Financially helping poverty stricken kids has always been controversial. With conservatives both rooting for more kids to be born and denying them help in the form of early childhood intervention, food stamps (SNAP), or subsidized childcare for those whose parents must work.
This book is for anyone interested in the origins of today's foster care system. How a society treats its children speaks volumes. In the U.S., we have always struggled.
The idea of "earning one's keep" has always been a popular one and, once upon a time, this notion extended to the youngest of citizens.
Between 1870 and 1890, reformers sought to place-out institutionalized dependent children (from county poor farms or orphanages) to farm families. They thought farm life would be healthy for these kids. But the effort was largely detrimental, since a vast number of farmers just wanted free labor -- either in the fields or domestic chores in the home. These kids were often overworked, underfed, and denied the opportunity of schooling.
Called placement homes (later called foster homes), this was a way for the state or county to dispense with the cost of supporting children whose parents were either dead or destitute. Send them to a farm! was the mantra. The idea was to install a work ethic in the children in a place filled with fresh air and honesty. This mindset turned out to be very misguided. Morals and care don't come from rural air, they come from people. And a majority of those who accepted indigent/orphaned kids into their homes did so in order to use them as free laborers.
An Indiana man wrote about the legendary "Little Orphan Annie" based on a dependent child who lived in his own childhood home during the Civil War: "Little orphan Annie's come to our house to stay. / an' wash the cups and saucers up an' brush the crumbs away. / An' shoo the chickens off the porch an' dust the hearth an' sweep. / An' make the fire an bake the bread an earn her board and keep. The real-life Annie, a girl named Mary Alice, did tasks for the household as would be expected of most placed-out children; she was there to work. Other popular tales of placed-out children happily working on placement farms -- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Anne of Green Gables. But the happiness in these stories belie a dark reality. There was no vetting of placement homes, no unannounced checks to ensure a child's safety. It was a system fraught with problems and abuse.
Reformers did not like kids corralled in group homes or county poor farms. Instead, they sought to place these kids with farm families, hoping that they'd be treated as one of the family. That was not the common situation. Instead, children were taken in during harvest season, used for their labor, then returned to the group home. A 12-yr old girl was brutally raped before escaping. Without required reporting or supervision, children were at risk.
The official practice of mother's aid began in Illinois in 1911, marking a sharp departure from IL's previous reliance on private charities to handle the needs of dependent children. Direct aid was not a magic bullet to stop the need for placement homes, but its use contributed to their decline. Unfortunately, not all counties agreed to fund the program. It was largely viewed as an urban issue, so that widows in rural areas did not receive a pension. This led to their children being put into poor farms or other institutionalized care.
In 1924, a proposed constitutional amendment banning various forms of industrial child labor drew the ire of farmers and farm bureaus. In the Midwest, two-thirds of kids over age 12 worked in the fields. Ultimately, kids on family farms were excluded from most labor regulations.
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