TRENDS IN HEALTH LEGISLATION AND ADMINISTRATION

Abstract

THE need for research in the field of health and welfare of children may be considered the essential origin of the Children's Bureau. In recent yeat's, however, maternal and child health services, supported by large grants-in-aid to states, have overshadowed the Bureau's research function. The latter is, in fact, relatively unfamiliar except to those immediately concerned. However, at the present time, increasing attention is being given to strengthening and enlarging the Bureau's research program. There is good reason to anticipate that this matter will be brought to the attention of the 81st Congress.

Accordingly, Dr. Bain, Director of the Bureau's Division of Research in Child Development, has been asked to prepare the following statement for publication in this column:

A variety of research studies has been made by the Children's Bureau in the 36 years of its existence, sometimes independently but often in cooperation with institutions already engaged in similar investigations.

In the first decade of its existence the Children's Bureau, in line with its mandate to investigate and report "upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people," concentrated its small resources on studies of conditions surrounding the lives of children. A series of community studies on infant mortality revealed the social and economic factors associated with a high mortality rate.