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CHAPTER 2

Belonging and Exclusion

Esperanza foster parents Trevor and Josh were reflective about their experiences fostering four children over a period of three years and about the pending adoption of their current foster daughter, a petite Honduran toddler named Emma. They spoke frankly about their concerns and reservations with the fostering system. I had spoken casually numerous times with both of them and more extensively with Trevor, since he took charge during most home visits and functioned, in both their opinions, as the primary parent. But when I sat down to interview Josh formally he surprised me with his direct and open reflections on his experience as a foster father and adoptive father-to-be. Josh and I spoke about the shifts in Emma’s case. Although it had never seemed likely to social workers involved in the case that Emma’s mother and father would regain custody, due to ongoing mental health issues and general conditions of family instability, Emma’s maternal grandmother had expressed interest in gaining custody of Emma, as she already had custody of some of Emma’s older siblings. Because she was elderly, Emma’s grandmother felt she could not care for the children on her own, and wanted to bring a daughter, Emma’s aunt, from Honduras to help care for the children. It was for this reason that Emma’s case had dragged on for some time. However, when Emma’s grandmother could not procure the required visa for Emma’s aunt, the county social worker felt she had waited long enough for a family placement, and focused her attention on finding Emma a permanent, adoptive home, in this case with Trevor and Josh, to whom Emma had grown quite attached.

Toward the end of our interview, once my notepad had been put away and we were speaking more casually, Josh looked down at his lap and said, “I just don’t know if we are doing the right thing by taking Emma away.”¹ Josh told me he wondered about what they were doing, explaining that he was happy to adopt but he worried that sometimes adoptions happened in cases where it was not truly the only option. Citing the case of Kyle, one of Josh’s former foster children who had been reunified with his father only after the forceful intervention of Josh and Trevor, Josh asserted he was speaking not from conjecture but from experience.

Kyle’s parents split up when his father was hospitalized for severe depression. Kyle’s mother remained with him in San Diego while his father relocated to another state. Months later, two-year-old Kyle was placed in foster care, with Trevor and Josh, due to allegations of maternal drug use and neglect. When Kyle’s mother’s parental rights were terminated, Kyle’s father continued to fight to regain custody. Josh and Trevor believed the social worker had written Kyle’s father off as a good placement option because she didn’t feel that he had a strong relationship with Kyle, and their “visits” over the phone were not going well. Though Kyle did display anger at his father and unwillingness to speak with him on the phone, Trevor felt that no two-year-old could rebuild a relationship through phone calls. He and Josh set up Skype communication with Kyle’s father, and each week coached him through reading stories and playing with finger puppets, something Trevor and Josh had discovered that Kyle loved. Kyle was eventually reunified with his father, and while Trevor and Josh were thrilled with the result, they felt that the reunification had occurred largely through their efforts and in spite of, rather than because of, the actions of the social worker and the routine workings of the child welfare system. Their experiences with Kyle left them feeling that the system did not always work toward reunification as enthusiastically as it might and, as a result, split up families without legitimate cause to do so. Josh explained that he had raised these sorts of concerns with Emma’s adoption social worker, wondering whether all avenues had been exhausted before termination of parental rights, if adoption was really in her best interest. She had responded that Emma was going to be adopted, and that if he and Trevor did not “open their arms” to her, another family would. When I asked Trevor whether the various case outcomes he and Josh had witnessed were, in his opinion, largely contingent on the social worker who happened to be assigned to the case, he responded, “One hundred percent, oh, absolutely.” But he went on to say how amazed he was by social workers and impressed by the passion they give to their job regardless of the “gross underpay” they received. “I wouldn’t do it for that money,” he told me, “No way.”²

The vast majority of foster parents I spoke with articulated a nuanced understanding of their foster child’s biological parents as not “bad” parents, but as people caught up in bad circumstances. But none except Josh expressed such an explicit sense of discomfort with their own adoption of a foster child and with a concern about what they saw as a potentially unnecessary severance of family ties. Josh, based on his own experiences, expressed a belief that the foster care system made it difficult for parents to get their children back and that the system as a whole supported adoption over reunification. He felt that the county was not sensitive to transportation difficulties parents faced in attempting to get between work, therapy, and visitations with their children. This was particularly the case given the size of San Diego County, the lack of effective public transportation, and the likelihood that biological parents were without their own vehicles. He had also heard that parents had their “salaries cut” when their children were removed.

Josh was correct, in a sense, because parents whose children were removed from their care did often lose benefits such as food stamps and housing subsidies based on the number of people in their “family.” They also often had difficulty qualifying for subsidized housing or childcare while they did not have physical custody of their children.³ This was a substantial obstacle for parents who had to demonstrate their ability to provide stable housing and a childcare plan before their children could be returned to them. The concerns that Josh voiced were issues that impacted parents entangled in the child welfare system, regardless of their social position, by virtue of being subject to the regulations and expectations of the social worker assigned to their case. However, as I argue throughout this book, these difficulties disproportionately impacted low-income parents, particularly those who were racially marginalized and undocumented, due to the precariousness of their legal status, their network for social support, and/or their economic circumstances. This differential impact was, in some sense, the issue Esperanza was founded to address. Most other foster parents I spoke with seemed to carefully avoid consideration of the possibility that they might have been raising children who could have been safely and happily returned to their parents’ care. Josh, on the other hand, was willing to articulate this problem out loud and to mark the circumstantial differences between those who lose their children and those who adopt them.

