A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare

When one thinks of orphanages, Oliver Twist asking "Can I have some more, please?" comes to mind. So does the image of the orphanage as a giant warehouse packed to the rafters with filthy children cowering under the harsh glare of psychotic social workers. Kenneth Cmiel's "A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare" does much to refute this view. Certainly, some orphanages were cesspools that mistreated their charges, but most genuinely tried to assist the children under their care. Cmiel's book, through the use of a plethora of source materials--including orphanage records, government documents, and personal interviews-- successfully charts the changing course of child welfare by looking at the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum from its founding in 1860 to its reorganization as a research center in 1984. Most importantly, he uses his findings to trace the changing attitudes regarding the care of dependent and delinquent children in the country at large. The author discovers that the early years of the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, from 1860 to roughly 1900, were a time of private, religion based assistance. The people that ran the institution on a daily basis were Protestant, wealthy, and female. They lived near the asylum, which meant that they took a personal interest in the condition of the institution and the children living there. The women running the orphanage also helped raise the funds necessary to operate the building on a yearly basis. Children chosen to live in the asylum came from working class families undergoing some sort of catastrophic upheaval, disasters that left one or both of the parents needing someone to watch their offspring while they put their family back together again. As a result, children in the orphanage during the early years of its existence rarely lived there very long. Progressive ideas about childcare, which began in earnest after 1900, sought to change the practices of the asylum by creating a unified network of facilities dependent upon citywide umbrella organizations that disbursed both funds and the latest social service theories. While successful in some areas, these Progressive ideas failed to gain power over Chicago area orphanages and asylums because privately owned facilities refused to give up control. The Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war period saw public funding increase from a trickle to a flood. With the boost in public funding came rules and regulations that severely curtailed the traditional authority of the private managing boards. The Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, now known as Chapin Hall as a result of a new facility built with donated funds, gradually turned over control of the organization to the professionally trained staff. The institution also went on the public dole, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). With public money came new resp

Child Abuse by the Stateby Patrick QuinnChild welfare work consists of one party taking over some or all of the process of rearing children when another party, usually in the nuclear family, has failed in some egregious way. Since the nuclear family is one of the most important components of any civil society, this is extremely important work. Children whose families fail them in some catastrophic way -- either through abuse, neglect or abandonment -- eventually become adults, and often prove to be formidable social nuisances. And the ability of any society to deal with such children is all the more crucial given that such problems seem to be pretty durable over time. Concern with exceedingly poor child rearing dates at least as far back as ancient Sumeria, and probably farther.America's approach to child welfare work has undergone a dramatic shift over the past 100 years, but the nature of the work done has remained fundamentally the same. When families are unwilling or unable to raise their children -- for whatever reason -- the rearing process must be assumed by someone else. What has changed in American child welfare work over the course of the 20th century is who that someone is. In the past, child welfare work was almost entirely private. Today, the assumption of the rearing process is handled almost entirely by government.It is time to consider the likelihood that this transition was a tragic mistake.Does gross ineffectiveness bother you? In 1995, a Chicago Tribune report revealed that the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), the state child welfare bureaucracy, did not know the whereabouts of more than 20,000 of its wards. Think about that for a moment: The physical location of roughly half of the children under the direct responsibility of the state was unknown to the state's bureaucrats.Does fiscal insanity bother you more? In Illinois, DCFS has been under fire almost constantly since its creation via legislative fiat in 1964. A steady stream of exposes has uncovered blunder after blunder: children sleeping on the floors of DCFS offices, a group of children housed without supervision in a local motel with regular access to adult movies, children actually dying while in the state's care. The state finally gave in to the immense political pressure that comes with such tragic and chronic embarrassments and went on a knee-jerk spending spree, with the help of some changes in state Medicaid laws. In the early 1990s, the DCFS budget soared more than 300 percent. Today, that budget is well over $1 billion. The clearest result of all of that spending is that children in the system now have a lot more people to "care" for them.Imagine a troubled child trying to adjust to a new group home. Now, after all that spending, that same child of limited coping abilities is expected to adjust to a new set of "parents" every 8 hours, along with numerous ancillary workers. And since all of those bloated b