Raising Government Children

Foster care today is widely criticized for breaking up families, providing inadequate services to children, and stigmatizing all involved. Yet, as Catherine E. Rymph shows in her new history of what became the foster care “system,” its founders had high hopes for reforming and modernizing child welfare through professionalized social work and scientific case management. Their vision of paid foster homes to create loving, substitute families imagined a future in which few children would need such temporary care and families would not be separated because of poverty. Rymph's analysis builds on the well-established literature of child welfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which has focused on institutions such as orphanages and the juvenile court system. She picks up the historiographic threads in the 1930s under the New Deal, though the conditions in the mid-twentieth century suggest much continuity rather than a clean break from earlier child welfare practices. While the state never fully embraced responsibility for dependent children, Rymph argues convincingly that foster care from its inception blurred the lines between public and private, transferring considerable fiscal burden onto foster parents. This arm of the much-disparaged “welfare state” really depended on the financial resources and labor of foster families, who were often precariously perched in the working class

Economic growth · Economics · Family preservation · Foster care · Government (linguistics · Political science · Poverty · Sociology · State (computer science · Welfare · Welfare state · Child Welfare and Adoption · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Public Administration