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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 5. April 2 1968

Play Centres

Play Centres

To encourage parents to keep these children at home, more emphasis should be placed on local play centres for mentally defective children. Instruction should be provided in training methods which parents could administer at home. Short-stay hospitals for children from smaller centres would enable ability assessment, and give the family a break. This principle could be extended to week-day boarding schools for older children.

Above all, the community must lose its fear and repugnance for the mentally defective child. This would tree parents from fears that keeping the children will alarm visitors, friends, neighbours and affect the other children.

Parents of any class and intellectual level may have a mentally defective child.

In this sense the mentally defective child is a child of the whole community, and should be accepted as such. In most instances these children are not only harmless, but good-natured and possessing as individual a character as normal children.

Occupational centres are a notable advance in enabling training within the community, but need more funds. Provision should be made for new techniques and work material to be introduced by highly-trained consultative staff from the main centres.

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Those who work in these occupational centres can feel like pioneers, guided more by instinct and ingenuity than is necessary. This also applies to Government training programmes. The administrators must be temperamentally suited. Skilled advice and good materials must be readily available. The "do-it-yourself" New Zealand approach places too great a burden on staff.

Frustration dogs this work. The slow pace of the children seems to infect the institutions. Programmes stagnate, old methods become inbuilt. Too often apathy goes disguised as patience. Progress is slow in any case; what use are new methods?

This seems the difficulty of large New Zealand institutions. The enthusiastic and imaginative people one does find in the system require the cunning of foxes and the patience of Job to establish anything new.