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1851 |
Massachusetts
passed the first modern adoption law, recognizing adoption as a social
and legal operation based on child
welfare rather than adult interests. Historians consider the 1851
Adoption of Children Act an important turning point because it
directed judges to ensure that adoption decrees were “fit and
proper.” How this determination was to be made was left entirely
to judicial discretion. |
1854 |
New York
Children's Aid Society, under the direction of reformer
Charles Loring Brace, launched the orphan
trains. |
1868 |
Massachusetts
Board of State Charities began paying for children to board in private
family homes: in 1869, an agent was appointed to visit children in
their homes. This was the beginning of placing-out,
a movement to care for children in families rather than institutions. |
1872 |
New York
State Charities Aid Association was organized. It was one of the first
organizations in the country to establish a specialized child-placement
program, in 1898. By 1922, homes for more than 3300 children had been
found. The first major outcome
study, How Foster Children
Turn Out (1924), was based on the work of this agency. |
1891 |
Michigan
was the first state to require that “the [the judge] shall be
satisfied as to the good moral character, and the ability to support
and educate such child, and of the suitableness of the home, or the
person or persons adopting such child.” |
1898 |
The Catholic Home Bureau was organized in New York by the St. Vincent
De Paul Society. It was the first Catholic agency to place children
in homes rather than orphanages, a model soon followed in other cities. |
1904 |
The first social work school,
the New York School of Applied Philanthropy, opened its doors. |
1909 |
First White
House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children declared that poverty
alone should not be grounds for removing children from families. When
children required placement for other reasons, however, they were
to be placed in family homes, “the highest and finest product
of civilization”;Sigmund Freud
published “Family Romances.” |
1910-1930 |
The first
specialized adoption agencies were founded, including the Spence
Alumni Society, the Free Synagogue Child Adoption Committee, the Alice
Chapin Nursery (all in New York) and the Cradle in Evanston, Illinois. |
1911 |
Dr. Arnold
Gesell founded the Juvenile Psycho Clinic (later the Clinic of
Child Development) at Yale. |
1912 |
Congress
created the U.S. Children's Bureau
in the Department of Labor “to investigate and report on all
matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among
all classes of our people”; Julia Lathrop was appointed as its
first chief, the first woman to head a federal agency. |
1912-1921 |
Baby
farming, commercial maternity homes, and adoption ad investigations
took place in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities. |
1915 |
Bureau
for Exchange of Information Among Child-Helping Organizations founded
(renamed Child Welfare League of America
in 1921); Abraham Flexner declared
social work “hardly eligible” for professional status. |
1916 |
Lewis Terman's
revision of the Binet scale popularized the intelligence quotient,
or I.Q. Worries about the “feeble-minded”
mentality of children available for adoption, and trends toward measuring
their mental potential as one part of the adoption process, usually
with mental tests, grew out of the eugenics
movement in the early part of the century. |
1917 |
Minnesota
passed first law mandating social investigation of all adoptions (including
home studies) and providing for
the confidentiality of adoption
records. |
1919 |
The Russell
Sage Foundation published the first professional child-placing manual;
U.S. Children's Bureau set
minimum standards for child-placing; Jessie
Taft authored an early manifesto for therapeutic adoption, “Relation
of Personality Study to Child Placing.” |
1919-1929 |
The first
empirical field studies of adoption
gathered basic information about how many adoptions were taking place,
of whom, and by whom. |
1921 |
Child
Welfare League of America formally renamed and organized. The
League adopted a Constitution
that defined standard-setting as one of the organization's core purposes;
American Association of Social Workers founded. |
1924 |
First major
outcome study, How
Foster Children Turn Out, published. |
1934 |
The state
of Iowa began administering mental tests to all children placed for
adoption in hopes of preventing the unwitting adoption of retarded
children (called “feeble-minded”
at the time). This policy inspired nature-nurture
studies at the Iowa Child Welfare Station that eventually served
to challenge hereditarian orthodoxies and promote policies of early
family placement. |
1935 |
Social
Security Act included provision for aid to dependent children, crippled
children's programs, and child welfare, which eventually led to a
dramatic expansion of foster care;
American Youth Congress issued “The Declaration of the Rights
of American Youth”; Justine Wise
Polier was appointed to head the Domestic Relations Court of Manhattan.
She became an important early critic of matching
in adoption. |
1937-1938 |
First Child Welfare League of America
initiative that distinguished minimum
standards for permanent (adoptive) and temporary (foster) placements. |
1939 |
Valentine P. Wasson published The
Chosen Baby, a landmark in the literature on telling
children about their adopted status. |
1944 |
In Prince v. Massachusetts, a case involving Jehovah's Witnesses,
the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state's power as parens patriae
to restrict parental control in order to guard “the general
interest in youth's well being.” |
1948 |
The first
recorded transracial adoption
of an African-American child by white parents took place in Minnesota.
