Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage (review)

Veronica Strong-Boag provides an important and much-needed analysis of the genesis and implementation of the fostering of children in private homes and institutions in English Canada. She explains that the book “explores the missteps and detours of a century and more of child protection efforts by Canadians and their governments as they confronted the specter of children judged neglected, abused, deficient, and delinquent” (p. 3) from the late 19th century. Beginning in the early twentieth century, placing children not identified as deficient or delinquent in the homes of respectable families was perceived to be a preferable nurturing environment to institutional care. Foster families were sought to nurture children who were either voluntarily surrendered for care by a biological parent (often due to economic circumstance), or, children removed from parental care by the state due to poverty, neglect, or violence. Strong-Boag deconstructs how fostering strategies adapted over time and in response to changing government policies and public perceptions. She explains that although Canadians and their governments were slow to offer economic assistance to the needy after Confederation, economic support for fostering was an extension of the “social supports” introduced in the interwar period that included mothers’ allowances, unemployment insurance and family allowances (p. 35). She finds that in any decade, race, being a newcomer to Canada, (dis)ability, kinship ties, and economic disparity shaped the contours of foster care in English Canada. Furthermore, Strong-Boag reveals the gendered stereotypes of absentee parents that prevailed for much of the history of fostering: non-custodial mothers were condemned as failures more often than non-custodial fathers unless the father had been charged with abuse or refused to provide financial support.

Strong-Boag confesses that “Fostering Nation? is not a happy book. It struggled throughout its creation to escape submersion in the tide of human tragedies that threads throughout the history of child welfare in Canada” (p. 1). She found that kindness and protection were sometimes lacking from those acting in the “best interest” of children or adolescents. Strong-Boag gives a voice to three distinct groups within this volume: “the boys, girls, women and men at the centre of public and private childcare initiatives” (p. 5), the biological or ‘first families” and their relatives or “kin”, and “foster or surrogate parents, those adults who have assumed responsibilities for girls and boys who are not their sons and daughters by birth” (p. 6). The extensive inventory of government and NGO reports help Strong-Boag to locate and situate the experiences of these three groups within the larger histories of child welfare, child protection and foster care. She identifies child savers John Naylor of Halifax and J.J. Kelso of Toronto as early advocates of foster care. “State-run, sanctioned, and subsidized fostering spread across Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century to replace parents who could not meet the standards of respectable child rearing” (p. 71). Overall, Strong-Boag argues that fostering in English Canada showed greater tolerance for racial minorities, recent immigrants, the poor and unwed mothers after 1960 but often failed first families and fostered youngsters, despite Canada’s status as an affluent capitalist nation (p. 202).

Fostering Nation? is an extension of Strong-Boag’s earlier work on adoption in Canada. Taken together, these works emphasize the importance of recognizing colonial attitudes in the policies confronted by First Nations parents and their children and how such attitudes excused “the sixties scoop” of First Nations children (p. 175). The national narrative provides insight into the policies and public attitudes toward child welfare and child protection in Canada. Strong-Boag divulges how the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a catalyst for greater agency among First Nations in response to past detrimental approaches to the care of Native children (p. 100). “Social security, adoption and fostering programs evolved to confer greater entitlement to the benefits of childhood on First Nations, non-European, and other marginalized populations...