Family Preservation - History

History

The support of family preservation can be traced back to the negative reaction to the 'orphan train movement'. After the 1851 passage of the Massachusetts Adoption Act, children were shifted from institutions to adoptive families. Reverend Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's Aid Society, was responsible for this movement. He saw children as a threat to social order, who needed to be removed from their poverty stricken parents as poverty restricts moral family values. In March 1884, he loaded a train with 138 children who were affected by poverty and sent them west. These children, half who were not orphans, stood on the platform at each stop waiting to be claimed or sent to the next stop. His methods were replicated and the total number of children affected was estimated from 150,000 to 250,000. The outrage against this practice caused many people to take an alternative method to the extreme, and thus set the stage for the progressive era.

Two early reformers setting the stage for family preservation were Lillian Wald and Florence Kelly. Florence Kelley gave a series of lectures at various universities proposing a United States Commission for Children. This Commission would research and share information in regards to the mental and moral conditions, as well as the prospects of children of the Nation. She included seven major subjects requiring prompt attention including infant mortality, birth registration, orphanage, child labor, desertion, illegitimacy and degeneracy. In 1903, Lillian Wald suggested the creation of a Federal Children's Bureau to Florence Kelley. She argued that there was no reason the government could not have a department to look after children if it could have one to look after farm crops.

President William Howard Taft signed into law the bill that creates the Children's Bureau in 1912. Julia Lathrop was appointed as the first chief and headed a 16 person organization with an initial budget of $25,640. Throughout their nine-year struggle Wald and Florence received support from many prominent people, including President Theodore Roosevelt. They would be credited for spreading these ideas and giving them a far-reaching impact. This impact helped issues of child welfare gain recognition on the state level where change can occur more rapidly.

The first statewide legislation on mothers' pensions passed in Chicago in 1911. In effect, the Chicago Juvenile Court created a system that included both an "institutional track" and a "home-based" track. Both systems were based on two different ideas of what constituted family preservation. The Institutional track was based on the nineteenth- century model of family preservation which actually physically separated the child from the family. Because children were considered part of the "natural" family, the family was considered preserved even in their absence. The children were expected to return home when conditions improved. The home-based track resembled today's idea of family preservation, in which the family is able to remain physically together with monetary aid from the state.

The track chosen was often dependent upon which parent was the primary care-giver. "Motherless children generally ended up on the institutional track and fatherless ones in the home-based track." Fathers with their children in institutions would often pay the state for this service. This distinction was made to reinforce the gender roles of the women raising the children and the men earning a living. Due to the limited guidelines of the mothers' pension act, each case was dependent upon the interpretation of the judges. Guidelines did not even limit pensions to mother's thus allowing judges to grant them to father's. By 1916, 21 states had passed mothers' pensions which grew to 40 by 1920. The Children's Bureau studied mothers' pensions in the United States, Denmark and New Zealand, so that they could guide states as they made such plans.

The creation of the Children's Bureau and the mothers' pension act both contributed substantially to today's welfare system. The Children's Bureau made child welfare the responsibility of the Federal Government and worked to define and shape better policies. The movement to create this Bureau helped the idea of family preservation spread and shape new policy.

The mothers' pension was given credit for the development of the American Welfare State as it exists today. The statewide, and therefore local administration that characterized mothers' pensions is blamed for the absence of a more centralized approach to public welfare. Many historians believe that a centralized approach would be more efficient and rational.

Today's policy lacks centralized control, as states are given freedom to set their own guidelines. Despite this fact, family preservation remains a central idea. Future legislation leading up to today's system, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), has continued to preserve families by granting aid. In 1935, the Social Security Act created the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, which became Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This eventually became TANF, which was reauthorized in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.