Volume 1

Fit for the future : report of the Committee on Child Health Services / chairman, S.D.M. Court.

  • Great Britain. Committee on Child Health Services.
Date:
1976
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Fit for the future : report of the Committee on Child Health Services / chairman, S.D.M. Court. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    32/472 (page 12)
    children are very disturbing because the cases which come to light are almost certainly only the tip of the iceberg. It is likely to occur among parents who are hard pressed by life, burdened by their children, and especially their young children, from whom they cannot get the physical relief of removing themselves or the psychological relief of sharing their burdens with others. It is not only a matter of individual behaviour since one could expect that in a healthy society child battering would happen only in rare pathological cases. Trends and Innovations The changing pattern of family and social life An effective health service, and especially an effective child health service, must be knowledgeable about the social and economic circumstances of those it serves and have developed a philosophy of how its expertise and facilities can best be made available to those in need of them. It was part of our remit to examine the use made of existing services and although there is regrettably little statistical evidence so that we have had to rely a good deal on anecdote, it is none the less clear that health services in the future will have to take much more account of the realities of life and its constraints for most families with children if the services are to reach them more satisfactorily. The average age of marriage in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s has been lower than at any time since civil registration began in 1836 and more than 90% of women have married at least once by the time they reach the end of child-bearing age. In 1974 spinsters were marrying 24-3 years younger than their counterparts 40 years ago (at an average age of 22.7 instead of 25.5); and whereas in 1931 17% of women aged 45-49 had never married, in 1974 the proportion was only 7%. Thus marriage is becoming more popular and is being undertaken younger, although the trend seems to have levelled off in recent years. Divorce, too, is getting more popular. There has been a long term upward trend in the divorce rate ever since civil divorce first became available in 1857. But up to 1940 the number each year never exceeded 10,000. After the second world war a much steeper upward trend began and the 1970 figure (58,000) was double that of 1960. Since the new legislation of 1970 there has been a further doubling of the annual rate: 120,000 divorces in 1975. Not only has the divorce rate risen steadily but there is also a growing tendency for husbands and wives to divorce at younger ages and after shorter durations of marriage. Marriages where the bride was under 20 are twice as likely to end in divorce as those where she was 20-24 years old. Yet the divorced frequently remarry very soon and there is an upsurge in this trend also. In 1965 11% of marriages involved a divorced bride or groom—by 1972 it was 22% and in 1974 25%. Yet though marriage is more popular and entered into younger there has been no consistent increase in the number of children. A general picture of declining annual births and earlier marriage reflects the way in which getting married and starting a family are no longer so closely connected as they were even a few years ago. Moreover, recent trends in births have, in particular, shown a fall in the number of births to married women who