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15.
and for the mentally handicapped it is certain to do so.
Socio-economic conditions during the past twenty years have
tended to encourage the least responsible parents to have the
largest families. One Walthamstow family taken into care last
year because of the father's fecklessness consisted of nine
children ranging from 3 to 13 years of age. It has been
shown that 'Problem Families' who need constant help and
supervision by the Health and Welfare Departments to maintain
even minimum standards have, on average, exactly twice as
many children as their socially and economically self-reliant
neighbours. Conversely many men and women whose lives have
been of inestimable benefit to the community and whose
qualities of mind have won them prominence and universal
esteem, have no children or, at most, one or two. There is a
progressive increase too, in the number of illegitimate births
which now account for 5.4 Der cent (more than one in nineteen)
of live births throu£hout England and Wales. London, because of
the facilities and anonimity provided uy a great city, tends
to import these problems and for 1960 the figure for the
Administrative County was 6,530 illegitimate births, representing
11.4 per cent or one out of every nine babies born! These
unfortunate children experience not only an increased mortality
(in 1960 the Illegitimate Infant Mortality Rate in Walthamstow
was 54.5 per thousand compared with 16.7 for legitimate
infants) but also an increased liability to suffer from mental
and physical defects. It is not surprising that this should
be so; children are just as likely to inherit the mental and
physical characteristics of their parents as to resemble them
in appearance. Although individual psychologists and
sociologists vary in their assessments of the degree to which
intelligence is dependent upon heredity (and we can all think
of exceptions) one generally accepted view is that parents'
intelligence and environment together account for 80 per cent
of the difference (above or below average) in the intelligence
of the child and, in this context, heredity is four times as
important as environment. It is significant that the Ministry
of Education estimate an increase in the provision of special
school places for the educationally subnormal from the present
figure of 34,500 to 54,000 by 1965.
The trend is less clear with the primarily physically
handicapped child but we are coming more and more to be
concerned with hereditary and congenital conditions and little
progress has been made in combating these. Techniques like
exchange transfusion of the entire blood volume may save the
life of a baby affected by Rhesus incompatability and improvements
in obstetric and paediatric techniques enable many infants