ADOPTED CHILDREN

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 98, 9 April 1934, Page 5

ADOPTED CHILDREN

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION’S WORK. A writer in the Sydney “Morning Herald” gives information which will interest many New Zealanders, for many childless couples here have adopted children through the National Children's Adoption Association. A snapshot has just been received in London of ‘three bonny children who live on a sheep station in New South Wales. Three years ago they lived with their father, a poverty-stricken widower with seven children, all “steps and stairs,” in a mean street in a London slum. The father, at his wits' end to know what to do, appealed to the association and was through its good offices brought into touch with a wealthy Australian spinster eating her heart out with loneliness. She was in London for the gaieties of the season: when she set sail for home she took with her the widower's three youngest —two boys and a girl. They now have everything that the best of parents could have provided for them—pet lambs, a lovely quiet old dobbin to ride, a rambling garden filled with flowers and shrubs and fruit trees, a cool meandering river beyond for refuge from the heat of the summer sun. Their whole future is assured. GIRLS WANTED. The work of the association has been particularly heartening of late, for numbers of childless people have decided to adopt one or more children. The secretary, Mrs. Plummer, tells the tale that you hear at babies’ homes all over the world. “There is a tremendous demand for girls,” she says. “We simply can’t get enough to fill the demand, while the poor bey babies are often left on our hands!” Although the adoptive couples have a fixed idea as to the particular type of baby they want—a girl with blue eyes and fair curls, for instance—it often happens that a baby decides its own future by itself doing the adopting. A brown-eyed little boy holds out his hands, coos delightedly—and the bluedeyed girl is forgotten. Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, is president ot the association, and students trained at the centres, Tower Cressy and Castlebar, are known as Princess Alice nurses. The training schools provide a course of one year for educated girls. Their curriculum covers instruction in the feeding and general care of infants, lectures on hygiene, physical development, and infantile diseases, and practical cookery and laundry work. Many girls who have taken the course of training have secured excellent portions in private families and institutions both at home and abroad.