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mind a comprehensive Day Centre offering comfortable surroundings,
meals and snacks, newspapers, periodicals and possibly a lending library,
suitable games and all opportunities for social contact and the maintenance
of interest in life and the World in general. Such a centre would
be open every day of the week and for long hours of the day and might,
in time, be a prototype for other similar centres. The cost would be
high, but would it be too high?
Problem Families
Every district numbers in its population families whose standards
fall far short of those of their neighbours. They have been called
"Problem Families" or "Failing Families" and they stick out like a
sore thumb wherever they are encountered. The parents are frequently
of low intelligence and many have a mental hospital history. They are
shiftless, poor managers, and often delinquent. Standards of child care
and household management are of the lowest, debts abound, employment
is desultory, meals are wasteful and unnourishing, children's health
indifferent and school attendance poor. This is not an over-drawn picture
of the chronic problem family and, unfortunately, not an isolated
instance.
Why have we such family units in the middle of the twentieth
century and after close on twenty years of "The Welfare State" ? There
is no one answer to that question nor is there one solution to the puzzle
of how to help and support them. Each and every family has become a
problem for a variety of reasons and usually for more than one reason
and they engage the efforts of many types of social workers in trying to
resolve their difficulties and what is even more important, in trying to
detect the early signs of family failure before the condition has become
fully established.
It may be of interest to list these, all of whom may attend a Problem
Family Conference - a, meeting of interested parties called together to
plan a campaign of help and support
Public Health Service Medical Officers
General Medical Practitioners
Health Visitors
Social Workers of the Health Department
Education Welfare Officers
School Head Teachers
Probation Officers
Psychiatric Social Workers
Housing Managers
Housing Social Workers
Hospital Almoners
Representatives of
Child Guidance Clinics
Children's Department
N.S.P.C.C.
National Assistance Board
Guild of Social Service
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