Family preservation was the movement to help keep children at home with their families rather than in foster homes or institutions. This movement was a reaction to the earlier policy of family breakup, which pulled children out of unfit homes. Extreme poverty alone was seen as a justified reason to remove children. This new movement began in the 1890s, and in the 1909 White House Conference on Children it was the top ranked issue. In order to keep families together, the family would be given enough money so that the mother would not have to work a full-time job. The families that were given this assistance were usually headed by widows.Katz, M. B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse- A Social History of Welfare in America. Basic Books, NY: 1996 (p. 117-132)."
Overview Family preservation stems back to the poor laws of the late-eighteen and early-nineteen hundreds. Child-Saving was the theme of the era. With the new labor laws for children, the emphasis on the newly developed child psychology and the fear of family disintegration, social workers put a greater emphasis on the child, who was no longer considered just a smaller adult. Before this, children were systematically taken out of homes if their parents did not make enough income to support them. "Extreme poverty itself, many of the leading authorities of the time had argued, was reason enough to break up a family."Katz, M. B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse- A Social History of Welfare in America. Basic Books, NY: 1996, (p. 128)."
Many Americans are forced to live from paycheck to paycheck, as income is just enough to cover the basic cost of living, with little left over to save for an emergency.Teller-Elsberg, J., Folbre, N., Heintz, J & the Center for Popular Economics. Field Guide to the U. S. Economy. (Rev. ed.) The New Press, NY: 2006, (p. 9). The United States has no universal health coverage, and half of all poor full-time workers did not receive health insurance through their jobs. This means they must pay medical expenses out of pocket, or simply not use medical facilities. In 2004, just over 1.5 million American workers were affected by mass lay-offs. Many of these people could find jobs, but only sometimes as good as the job they lost. The average unemployment rate in 2004 was 5.5 percent.Teller-Elsberg, J., Folbre, N., Heintz, J & the Center for Popular Economics. Field Guide to the U. S. Economy. (Rev. ed.) The New Press, NY: 2006, (pp. 27-31).
These trends leave it difficult for someone who hit hard times to recover. The number of mothers living below the poverty level has been increasing for decades, and represented over half of the people living below the poverty line in 2003.Teller-Elsberg, J., Folbre, N., Heintz, J & the Center for Popular Economics. Field Guide to the U. S. Economy. (Rev. ed.) The New Press, NY: 2006, (p. 47). This leaves women and children increasingly vulnerable to poverty. With the welfare system defined by temporary aid, assistance may run out leaving these women and their children without support. Perhaps Family Preservation will once again become an issue as more mothers become unable to afford or take care of their children adequately.
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.Kahan, M. (2006). "Put Up" on Platforms: A History of Twentieth Century Adoption Policy in the United States. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 23(3).
Two early reformers setting the stage for family preservation were Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley. 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.Bradbury, D. E. & Eliot M.D., M. M. (n.d.). Four Decades of Action for Children. a short history of the Children's Bureau. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (1-17)
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.Social Security Administration. (n.d.) History: The Children's Bureau. Retrieved October 26, 2007, from http://www.ssa.gov/history/childb1.html. 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."Tanenhaus, D. S. (2001). Growing up dependent: family preservation in early twentieth-century Chicago. Law and History Review,19(3). Fathers with their children in institutions would often pay the state for this service. This distinction was made due to 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.
A rebirth of family preservation
Family preservation is seeing a rebirth. There are organizations devoted to preserving natural families in crisis and those who have experienced a wrongful termination of parental rights.
The National Family Preservation Network , founded in 1992 to serve as the primary national voice for the preservation of families through Intensive Family Preservation and Reunification Services (IFPS & IFRS) and a myriad of state programs, many affiliated with schools of social work.
In addition there are father's right advocacy organizations and kinship care and subsidized guardianship organizations and programs such as Kinship Care Practice Project that conducts research, develops training materials, and provides educational opportunities to work collaboratively with extended families.
Family Preservation Foundation (FPF), a national nonprofit with over 12,000 members, advocates for preserving and empowering parental rights, family preservation, family first ideology, stopping unwarranted forced parental separation, and restoring the respect for children’s rights that allow them to remain with their biological parent and/or extended family when its safe to do so, thus preserving the family unit. Founder Dwight Mitchell says that current laws are so vague and written so broadly that Child Welfare can remove children from the family home for anything less than physical harm. FPF, filed a federal lawsuit declaring that certain state laws that govern when and how children can be removed from their homes are unconstitutional and deprive families of due process.
There are also grass roots organizations such as the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform that advocates for systemic reform of the child welfare system and Origins-USA , a national non-profit that advocates natural family preservation and supports families separated by adoption.
The need for these services and initiatives developed largely in response to the over-reliance on transient and often unsafe out-of-home care that characterized services in the 1970s. As early as 1966 the Casey Family Programs operated to provide and improve — and ultimately prevent the need for—foster care.
The peak years for out of family placements into adoption in the US were between the end of World War II and Roe V. Wade. In 1960, New York was the first state to adopt the Interstate Compact on Placement of Children establishing procedures for the interstate placement of children.
By 1967, 44 states adopted laws making the reporting of crimes against children mandatory. According to the National Association of Counsel for Children, "reporting is recognized as the primary reason for the dramatic increases seen in cases of child abuse and neglect."