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New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 5

Sir-A small child has little idea of time, so that mother’s assurance that she will come "next Sunday" seems to mean she won’t come for an eternity, if at all. Most of them, however, can understand "tomorrow," and when they find that she really does come every day, they don’t feel that she is deserting them. Also nurse’s "Mummy coming soon" will satisfy them, provided she really does come. I well remember hearing for days on end the despairing "Mummy, oh, Mummy," of a tiny toddler in hospital, quiet only when sheer’ exhaustion brought troubled sleep. Also there was a three-year-old who shared a ward with me in a small hospital, a brave and merry little soul, whose silent moments of fretting and half whispered "when can I go home" when alone, ‘were rarely if ever noticed by the three different sets of over-worked staff, and whose rather vague symptoms persisted week after week. No array of medical degrees would convince a mother that in such cases the child’s progress isn’t hindered. We all know who the small child wants (and needs) when in trouble, and it seems to me that there are few cases when anyone has any legal or moral (or medical) right to forbid his mother to an under-five. Everyone realises there are serious difficulties, as in any worth-while task, but there is an old story about wills and ways that applies to this as to other problems. A willingness to co-operate is needed from both sides, not an arbitrary enforcement of a rule by one. There must be ‘cases, especially where shock is involved, when enforced separation from a mother endangers a child’s very life. Hysterical mothers aren’t so very numerous, and would be much less so if they knew they could see the child again tomorrow, and that calling them in didn’t mean the illness had taken a critical turn.

WHERE THERE'S A WILL

(Opotiki)_