Child Welfare Policy: Past, Present, and Future

The second account of a changing stance toward children’s rights was evolution alongside women’s rights. Before this time, women and children were seen as unimportant under the law, whereas a father was given almost total control over all matters regarding his wife and children. If a father was violent or neglectful, society simply turned their shoulder to it. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, laws pertaining to the family system began to change. A new law recognized the equal rights of fathers and mothers with the mother’s rights reigning over the fathers in regards to the children. Also, the legal system began viewing children as important to the future of society, therefore “appropriate objects of the court’s protection” (Popple and Leighninger, 2011).
Unfortunately, because of the Great Depression of the 1930s, nongovernmental child protection societies dwindled. These organizations relied heavily on charitable contributions and when the economy collapsed, the contributions halted. By the 1940s, most of the child protection societies either merged with other organizations or closed completely.
The last era of child welfare began in 1962. Myers says that the 1960s started a time when people were actually paying more attention to child abuse, thanks to medical doctors. Prior to this time, physicians had little to no training or information on child abuse. A pediatric radiologist by the name of John Caffey saw six children with multiple fractures and subdural hematomas (a collection of blood outside of the brain because of head injury). In his report, Caffey did not outright explain the injuries to abuse, but hinted at it. After his paper, a substantial flow of doctors called attention to abuse being a f...

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...the Child Welfare System Works. Retrieved from https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/cpswork.cfm Myers, John. (2008). A Short History of Child Protection in America. Family Law Quarterly, 42(3), 449-463.

Pecora, Peter., Whittaker, James., and Maluccio, Anthony. (2012). The Child Welfare Challenge: Policy, Practice, and Research. Aldine Transaction.

Popple, Philip and Lighninger, Leslie. (2011). The Policy Based Profession: An Introduction to Social Welfare Policy Analysis For Social Workers. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Sribnick, Ethan. (2011). The Origins of Modern Child Welfare. The Journal of Policy History. 23(2), 150-176.

Wulczyn, Fred., Barth, Richard., Yuan, Ying-Ying., Harden,Brenda., and Landsverk, John. (2005). Beyond Common Sense: Child Welfare, Child Well-Being, and the Evidence for Policy Reform. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.