Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States (review)

Lost Kids is an impressive collection of cutting edge scholarship on the histories of vulnerable children in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada and the United States. The essays are connected by three central themes: the histories of the place of the state in shaping constructions of and responses to vulnerable children, the shifting contexts of families and households, and the evolution of child welfare and criminal justice. Oral history and institutional records are employed by historians concerned with race, class, and the law; the rise of the expert; and global and trans-border connections. Recognizing that nineteenth-century legislation that raised the age of school-leaving and significant improvements in health care, as well as the increased sentimentalization of childhood have all meant improvements for most children, this book highlights the fact that many children have remained vulnerable, and the editors ably seek to find out who has been left behind, who exactly are the "at risk" children, and why do they remain on the edge?

Here scholars have taken up this question and reveal findings on topics such as transracial adoption, disability, teenage angst, the construction of juvenile delinquency and curfews to regulate such, sick kids, children of divorce, children left behind in American social policy and other legal processes, recreation programs, and child labor. Karen Dubinsky argues that "trans-racial adoption can mean both cross-racial solidarity and colonial conquest" (p. 17). Veronica Strong-Boag demonstrates that disabled children have historically been and continue to be marginalized, discriminated against, and made to feel abnormal and vulnerable. While disabled, Aboriginal or African-Canadian children struggled and often failed to achieve fair and humane treatment because of their race or disabilities, adolescent youth were often alienated simply because of their age, which to many in twentieth-century North America represented danger and fear. Girls were constructed as promiscuous and self-starving, and boys were bound for gangs and hooliganism if not suicide, according to Cynthia Comacchio, who ably deconstructs the meanings of the "maladjusted" adolescent in the early twentieth century. William Bush in his article on juvenile justice and race in the southern United States during the 1950s and Tamara Myers's effective treatment of curfew laws in Canadian cities during and up to 1945 both shed light on just how far the state would go to reinforce ideas about "maladjusted" adolescents. Sick children too came under close scrutiny, and their bodies and minds were deemed malleable. Denyse Baillargeon's compelling and innovative essay on Quebec children who were patients at the Sainte-Justine hospital during the first fifty years of the twentieth century portrays the concern of hospital administrators to shape their patients into good, moral, Christian citizens. The creation of a Scout troop known as the "reclining scouts" is just one example of the programs introduced to child patients. This troop, it was hoped, would stave "off the wave of Communism that is washing over the country" (p. 128). Mona Gleason argues convincingly that children's bodies became a contested site for "social acceptability, civilizing and colonizing techniques, interests of the state, and so called 'good health'" (p. 149).

Social policies also attempted to determine how childhood would be experienced. Molly Ladd-Taylor traces child welfare policy over a century and finds that children labeled as "hopeless" have continually been left behind. Her conclusion is that only when society confronts our "most basic conceptions of disability, and the economic and structural inequalities that sustain and fuel them, can we truly ensure that no child is left behind" (p. 171). Leslie Paris demonstrates how children of separated or divorced parents tried to negotiate a world which still glorified the heterosexual conjugal family, even though there was mounting evidence that it was in decline throughout the 1970s. Policies that were written with the best interests of children in mind did not...