin to which wool is a barbed-wire fence in miniature. “The environment must allow for emotional as well as for physical growth. A child requires a secure family and freedom from the fear that they will desert him. As well as love and acceptance, he needs education for adult responsibility."