Title: Relationship of family planning to pediatrics and child health.

POPLINE Document Number: 702396

Author(s):

Wallace HM
Gold EM

Source citation:

Clinical Pediatrics, 1970 Dec;9(12):699-701.

Abstract:

This article starts from the premise that there are good reasons as to why family planning and child health services should be closely related to each other, in the end helping prolong the life of the infants, promote optimum levels of growth, and better the quality of par ental care. The points discussed in those terms are: 1) greater intervals between pregnancies reduces the chance of infant and child mortality, 2) family planning helps better the quality of family life and the health of the existing children by keeping the number of children low and the intervals between them optimum, 3) infant and child mortality reduction is a prerequisite in many underdeveloped countries for couples to adopt family planning, 4) family planning education and services should be a part of school programs, 5) large family size and overcrowding are associated with children's diseases, 6) children of large families are smaller in size, 7) maternal care in large families is less adequate than that in smaller families, 8) because of less maternal supervision, accidents in childhood may be more in the large families. The authors feel that family planning and child care services should be brought together for the foregoing reasons. The ways of doing this may include special health programs for school children, dissemination of family planning information in day care centers, head start programs, and diagnostic, counseling, and treatment centers for handicapped children, etc.

Keywords:

Family Planning Programs
Maternal Health Services
Family Planning
Programs
Organization and Administration
Maternal-Child Health Services
Primary Health Care
Health Services
Delivery of Health Care
Health