Child Welfare in America

Reading these histories of child welfare in the United States reminds me of my fortune as well as misfortune as a child. In 1981, at the age of twelve, I was involved in a car accident that took the lives of my parents and paternal grandmother. My only brother, thirteen years old, was also in the wreck, but, luckily, he too survived. Little did I know then that my parents' death thrust us, now technically orphans, into the child welfare system. Fortunately, my brother and I avoided what scholars describe as the labyrinth of child welfare services when my uncle, my father's youngest brother, and his wife took us in and raised us alongside their two daughters. If Bullard's, Ladd-Taylor's, and Rymph's books are any indication, we dodged a bullet, especially given our status as Mexican-origin, working-class, immigrant children. Luckily, my aunt and uncle—our guardians—raised us safely and lovingly, giving us the opportunity to go off to college after high school and eventually pursue post-baccalaureate degrees.

The history of child welfare in America was not so fortuitous for many children and their families, especially those from ethnic and racial backgrounds. As the studies under review indicate, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the care for dependent, delinquent, abandoned, orphaned, or in other way "parentless" children in the United States was haphazard at best and negligent and, in some cases, criminal at worst. While some sought to bring Christian morality and racial whitening to ethnic children to make them "acceptable" to the dominant, elite white society, others turned to temporary homes and parents to care for those in unstable and economically marginalized families. In states where fiscal concerns over the care and support of growing numbers of poor children and adults were paramount, officials employed alternative strategies: they sterilized the impoverished to "fix" their economic dependency on the state. Taken together, these monographs illustrate the wide range of approaches and attitudes as well as successes and failures in the name of "saving" the child. They also show how a diverse group of state and community leaders, social workers, and self-described child and family advocates, among others, contributed to the moralizing of impoverished, unwed mothers and ethnic, racial, working-class families. In the process, they helped define and redefine the worthy and unworthy poor. The studies demonstrate, as well, that no two approaches functioned the same and that, in many ways, child welfare in the United States has been and remains a tangled system that negatively impacts the ones meant to benefit: marginalized children.

As Bullard's Civilizing the Child indicates, orphans, homeless waifs, and poor children in nineteenth-century America had few opportunities for building their future outlook. Those from ethnic immigrant and, particularly, racial backgrounds had even fewer chances of making it to adulthood with any semblance of economic security. That insecurity among immigrant children and children of color, Bullard demonstrates, was founded on the United States' history of settler colonialism. As a settler-colonial state, race and racial boundaries in the United States proved integral to the nation's obsession with maintaining a hierarchical racial order with whites on top and nonwhites on the bottom. As increasing numbers of impoverished immigrant children, along with their parents, poured into eastern, and later western, states in the nineteenth century, elite members of society worried about their...