Josh’s concern about the patterns of removal and what he perceived to be the agency’s inclination toward adoption rather than reunification were also concerns about the means through which child welfare pursued its goals of child protection. His concerns raised questions about what the personal stakes were for foster parents who participated in the removal and subsequent adoption of children. As I discuss throughout this chapter, processes of child removal have commonly taken place through a framework of “best interest.” This framework asserts that state interventions into families, including the removal of children from their parents’ custody and termination of parental rights, are not about social control or the production of social norms governing family life. Rather, these interventions are framed as being a singleminded pursuit of the “best” possible lives for children. “Best interest” is a powerful framework for intervention precisely because it is seemingly beyond reproach—who wouldn’t want children to have their best interests met? Yet “best interest” is a slippery, multivalent category, and ideas about what is best for particular children, and from whose perspectives, varies across time and space.

“Best interest” is a discretionary legal framework, privileging those who are positioned to speak authoritatively while silencing others. And, as I suggest below, this framework has historically been mobilized to remove children from families who were framed as “unworthy” citizens, or noncitizens, rather than to protect children from concrete instances of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. As such, a “best interest” framework has the propensity to categorize entire communities as abusive or neglectful through their social position, positing, in many cases, that the trajectory children might pursue under the care of white middle-class Protestant citizen parents is more important to their well-being than remaining in the custody of their natal family. To be clear, I am not arguing here for the necessary primacy of biological connections. Rather, I am interested in the way the agency may nominally prioritize the natal family while pursuing this policy for some individuals and not for racially or otherwise marginalized others.

This chapter takes up an examination of the “best interest” framework through a historical perspective. I consider practices of child removal, institutions and policies that have positioned some parents as unfit throughout U.S. history, and contemporary structural forces that mark out particular individuals as objects of intervention. I examine what these historical moments reveal about the ways children and families have been positioned as central sites for the production of citizenship, race, and national belonging and explore how philanthropic agencies and government actors have been involved in both the promotion and the dissolution of particular families. I consider what sorts of families have been positioned, throughout various points in U.S. history, as ideal homes for children. And finally, I ask how “best interest” is mobilized in the contemporary context of child welfare.

Family, Population, and Nation

The child and the family have been positioned at the frontlines of an effort to police the racial categories and citizenship limits that mark the boundaries of the national body within the contemporary United States. From eugenics to national hygiene campaigns and public health interventions, mothers and children have been the primary targets of widespread efforts to shape the national citizenry (Molina 2006; Donzelot 1979; Stoler 2002). The framework of “family values” serves as a stand-in for a particular raced and gendered construction of the family that is equated with the health of the nation itself (Collins 1998). Although the idealized family form may shift over time, what remains constant is the way the privileged form of family is linked up with economic, legal, and social privileges in relation to the nation-state (Coontz 2000). Families who do not fit this idealized form have historically been vulnerable to a variety of interventions. As such, the formation and dissolution of families enacted primarily through child removal, adoption, and residential schooling have constituted a central ground for contestations about citizenship, racial hierarchy, and belonging throughout U.S. history.⁴

In considering practices and policies surrounding the history of family intervention and forms of child removal in the U.S. context I address two overlapping periods—the moral reform era, constituting the majority of the nineteenth century, and the progressive era, lasting roughly from 1890 to 1920.⁵ I focus on the treatment of dependent children throughout these periods and the accompanying anxieties about morality and the general “health” of the nation in which these efforts were enmeshed. This time frame foregrounds widespread efforts to explicitly shape parenting practices and marks a shift in the role of children from wage-earners to innocents in need of care, love, and protection (Zelizer 1985). As I examine below, ideas about hygiene, child labor, nutrition, supervision, and religious values became grounds for determining whether parents were acting, or were capable of acting, in their child’s “best interest.” These sorts of criteria resonate with the focus of contemporary child welfare interventions that disproportionately intervene in working-class and impoverished families of color. Although the contours of “best interest” have shifted over time, the framing of custody determinations around a focus on “best interest” has remained strikingly stable.

Family Interventions and the Construction of the Dependent Child

During the early 1800s, in the United States, children who were destitute or orphaned were often taken into almshouses and housed alongside adults who were categorized as indigent or mentally ill (Platt 2009[1969]:108). Due to poor sanitary conditions, children faced high death rates in almshouses, and concern with this problem eventually contributed to the development of orphanages and boarding schools initially run by philanthropic organizations, most of which were associated with religious organizations. The 1830s saw a proliferation of these institutions, and by 1910 more than 110,000 children were housed in 1,151 institutions across the United States (Tiffin 1982:64). These practices were developed out of a sense of community responsibility for impoverished individuals, rooted in the British Poor Laws that influenced practices for approaching the “problem” of the poor during the colonial era. Although U.S. policy and practices developed out of this foundation, conceptions of and approaches to the poor, and particularly impoverished children, gradually adapted and responded to the specific circumstances that arose in relation to westward expansion, substantial waves of immigration, and, later, industrialization and urbanization processes in large U.S. cities.

