Parenting in New Zealand with Plunket

Caring for mums and babies

There are fewer organisations more ‘Kiwi’ than Plunket. To almost any Kiwi parent, the name is synonymous with sausage rolls, teddy bears, picnics and, most importantly, support through the early days of parenting. Run as a not-for-profit organisation, Plunket combines clinical staff with a huge volunteer network to provide services for the development, health and wellbeing of children under age five.

Fighting infant mortality

Named after its first patron, Lady Victoria Plunket, the organisation was established in Dunedin in 1907 by Frederick Truby King in response to an escalating infant mortality rate. Truby King believed that the future health of the nation lay in providing mothers with formulated doctrines on nutrition and infant care. He established the Karitane Home for Babies in Dunedin where he and his team cared for malnourished infants, and six further Karitane hospitals, which cared for babies failing to thrive.

Within two short years the Plunket Society had centres in all four major regions throughout the country, and within five years Truby King had inspired a further 60 branches, with a Plunket nurse at each one.

Plunket, along with Kiwi babies, thrived following King's ideologies. Mothers were educated in 'domestic hygiene' and 'mothercraft', which emphasised regularity of habits including feeding, sleeping and toileting. Within three decades, New Zealand boasted the lowest infant mortality rate in the world, an accolade credited to King and the triumph of his work.

A Kiwi mainstay

Today Plunket is still regarded as one of the mainstays for most parents of small children. They are involved in nearly every aspect of child welfare and continue to be a wonderful resource for parents. Plunket's huge range of mostly free services includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Car seat hire
• Parent education – in areas as diverse as First Aid to Babysitting Certificates
• Parent groups – a networking service that gets parents together to support one another
• PlunketLine – a toll free support line, answered by Plunket Nurses, that operates from 7am – midnight, seven days a week (0800 933 922)
• Plunket well-child assessments – a Ministry of Health sponsored project to ensure the health and wellbeing of all Kiwi kids under five years of age
• Toy libraries – a wonderful resource of toys and books for children, which operates just like a lending library