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
