Abstract
Catherine E. Rymph’s book, Raising Government Children, is an exploratory description of the history and evolution of the U.S. foster care system from the 1930s to the 1970s. The book ties interpretations of how specific national policies were used (such as Aid to Dependent Children) to the inadequacies of the U.S. foster care system past and present. Particularly noteworthy, the author does an exceptionally good job of explaining how allowing Aid to Dependent Children and Families–Foster Care funds to be used to support the provision of services provided by foster parents led to more children being removed from their homes, often unnecessarily. Rymph’s work depicts how child welfare incentives were often misaligned. The book richly and critically details the prejudiced assumptions guiding the architects and key administrators of the U.S. foster care system during this 40-year time span. The author boldly exposes how unscientific, sexist, and racist viewpoints systemically produced dissatisfying child welfare outcomes. The author should be commended for her multiple mentions of children of color and disabled children, considering the dearth of historical information about such children before the 1960s.
Still, it is unclear that this book contributes to social work practice, scholarship, or education. That the foster care system is decentralized, partially privatized, and underserving children and families has been well established. Although there may not be many books that study the history of foster care in the United States, during this exact time period, in this exact way, much has been written from a historical, systemic, and policy perspective about factors that contributed to the fragmented and failing U.S. child welfare system. The book does not mention gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, or transgender stakeholders. These are important omissions given the discrimination that gay and lesbian, prospective adoptive and foster parents have experienced and the fact that children have been kicked out of their homes for being gay.
The most glaring omission is that the book does not describe or represent the perspectives of the children served by foster care. The book mentions the permanency movement, but not the positive youth development movement. The author laments that she marginalizes children’s voices in this work because it is “hardest to access the views of the children themselves” (p. 13). However, youth have attempted to speak up in various ways throughout the history of U.S. foster care, their perspectives have been increasingly documented, and youth empowerment could have been proposed as a potential solution among many potential solutions for a problem-riddled child welfare system.
The author sprinkles various solutions (such as more funding to support biological families) throughout the work but does not conclude with policy and practitioner recommendations. Instead, she reiterates that various reforms have been and continue to be made. Although critical of the current child welfare system, Rymph gives the benefit of the doubt to all adult child welfare stakeholders and largely ignores the children themselves. By not including the perspectives and experiences of children and youth, Rymph repeats and thereby deepens the oppression of the child welfare system. Readers might very well conclude that the foster care system was created by adults to meet the needs of adults and that the welfare of children is just a distant afterthought or a hopeful byproduct. The danger of Rymph’s omissions and her compassionate but inconclusive adult-focused approach is that the readers might use the book’s contents to rationalize or explain away the failures of U.S. foster care, thus reinforcing a system and society that harms children. The book might leave readers shrugging with complacency and indifference. Raising Government Children lacks a prescription for solutions and does not make readers feel empathy for those who are truly impacted by the system the most: voiceless children.
