A children's charter / The Labour Party.

  • Labour Party
Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A children's charter / The Labour Party. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE STATE AND THE CHILD The purpose of this pamphlet is to indicate the social provision which the community should make for its children. It was in the past taken for granted that the care and wellbeing of the child was the responsibility solely of its parents. Every new demand upon the state or local authorities on behalf of children was described in some quarters as further evidence of a “ weakening of parental responsibility.” Actually the reverse was true. Labour women who have consistently asked for wider social pro- vision for the needs of childhood, have done so out of a growing sense of responsibility, both as mothers and citizens, derived from their Socialist conception of human personality. They reject the view that a child is the “ pro- perty ” of its parents, an investment for their own future; they regard every child as an individual, and potential citizen, with a personality to be respected, and the right to the conditions which will ensure its healthy develop- ment—physical, mental, emotional. Everyone is agreed that the mother has a special res- ponsibility for the wellbeing of her child, and that the child has a right to the security which a happy home pro- vides. But many of the needs of children can better be met collectively by the community than by the individual home—and this would still be true even if the burden of extreme poverty were lifted from the thousands of homes overshadowed by this burden to-day. For the view is based on a’surer knowledge than our fathers and mothers had of the physical and mental needs of the child, and of the laws of its growth. CHILDREN’S ALLOWANCES As Socialists we believe that every child has a right to a share in the nation’s resources, and that, in a Socialist state, with these resources co-operatively owned and con- trolled, we should meet this claim by an adequate pro- vision of social services along with a system of allowances paid to mothers in respect of their children.
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