Conclusion

The conclusion briefly summarizes some of the developments in foster care in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including the rise of the permanency movement, the passage of the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, and the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, each of which shaped the development of foster care, particularly in the areas of subsidized adoption and easier paths to Termination of Parental Rights (TPR). The conclusion also argues that society’s reluctance to adequately support low income birth mothers and low paid foster mothers is part of a broader ambivalence about careworkers in general.

Poverty, Punishment, and Public Assistance

This chapter explores policy changes in the 1960s that for the first time allowed federal funds to be spent on board payments but which also made foster care a more punitive system, now firmly linked to public assistance, in which children of color were overrepresented. It looks particularly at the impact of the creation of Aid to Families with Dependent Children-Foster Care (AFDC-FC) in making foster care in this transition.

Compensated Motherhood and the State

This chapter examines the role of foster parents as workers, an idea rooted in the nineteenth century role of the “boarding mother.” Child Welfare professionals, foster parents, and the public struggled over the proper balance between paying adequate board to foster parents while ensuring that desire to nurture a child remained the paramount motivation. By the 1960s, foster parents began organizing themselves, culminating in the formation of the National Foster Parents Association in 1971.

The Hard-to-Place Child

This chapter examines the notion of the “hard-to-place child” and the post-war emergence of the idea that foster children were inherently damaged. This idea derived from the rise of “attachment theory” and the conventional wisdom that New Deal family security programs had effectively eliminated poverty as a reason for child placement, thereby meaning that those children still in need of foster care came from pathological families. The chapter looks at various qualities that made a child “hard-to-place,” including, age, disability, behavioural problems, and race. It looks specifically at the use of board rates as a strategy to recruit foster parents and at efforts to recruit African American foster homes to serve African American children.

Providing Love and Care

This chapter examines the ambiguity of the foster parent role in the post-World War II period, looking particularly at analogies to other kinds of parenting. It explores efforts by child welfare professionals to reconcile their ambivalent feelings about foster parents through the creation and promotion of national standards for foster care and foster parenting. The chapter looks closely at professional writings about the foster mother role and the reasons why foster fathers received so little attention. It also examines the ways in which foster parents resisted their proscribed role, notably through attempting to adopt children in their care.

The New Deal, Family Security, and the Emergence of a Public Child Welfare System

This chapter addresses the significance of the New Deal to the development of publicly funded foster care and its relationship to the nascent welfare state. The chapter includes many first-hand accounts of parents turning to foster care because they could not provide both economic support and nurturing care to their children. The chapter argues that the onset of the Great Depression marked a setback for the delivery of child welfare services. However, the promise of a more rational system of federal welfare provision through passage of the Social Security Act and other New Deal programs raised hopes that economic insecurity for families could be so drastically reduced as to eliminate (or at least diminish) the role of poverty in separating children from their families. In addition, Title V of the Social Security Act also provided funds to develop state-level public child welfare services, which helped spur the creation of a child welfare infrastructure.

Introduction

The introduction describes aspects of the state of foster care today, noting that child welfare professionals in the early twentieth century had been optimistic that they could create a much better system than what has emerged. The introduction also surveys relevant work by historians that has addressed the history of inequality in the welfare state and the history of adoption, remarking that foster care is significant to both subjects but has not been systematically studied by historians.

Helping America’s Orphans of War

This chapter examines the impact of World War II, which increased the need for foster care, decreased the supply of foster parents, and exacerbated tensions over women’s roles as workers, mothers, and caregivers. In an effort to meet wartime needs for foster parents, child welfare professionals turned to the rhetoric of war service to recruit foster families, celebrating foster mothers’ caregiving as part of the war effort. As was also the case for other women working in war industries, however, champions celebrated foster mothers’ motivations in traditionally feminine terms while often downplaying the very real economic considerations at play. The chapter examines the role of a program to temporarily place British children in American homes (administered by the US Committee for the Care of European Children) in further developing the American child welfare infrastructure. It also explores child welfare professionals’ opposition to institutional day care.

Into the Family Life of Strangers

This chapter surveys the origins of foster care in earlier methods for supporting dependent children dating back to the colonial period, including indenture, orphanages, “placing out” (also known as orphan trains), boarding out, and adoption. It attends to the racial and religious aspects of these systems and to the relationship between private and public systems of child welfare. The chapter also discusses the importance of the professionalization of the child welfare field in the early twentieth century, particularly the creation of the US Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America.