President Franklin Roosevelt signing
the Social Security Act of 1935. Frances Perkins, Secretary of
Labor, is the only woman visible in this photograph, but women
were key advocates of “maternalist” social policies
for children and families, including the program called Aid to
Dependent Children, that eventually led to a dramatic expansion
of foster placements.
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Before 1945, “fostering”
referred to numerous arrangements in which children were cared for
in homes other than their own. The point of the term was to contrast
institutional care with family placements. The case for foster care
was articulated by nineteenth-century child-savers, including Charles
Loring Brace, publicized by the orphan
trains, and advanced by states that experimented with placing-out
children rather than consigning them to orphanages.
In the early twentieth century, the cause was taken up by reformers
like Henry Dwight Chapin, a New York pediatrician and founder of
the Speedwell Society whose wife established one of the country’s
first specialized adoption agencies,
the Alice Chapin Nursery, in 1910. Henry Chapin circulated statistics
showing that orphanages literally sickened and killed alarming numbers
of children. His conviction that “a poor home is often better
than a good institution” spread quickly among child
welfare and public health professionals, but in 1910, there
were well over 1000 orphanages in the United States, and their average
size had grown considerably since the late nineteenth century. The
campaign to make families the only acceptable places to raise children
still had a long way to go.
On the front lines of this movement were “foster parents”
who took other people’s children into their homes temporarily
and permanently, informally and formally. Children who earned their
keep by working, children whose board was paid by agencies, and
children placed in “free homes” were all living in foster
families. During the early decades of the twentieth century, legally
adopted children were also called foster children. The terms of
family care varied enormously. Terminology did not.
Long before “adoption” was commonly used, child-placers
appreciated the differences between permanent kinship and temporary
residence in someone else’s home. Most Progressive-era social
workers aimed to keep children with their own families, even
if they were illegitimate, out of
respect for the importance of blood ties. But advocates also knew
that some children could not or should not live with their birth
parents. For these children, becoming a lifelong member of a
new family was desirable. Common sense suggested that emotional
security was key to children’s health and welfare, and developmental
science produced additional evidence for this claim. Research on
attachment and loss and studies of maternal deprivation in infancy
influenced policies of early placement and ushered in a more pro-adoption
climate after 1940.
By 1950, statistics showed
that children in family foster care outnumbered children in institutions
for the first time. By 1960, there were more than twice as many
in foster care. By the late 1970s, the foster child population exceeded
500,000, roughly where it stands today. Foster placements could
be numerous and lengthy in practice, but in theory they were temporary
because children maintained ties to their birth
parents. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, as foster care became
more common for more children, adoptions increasingly involved practices
like matching, policies like confidentiality
and sealed records, and placements of infants and toddlers rather
than older children. Adoption aspired to the wholesale substitution
of one family for another. Foster care did not.
Two developments distanced adoption from foster care after the
New Deal and World War II: the growth of public social welfare services
and a new consciousness about the plight of African-American,
mixed-race, older, native, developmentally delayed, physically disabled,
and other hard-to-place children. Anti-poverty programs like Aid
to Dependent Children (established by the Social Security Act of
1935 and later renamed Aid to Families With Dependent Children)
offered financially struggling parents an alternative to placing
their children in institutions or surrendering them forever. When
the program expanded in the early 1960s, federal funding for foster
care was added. The result was an explosion in out-of-home family
placements. During the last half-century, foster care has come to
designate this government-funded system. Foster care is now the
main form of assistance provided to poor children in the United
States who cannot remain in their own homes because of neglect or
abuse.
Race as well as class marked the growing gap between foster care
and adoption. During the postwar civil rights era, poor children
of color, formerly denied many services, comprised more of the foster
care caseload. Foster parents were somewhat better off economically
than the children in their care, but they too were increasingly
drawn from minority racial and ethnic communities. Foster parents
were licensed and compensated by the state for the work they did,
however meagerly, and had fewer legal protections than adoptive
or birth parents. By definition,
foster parents were not autonomous. They were expected to provide
havens of safety and love for children at risk, but they were also
responsible for keeping children in contact with relatives and agency
workers. Adopters, on the other hand, were more affluent. They paid
for the services they received, overwhelmingly preferred babies
and young children whose racial identities matched their own, and
were legally entitled to manage their families without supervision
after court decrees were issued. Adoption spelled permanence, but
the price of that permanence was the social obliteration of natal
ties.
Children sometimes moved from foster care to adoption. Because termination
of parental rights was a lengthy process, most of these were (and
are) special needs adoptions. Foster
children were invariably older and had complex loyalties to natal
and foster kin. Their histories of separation and trauma were associated
with behavioral and health problems. These characteristics made
them undesirable to many would-be parents, and that made their adoptions
difficult and expensive to arrange. After midcentury, agencies invested
scarce time and money recruiting parents for hard-to-place children.
By the 1960s, a few turned in frustration to controversial solutions
like transracial adoptions.
Another approach, pioneered by New York state in 1965 and supported
by the federal Adoption Assistance
and Child Welfare Act of 1980, was to subsidize adoptions. Subsidies
exposed the cruelty of market forces by offering economic incentives
to adopt children for whom there was little or no demand. They challenged
the assumption that permanent kinship required financial independence
and acknowledged the high costs of raising children who needed ongoing
medical and psychological help. If subsidies began to undercut the
differences between foster care and adoption, a 1977 class action
suit did just the opposite. In Smith
v. OFFER, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that foster parents
were not entitled to the same constitutional rights as other parents.
Because states licensed, created, and paid them, foster families
could not oppose children’s removal or expect to remain intact,
as birth families could, no matter how long-lasting and deep the
ties between foster parents and children.
For the past several decades, the foster care system has confronted
substance abuse, AIDS, and other adult epidemics that trickle down
to children. Even as more Americans seek healthy infants and toddlers
through open adoptions, international
adoptions, and new reproductive technologies, foster children
drift from one placement to the next, and approximately 20,000 “age
out” of the system each year. Their tragic plight has provoked
soul-searching about “permanency planning,” hearings
about barriers to adoption, and legislation, such as the Adoption
and Safe Families Act of 1997, that commits new resources to adoption.
“Kinship care,” which seeks to transform grandmothers,
aunts, and other birth relatives into certified foster parents or
legal guardians, is one recent response to the failures of foster
care. Such policies reflect the enduring rhetoric of family preservation
while acknowledging the insurmountable odds against secure belonging
for too many American children. |