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Prior chapters have reported on alumni functioning in terms of physical and mental health; education; and employment and finances. This chapter focuses on the nature and quality of the relationships that alumni have with key groups of people such as spouses or partners, birth family, and former foster parents. Sources and types of social support available to alumni are examined, as well as child-rearing status, parenting, and placement of children of alumni in foster care.

This chapter examines the role of foster parents as workers, an idea rooted in the nineteenth century role of the “boarding mother.” Child Welfare professionals, foster parents, and the public struggled over the proper balance between paying adequate board to foster parents while ensuring that desire to nurture a child remained the paramount motivation. By the 1960s, foster parents began organizing themselves, culminating in the formation of the National Foster Parents Association in 1971.

This chapter examines the ambiguity of the foster parent role in the post-World War II period, looking particularly at analogies to other kinds of parenting. It explores efforts by child welfare professionals to reconcile their ambivalent feelings about foster parents through the creation and promotion of national standards for foster care and foster parenting. The chapter looks closely at professional writings about the foster mother role and the reasons why foster fathers received so little attention. It also examines the ways in which foster parents resisted their proscribed role, notably through attempting to adopt children in their care.

This chapter profiles cases involving children of so-called planned lesbian and gay families. In particular, it looks at lesbian and gay litigants in foster care and adoption cases who have sometimes found themselves in court battling government officials seeking to deny them the opportunity to become parents. It also considers the issue of gay teenagers who are placed under the care of gay foster parents and the contention of child welfare officials that lesbian and gay people are incapable of being good parents because of their same-sex sexual orientation and relationships. Finally, it examines how the courts have responded to adoption petitions, including those concerning joint adoptions and second-parent adoptions, brought by LGBT parents who were open about their sexual orientation.

This chapter profiles cases involving children of so-called planned lesbian and gay families. In particular, it looks at lesbian and gay litigants in foster care and adoption cases who have sometimes found themselves in court battling government officials seeking to deny them the opportunity to become parents. It also considers the issue of gay teenagers who are placed under the care of gay foster parents and the contention of child welfare officials that lesbian and gay people are incapable of being good parents because of their same-sex sexual orientation and relationships. Finally, it examines how the courts have responded to adoption petitions, including those concerning joint adoptions and second-parent adoptions, brought by LGBT parents who were open about their sexual orientation.

This chapter examines the impact of World War II, which increased the need for foster care, decreased the supply of foster parents, and exacerbated tensions over women’s roles as workers, mothers, and caregivers. In an effort to meet wartime needs for foster parents, child welfare professionals turned to the rhetoric of war service to recruit foster families, celebrating foster mothers’ caregiving as part of the war effort. As was also the case for other women working in war industries, however, champions celebrated foster mothers’ motivations in traditionally feminine terms while often downplaying the very real economic considerations at play. The chapter examines the role of a program to temporarily place British children in American homes (administered by the US Committee for the Care of European Children) in further developing the American child welfare infrastructure. It also explores child welfare professionals’ opposition to institutional day care.

This epilogue examines how changes in child welfare policy were affected by the decline of the farm home as a symbol of American prosperity, the appropriate levels of work and education for children, the expense of placement, the problems with supervision, and efforts at family preservation. It explains how the decisions made during the Progressive Era to rationalize, study, centralize, and professionalize institutionalization and placement permanently altered the methods of care for dependent children throughout the country. It suggests that the farm placement system changed in part because the farm itself was in transition, and that foster care was also unsuccessful in ways similar to the practice it was purported to replace. Finally, it considers problems with dependent child care policy that persist until today, in which foster children are trapped in a web of bureaucracy that undermines conscientious foster parents from being able to parent.

This chapter traces the next steps in the progress of children under the care of foundling hospitals. Survivors of the nursery were sent out to wetnurses and foster parents who cared for them in the city or (more often) in the supposedly healthier countryside. Some were eventually adopted and others returned to the hospital at ages which varied through time. Families, especially country families, valued the extra income from nurses’ wages, and both breast-feeding and adoption may have had roles in determining family size. Hospitals made some attempts at the systematic inspection of foster families, both to protect children’s wellbeing and to save themselves from fraud, though some miscreants succeeded in escaping their vigilance and even at one point in organising a black market in foundling children.

This book is an examination of the effort of a group of white women who, aided sporadically by limited financial support from African Americans, labored for over a century to maintain a home for black youth, first orphans and then also half-orphans and neglected, dependent, and delinquent children. The Colored Orphan Asylum (COA), the first in the nation for African American youth, was similar to other orphanages in the United States. Some orphanages cared for only Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish youth. In contrast, the COA housed blacks and occasionally American Indians until 1944, when a state law required them also to accept white applicants. The COA did not deviate from this pattern, although very few children were indentured to African American homes, and it was not until the early twentieth century when efforts were made to place them in the homes of black foster or adoptive parents.