Foster-Parents

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 5

Foster-Parents

ANY of those who read the article about foster-parents in our last issue must have felt as we ourselves did when we read it-astonished to know that this work had been going on for 50 years, and ashamed to think that. they themselves had done so little actively to help. But out of sight is out of mind for most of us. If we are not constantly reminded of social problems, we don’t give them any thought, and in most cases we forget after a

time that they exist. The dullest of us of course know that children who have no homes, or bad homes, or no parents, or bad parents are the responsibility of the rest of the community; but we don’t often make it our business ‘to find out how that responsibility is being met. It was not because of anything most of us did that there are state wards in our midst to-day holding honourable and even distinguished places in the community, but it may have been because of something we did not do that there are also continuing failures. We are not all qualified to assist directly: some of us have no house-room, some no headroom, some no heart-room. But we are all qualified to ask ourselves where we stand in such matters, and if only one home in a hundred opened its doors the worst problem of the welfare officers would completely disappear: They would still have failures, since it is not possible to remake in a few months or a few years what neglect or strife or bad habits have so gravely damaged. But they would at least have a chance of separating the inevitable from the unnecessary failures if we gave them a wide encugh choice of foster-parents. As matters stand a choice has sometimes to be made between the well-meaning and foolish, the merely foolish, and the foolish who are not as well-meaning as they ought to be.