From Indenture to Family Foster Care: A Brief History of Child Placing

Abstract

Americans have always arranged for some children to be reared by adults other than their own parents. In colonial America, children from all classes were indentured into new homes to learn a trade. In the 1850s, the Children's Aid Society began sending impoverished urban children to western states to be placed in rural homes. By 1900, some private placing agencies were making board payments to foster parents. Over the course of the twentieth century, boarding out developed into the modem family foster care system as social work gained prominence and the role of state and federal governments in child welfare grew.Throughout American history, some children from impoverished families have always been reared in the homes of other people, but the ways that they were cared for have changed. In colonial America, children from all classes were sometimes indentured to families where they were to live, work, and learn a trade; this was an especially common way of caring for orphans and other dependent children, but it was seen as appropriate for children from other classes as well. Between 1800 and 1850, orphan asylums became a widespread way of caring for children from impoverished families; at the same time, changing conceptions of childhood helped narrow the use of indenture to children from very poor families. In the 1850s, a variation on indenture, placing-out, began moving children from poor urban families to rural homes. Unlike indenture, placing-out was based on an anti-urban, anti-immigrant ideology. In the 1880s and 1890s, some agencies began to pay foster parents for boarding young children, so that the children would not be forced to work, as well as for caring for children who were difficult to live with or who had special needs. This boarding-out system gradually evolved into the modern family foster care system as government became increasingly involved in the welfare of children.Certain underlying elements have always shaped the ways that impoverished children were treated. Parental poverty has always increased the risk of children being removed from their families and placed elsewhere, whether in other homes or institutions. Society's reluctance to provide sufficient aid to keep impoverished families together has made it necessary for private agencies and government officials to arrange care for children whose parents cannot care for them. Child abuse and neglect, much of which arises from the strains created by severe poverty, became headline news in the 1870s, and have been major public issues in recent decades.The role of government in funding and supervising child welfare has grown gradually over the past century. Between 1900 and 1930, the gradual professionalization of social work went hand in hand with increased government involvement in child welfare to cause a shift toward the boarding-out system and away from institutional care of children. But institutional care and child placement are not opposing systems; whichever has been the dominant system has always made use of the other as a supplement. A century ago, orphan asylums often placed children with families for indenture or adoption, and in the late twentieth century, institutions and other forms of group care function as part of the out-of-home care system.Changing conceptions of the nature of childhood have also played an important role in shaping child placement systems. In colonial America, children were viewed as miniature adults who were expected to grow up as quickly as possible. Teaching children the value of hard work and the skills of a trade was at the heart of indenture. In the early nineteenth century, a new view of childhood as a separate stage of life emerged. Childhood began to be seen as a stage of innocence that should be cultivated and nurtured; children should be allowed to be children, not turned into small adults as quickly as possible. Some reformers saw it as essential that children be removed from impoverished families in crowded cities and placed in pure rural settings. …