During this era, the primary focus of intervention was on the children of new European immigrant families, primarily Irish and Italian Catholic families, living in urban settings. Some parents and relatives sought care for their children in an institutional setting themselves, while other children were placed in such institutions through the intervention of charity workers or the authority of a local court. The majority of family interventions were initially enacted not by the state or federal government but by religious, philanthropic efforts spearheaded primarily by upper-class white women.⁶ The normative values these women promoted were enmeshed with their own class positions and the patriarchal authority of their religious institutions.⁷ And while they were largely focused on child-rearing practices, they were intimately bound up with concerns about the shape of what the future U.S. population would look like.

Awareness of child abuse as a social problem gradually arose in the 1870s, marked by the founding of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Gordon 1989).⁸ While earlier interventions had focused on homelessness, abandonment, or starvation, these later efforts placed an increased emphasis on neglect and cruelty toward children. This reorientation considered the child specifically within the context of the family. With a shift toward concern over the treatment of children, rather than only their poverty, the question of the category of maternal “neglect” became a salient issue as it was necessarily constructed against a norm of “proper” care (Gordon 1989:7). As such, concerns about mothers’ knowledge and conduct in relation to norms of hygiene, nutrition, and care of infants, among other topics, were central to the production of a healthy and proper citizenry.⁹ In this way, concern about the “neglected” child was a site for concern about the health of the nation itself.

The questions of who constituted a child in need of saving and what characteristics defined a dependent or neglected child are issues that continue to plague agents and agencies charged with the goal of child protection. Mapping these shifts sheds light on changing norms and anxieties. An 1899 definition of the “dependent” or “neglected” child, for example, included homelessness, neglect, cruelty, and depravity on the part of the parents, but also included any child “found living in any house of ill-fame” and “any child under the age of eight who is found peddling or selling any article or singing or playing any musical instrument upon the street or giving any public entertainment,” highlighting anxieties about child labor and the presence of children on urban streets acting as wage earners for their families (Tiffin 1982:38). The vagueness of the definition, which left open interpretation of such terms as “proper care” or “ill-fame,” positioned a wide range of families as potentially vulnerable to intervention.

In the context of the pre-industrial English language, as Fraser and Gordon (1994) argue, the term “dependency” was synonymous with subordination. Dependency encapsulated not so much the trait of an individual, as with the specter of the welfare dependent mother in the contemporary U.S. context, but a positive social relation between master and apprentice, employer and laborer. It is in this sense, Fraser and Gordon note, that phrases like “independently wealthy” indicate an individual free of the obligation to labor. It was thus only with the rise of industrial labor that wage labor became understood as symbolic of independence based on the idea that individuals were free to sell their labor as they chose. Wage labor was no longer understood primarily as a social relationship of dependence between employer and employee. Because independence was positively equated with wage labor, dependency became reframed as a dysfunctional relationship, a “psychological/moral register” (Fraser and Gordon 1994). Dependency became a problematic characteristic rather than an indication of a productive social relation. With this shift dependency was no longer suitable for white working men and became the terrain of women, encapsulated by the figure of the “housewife,” as well as by both men and women of color.

This pejorative reading of dependency was heightened in a U.S. social context where the “absence of a hierarchical social tradition in which subordination was understood to be structural, not characterological, facilitated hostility to public support of the poor” (Fraser and Gordon 1994:320). It is in relation to these historical conditions that we might understand the framing of “welfare dependency” more broadly. However, children constitute a category that perpetuates the concept of dependency as a productive social relationship. As senator Daniel Moynihan (1973) stated, “[Dependency] is an incomplete state in life: normal in a child, abnormal in the adult.”¹⁰ Dependency, in this sense, is naturalized as a characteristic embedded in the term “child.” Healthy children are, by definition, dependent. Yet the notion of a dependent child departs from this normative, positive sense of dependency. That is, children marked as dependent are not dependent on their parents, as is deemed natural, but rather are problematically dependent on the intervention of the state or the kindness of strangers. In this sense, a dependent child is reworked as a potential burden and a social problem, one who lacks properly reliable parents to depend upon.

From Child Savers to Professional Social Work

Child saving efforts were driven by concerns about the morality of, and care for, children and were deeply enmeshed in efforts to preserve white Protestant values against rising concerns about immigration and the “moral depravity” of the urban poor.¹¹ Child saving efforts were primarily promoted by wealthy philanthropists concerned about the influence of new European immigrant communities, whom they categorized as nonwhite, and by anxieties about the sanitation, immorality, criminality, and disease associated with urban communities during the industrialization era in the United States. These efforts were pursued by a variety of organizations and individuals, and were not regulated by state or federal government. Thus they took a variety of forms, from teaching parenting skills and distributing informational pamphlets to scouring the streets for “neglected” children who were placed in orphanages or other charitable institutions. The majority of these efforts were focused on large urban cities such as Boston, New York, and Chicago.