The term “home study”
was not common until the mid-twentieth century, but investigations
of potential foster and adoptive homes were hardly new in 1950.
Children who rode the orphan trains in
the nineteenth-century, or who were placed-out
during the early years of the twentieth century, were supposed to
be given to responsible adults who possessed adequate resources
to care for them. At least in theory, child-placers were charged
with insuring that families who took in children born to others
had the money, food, and room—not to mention wisdom, patience,
and love—to do the job.
The major finding of early adoption field
studies was that home investigations were either not done well
or not done at all. Progressive-era reformers were appalled by baby
farms and other black-market adoptions that illustrated how
children might be casually, cruelly, or commercially placed with
just about anyone for just about any reason. They complained that
sloppy and unregulated arrangements jeopardized child
welfare and argued that states had a duty to the public to insure
that placements were made according to minimum
standards, including the investigation of homes. In 1891, Michigan
called on judges to “investigate” before entering final
adoption decrees, but no state made such investigation mandatory
until the Minnesota Adoption
Law of 1917 charged public authorities with making an “appropriate
inquiry to determine whether the proposed foster home is a suitable
home for the child.”
Between 1917 and midcentury, most states revised their laws to
include such an inquiry. Enforcement was weak, however, and many
states did not require that investigations take place before
children were placed. This loophole made it considerably more difficult
to remove children in undesirable placements because many of those
children had already been living in their new homes for a long time.
Judges who handled adoptions often found themselves in a no-win
situation: severing attachments between children and their foster
families was likely to compound problems caused by poor placements
themselves.
The whole point of investigating homes was to predict, in advance,
the likelihood that any given child would find security and love
and turn out well in the end. During the first several decades of
the century, social workers made the
novel argument that only trained and experienced professionals could
make such predictions accurately. Yet most professional home investigations
began by gathering facts that were readily visible to any attentive
observer. Reports typically documented mothers’ housekeeping
and cooking skills, water supply, refrigeration, heating, and distance
to church and school. Investigators asked if foster children would
be expected to work and if they would have rooms of their own.
The moral qualifications of prospective foster
parents were evaluated by inquiring about the regularity of
church attendance, steadiness of work, sobriety, reputation, and
the well-being of any children (“own” or foster) already
living in the home. Questions about income, property, and literacy
were also routine, giving rise to widespread suspicions—still
prevalent today—that adoption, which regularly transferred
children from poor to middle-class homes, was hopelessly corrupted
by class and cultural biases. Whatever one’s view, the home
study illustrates one of the impossible balancing acts that adoption
has performed over time: weighing the obvious advantage of belonging
to a family blessed by wealth and educational privilege against
the belief that child welfare should never be calculated in dollars
and cents.
Child-placers during the Progressive era did not begin or end their
investigations by running white gloves over windowsills. They also
believed that home investigations should explore the intangible
qualities that made the difference between happy and unhappy homes.
Were parents kind? Were their expectations of children reasonable?
Would they be able to see things from the child’s point of
view? These questions were as consequential for children as they
were tricky to answer with certainty. One solution to this problem,
frequently mentioned in child-placing manuals, was to obtain independent
character references from neighbors and community leaders. Why?
Child-placers realized that foster parents could misrepresent themselves
and deceive investigators bent on uncovering the facts.
The transition from home investigations to home studies
marked the spread of therapeutic approaches that emphasized psychological
interpretation over empirical documentation in the investigation
process. During the post-World War II era, home studies were protracted
probes of parental worthiness in which personality profiles ranked
equally with financial stability and physical health and in which
matching aspired to both physical resemblance
and temperamental compatibility. In a major national study of adoption
practice at midcentury, for example, agencies reported that their
investigations concentrated on such qualities as personal adjustment,
happy marriages, congenial relationships with family and friends,
ability to love a child, and resolution of the grief that accompanied
childlessness. Applicants were asked about their families of origin,
their “sexual adjustment,” and their reasons for wanting
to adopt. The motivation of infertile
couples became an especially sensitive issue in the adoption process.
Over time, adoption investigations became complex helping operations.
The goal was not simply to accept or reject applicants on the basis
of fixed standards, but to evaluate the strengths and weakness of
their not-yet-realized parental capacity. Professionals influenced
by Freudian psychology
believed that people interested in adopting were, more often than
not, unaware of their own motivations and unable to determine for
themselves if they were emotionally ready for parenthood. The sincerest
and most enthusiastic couples might be fooling themselves and never
know it, whereas couples who expressed ambivalence might be perfectly
suited to the task of raising adopted children. In either case,
home studies aimed to reveal a truth deeper than words.
The most common explanation for the growing psychological emphasis
in home studies was simple: supply and demand. Adoption was influenced
by market forces, so couples were more frequently “screened
out” when demand was high. Popular journalistic coverage of
the “baby shortage” began as early as the 1930s and
adoption statistics occasionally
confirmed that applicants did sometimes dramatically outnumber available
babies. According to this view, increasing competition allowed agencies
to impose different, more selective standards for healthy white
infants. After 1945, concerns about the different, less selective
(and therefore discriminatory) standards used to place African-American,
mixed-race, and other hard-to-place children also supported this
view. Today's rhetoric about “screening in” adopters
of children with special needs has
led to a similar conclusion. When it comes to hard-to-place children,
prospective parents are welcomed as "partners" and "allies" rather
than scrutinized as subjects.
Home studies have had as many critics as defenders because their
timing, duration, and results have been extremely unpredictable.
Individuals and couples interested in adopting also wondered, reasonably
enough, why they had to subject themselves to evaluations that most
parents would find not only uncomfortable intrusions, but intolerable
violations of their reproductive freedom. Recognizing, however,
that agencies had the authority to give or withhold the children
they sought, many adoption applicants resigned themselves to a family-making
process in which professionals played God. Sometimes they complained
about being put in a “fish bowl” or subverted the home
study process by sharing with others what they had learned about
the qualities social workers preferred, implying that the entire
procedure was nothing but a hypocritical game in which theatrical
skill and the “right answers” mattered more than good
intentions or truth. Others simply decided to live without children
or turned to independent adoptions, which tended to treat would-be
parents as generous people with something to offer rather than clients
whose motivations required strict scrutiny.
The rationale for regulating adoption legally and socially—as
well as the considerable difficulty of doing so—is apparent
in the history of home studies. States believed that investigation
was necessary to make families in which children would be reliably
loved and protected, and in which belonging without blood would
be authentic belonging nonetheless. Yet states never gave agencies
a monopoly over adoption. (Only Delaware in 1952 and Connecticut
in 1957 banned non-agency adoptions, and because it was so easy
to cross state lines to adopt, these were largely symbolic acts.)
The result was that the agency professionals most dedicated to home
studies always had to compete with more flexible, less strenuous
arrangements. Changing investigatory fashions reflected trends in
social work, in the world of child
welfare, and in the broader culture and economy. What was being
tested and why may have changed, but at the heart of the modern
home study was an enduring belief. Because kinship without blood
was fragile and risky, systematic inquiry and interpretation were
needed in order for it to succeed. |