Welcome to this blog. If you are new, I just left off writing about Dr. Peter Neubauer, Task Force Chairman on the Report of the Joint Commission on the Mental Health of Children in the late 60's. Dr. Neubauer noted that just two decades earlier, when we talked about rearing infants, we really weren’t able to specify the importance of love and affection. He pointed out that we also had a lot to learn about launching healthy children: knowledge about early learning, emotional development, and the foundation of physical growth.
Neubauer called the emotional health of our children the number one public health problem of the day. He noted children with extended sleep disorders, children with fears so great they were unable to function, speech problems, bed wetting, temper tantrums and overdependency of such that a child cannot go onto the next steps of growth. He noted hyperactivity and children who were obsessively orderly; behaviors lasting far longer than they should. He said it was time for knowledge that had been accruing over the last two decades to be given to mothers.
Congress created a taskforce to study the mental health of children. The resulting report called Crisis in Child Mental Health: Challenge for the 1970s, required three years of exhaustive research and was nearly 600 pages long.
Brief summary of presentation to Congress: Children are a nation’s most precious resource. They are its future, its hope for the fulfillment of national goals. How important then for a nation to be committed to the health of its children, to helping them grow up physically, mentally, and emotionally strong. Society must also consider both human development and the environment in which children live, learn, and shape themselves. Honest effort to help children mature into strong and healthy adults can only benefit a nation; lack of commitment to do so can lead to national disaster. Crisis in Child Mental Health: Challenge for the 1970s. Report of the Joint Commission. New York: Harper, 1970. 578pp.
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