|
1949 |
New York was the first state
to pass a law against black market adoptions, which proved unenforceable
in practice. |
1953 |
Uniform
Adoption Act first proposed. Few states ever adopted it; Jean
Paton founded Orphan Voyage, the first adoptee search
support network. |
1953-1954 |
Child Welfare League of America conducted
nationwide survey of adoption agency practices. |
1953-1958 |
The first
nationally coordinated effort to locate adoptive homes for African
American children, the National Urban League Foster Care and Adoptions
Project. |
1954 |
Helen Doss
published The Family Nobody
Wanted; Jean Paton published The
Adopted Break Silence, the first book to offer a variety of
first-person adoption narratives
and promote the notion that adoptees had a distinctive identity. |
1955 |
Child
Welfare League of America national conference on adoption in Chicago
announced that the era of special
needs adoption had arrived; Congressional inquiry into interstate
and black market adoptions, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN),
suggested that poor adoption practices created juvenile delinquency;
Proposed federal law on black market adoptions introduced by Senators
Kefauver (D-TN) and Edward Thye (R-MN), but it never passed Congress;
National Association of Social Workers founded, consolidating a number
of other social work organizations;
Bertha and Harry Holt adopted eight
Korean War orphans after a special act of Congress allowed them to
do so; Pearl S. Buck accused social
workers and religious institutions of sustaining the black market
and preventing the adoption of children in order to preserve their
jobs; Adopt-A-Child founded by the National Urban League and fourteen
New York agencies to promote African-American
adoptions. |
1957 |
International Conference on Intercountry Adoptions issued report on
problems of international
adoptions; U.S. adoption agencies sponsored legislation to prohibit
or control proxy adoptions. |
1958 |
Child
Welfare League of America published Standards of Adoption
Service (revised in 1968, 1973, 1978, 1988, 2000); Indian
Adoption Project began. |
1959 |
UN Assembly
adopted Declaration of the Rights of the Child, endorsed in 1960 by
Golden Anniversary White House Conference on Children and Youth. |
1961 |
The Immigration and
Nationality Act incorporated, for the first time, provisions for the
international adoption
of foreign-born children by U.S. citizens. |
1960 |
Psychiatrist Marshall
Schechter published a study claiming that adopted children were
100 times more likely than their non-adopted counterparts to show
up in clinical populations. This sparked a vigorous debate about whether
adoptive kinship was itself a risk factor for mental disturbance and
illness and inspired a new round of studies into the psychopathology
of adoption. |
1962-1965 |
Special
conference on child abuse, led by Katherine Oettinger, chief of the
Children's Bureau, generated proposals for new laws requiring doctors
to notify law enforcement and most states adopted such legislation. |
1963 |
National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development established as part of the National Institutes
of Health; U.S. Children's Bureau moved
from Social Security Administration to Welfare Administration. |
1964 |
H. David
Kirk published Shared Fate: A Theory
of Adoption and Mental Health, the first book to make adoption
a serious issue in the sociological literature on family life and
mental health. |
1965
|
The Los
Angeles County Bureau of Adoptions launched the first organized program
of single parent adoptions
in order to locate homes for hard-to-place children with special
needs. |
| 1966 |
The National
Adoption Resource Exchange, later renamed the Adoption Resource Exchange
of North America (ARENA), was established as an outgrowth of the Indian
Adoption Project. |
1969 |
President
Nixon created the Office of Child Development in HEW to coordinate
and administer Head Start and U.S. Children's
Bureau functions. |
1970 |
Adoptions
reached their century-long statistical
peak at approximately 175,000 per year. Almost 80 percent of the total
were arranged by agencies. |
1971 |
Florence
Fisher founded the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association “to
abolish the existing practice of sealed
records” and advocate for “opening of records to any
adopted person over eighteen who wants, for any reason, to see them.” |
1972 |
National
Association of Black Social Workers opposed transracial
adoptions; Stanley v. Illinois
substantially increased the rights of unwed fathers in adoption by
requiring informed consent and proof of parental unfitness prior to
termination of parental rights. |
1973 |
Roe
v. Wade legalized abortion; Beyond
the Best Interests of the Child articulated the influential
concept of “psychological parent,” which prioritized continuity
of nurture and speedy and permanent decisions in legal proceedings
related to child placement and adoption. |
1976 |
Concerned
United Birthparents founded |
1978 |
Indian
Child Welfare Act passed by Congress; American Adoption Congress
founded |
1980 |
Adoption
Assistance and Child Welfare Act offered significant funding to
states that supported subsidy programs for special
needs adoptions and devoted resources to family preservation,
reunification, and the prevention of abuse, neglect, and child removal. |
1989 |
UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child |
1993 |
Hague
Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in respect
to Intercountry Adoption |
1994 |
Multiethnic Placement
Act was the first federal law to concern itself with race in adoption.
It prohibited agencies receiving federal funds from denying transracial
adoptions on the sole basis of race, but permitted the use of
race as one factor, among others, in foster and adoptive placements.
A 1996 revision to this law, the Inter-Ethnic Adoption Amendment,
made it impermissible to employ race at all. |
1996 |
Bastard
Nation founded. Its mission statement
promoted “the full human and civil rights of adult adoptees,”
including access to sealed records. |
1997 |
Adoption
and Safe Families Act stressed permanency planning for children and
represented a policy shift away from family reunification and toward
adoption. |
1998 |
Oregon voters
passed Ballot Measure 58,
allowing adult adoptees access to original birth certificates. This
legal blow to confidentiality
and sealed records was stalled by legal challenges to the measure's
constitutionality, which eventually failed. The measure has been in
effect in Oregon since June 2000. |
2000 |
The Child
Citizenship Act of 2000 allowed foreign-born adoptees to become
automatic American citizens when they entered the United States, eliminating
the legal burden of naturalization for international
adoptions; Census 2000
included “adopted son/daughter” as a kinship category
for the first time in U.S. history. |
