In the nineteenth century, child-caring
institutions such as orphanages and infant asylums proliferated.
By 1900, the ideology of institutional care was in decline. A new
imperative to place children in families was signaled by the first
White House Conference on Children in 1909, which championed home
life as “the highest and finest product of civilization.”
It was not until the 1950s, however, that the number of children
living in temporary foster families exceeded the number of children
living in institutions, and it was not until the 1960s that the
number of adoptive placements surpassed the number of institutional
placements.
Early in the twentieth century, “placing-out” was the
term that designated all non-institutional arrangements to care
for dependent children. Placing-out could mean baby
farming. It could mean boarding homes, in which agencies paid
families to care for children, or working homes, where older children
earned their keep. Traditional indentures were still used by orphanages
in many states into the twentieth century and these were not unusual
as a means of acquiring children for adoption. Indenture contracts
secured childrens services for a period of years in exchange
for the provision of food, shelter, and basic education. At their
age of release, typically 18, indentured children were given a fixed
sum of money, a suit of clothing, or other material resources specified
in advance. Free homes, where children received care without monetary
compensation, was another placing-out method. Free homes approximated
an adoption ideal founded on love rather than labor. Many children
placed in free homes were never legally adopted, however, and in
the early decades of the century, they were much less common than
homes in which board was paid.
Many Progressive-era reformers were influenced by eugenics
and insisted on a policy of family preservation. They grudgingly
accepted placing-out—especially when it amounted to adoption—as
a last resort. They may have idealized families as the only acceptable
place for children, but they preferred above all to keep children
with their blood kin.
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