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One of the central issues of poverty with which American society has struggled involves assisting people who are poor without making those people indefinitely dependent on public support. Traditionally, providing assistance to individuals whose poverty was due to circumstances beyond their control has encountered less resistance than helping other groups of people. Though children generally have been categorized as "deserving," the motivation for providing assistance to them has not always appeared to reflect that sentiment. This article examines the development, implementation, and discontinuance of placing-out programs for poor children from New York City. These programs, operated between 1853 and 1930, placed approximately 150,000 children with families for family foster care and adoption.
Placing-Out: The Orphan Train Strategy
In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Loring Brace [1880] and the Children's Aid Society (CAS) [1893] argued that the agency's programs would fill an existing gap in services by providing for children for whom there was no room in orphanages and those for whom an orphanage was inappropriate. Brace and CAS also argued that institutional care did not prepare children for life in the community and that most children did not want to go to orphanages. Orphanages were criticized for their selective admission policies, generally made on the basis of race/ethnicity and religion; their use of harsh discipline systems; their administrative freedom to discharge children arbitrarily; their overcrowding; their inability to accommodate the growing number of children in need of care as a result of immigration and the Civil War; and the disproportionate number of immigrant children in placement [Bremner 1970; Downs & Sherraden 1983; Kitterson 1968; Letchworth 1893].
Despite the diversity of services offered by CAS, the placing-out system is the one program for which the agency and Brace are most often remembered, credited, and criticized. This was the most ambitious and controversial program undertaken by CAS. Although the concept of placing children with families to whom the children were not related originated neither with CAS nor in the United States, the agency's placing-out system was significant in several ways. It was the first extensive and systematic placing-out program initiated by a charitable organization [Wheeler 1983]. In addition, the program differed from the indenture system in which children were legally apprenticed to families and paid for their work....