PLUNKET SOCIETY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 932, 21 June 1957, Page 11

PLUNKET SOCIETY

Sir.-Your reviewer, R.D.McE., has @ commendably succinct and pertinent query on the Plunket Society (Listener, May 31). He hardly exaggerates when he mentions Truby King’s "wholly physical concept of health,’ and he Taises an overdue query in asking whether our respect for Truby King’s theories has not too long been too unquestioning. Of course it has been, and is. A complex, semi-State institutionalised society like Plunket naturally tends to institutionalise its theory. This tendency to elevate theory to dogma is not peculiar to Plunket, by any means; with it, though, it has meant that, from being a generation ahead of the world, in many ways we are now so much behind it. Compare its publications with similar material aimed at ordinary parents in Britain, Canada or the States; these show that in ours, that danger of a "wholly physical concept of health" is ever-present. Overseas, for instance, schedule feeding has long been critically discussed in its relation to mental health. Is this adequately reflected, twenty years later, in local material? The Society’s suspicious treatment of ideas evolved elsewhere since Truby King’s first work results from its institutionalising of ideas-to use the same example, witness the "straw man" discussion (and dismissal) of demand feeding, in Plunket’s most widely read book, recently revised. Our debt to,Truby King is that he questioned practices he found. We should, too. He could not have before him the fifty years’ wealth of material from psychological study of children which we have. He would not, in 1957, have passed it over so lightly with eyes turned backwards. Is it to be the fate of Truby King to suffer the worst punishment of a revolutionary-not to suffer or be ignored, but to be enshrined? Some unpublished (but most reliable) figures on the actual practice of breast feeding in New Zealand suggest strongly that 50 years of Plunket teaching have achieved far too little in this, one of their key teachings. Why? The national conference last year learned that many mothers use the Society almost solely for its baby scales. Is the fault the mother’s? Or the Society’s? In many points, its teachings are more conservative than the advice parents will get from their obstetricians or pediatricians. This disparity, and that with overseas publications available, will confuse par-ents-unless they treat the Society’s advice with less respect than it ought to have. This criticism in no way denies Plunket’s tremendous contribution to our material and child welfare. But surely, when it so justly makes a claim for public support on such a scale, it has a public duty to beware of the danger of inertia which comes from its size and complexity. Undeniably, it has taken into account overseas research less speedily, less often than it shouldparticularly in the not purely physical aspects of child care. If our children

grow tall while our mental hospitals grow too small, it may not be an indictment of Plunket directly, but at the very least, it suggests that more concern might be given to this side of the work especially since Plunket has done so much to have a high standard of physical care taken as routine. The Society should not celay revision until public attitudes prod it. It is far too important an organisation to be uncritical, or uncriticised. Plunket, of all societies in New Zealand. should not become a

sacred cow.

D.

G.

(Wellington).