Catherine E. Rymph: Raising Government Children: A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State

In Raising Government Children: A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State, Catherine E. Rymph illustrates how poverty, race, and developments in child psychology shaped the U.S. foster care system. The purpose of Rymph’s monograph is to show how informal care arrangements between families turned into today’s foster care “system” or “industrial complex,” as it is sometimes referred to as. A notable strand in Rymph’s story is the divergence of two separate entities—adoption and foster care—and how one became synonymous with love and family while the other became synonymous with damage and welfare. Rymph’s writing includes policy analyses and expert quotes meant for an academic audience, but her incorporation of photographs and letters written to the Children’s Bureau taps into the emotional side of the story, making the writing also assessable to the non-academic interested in the topic generally. While the book does jump around a bit, making it difficult to always know where Rymph is in the chronology, Rymph does an excellent job connecting developments in our nation’s history to the modern foster care system, and her analysis of past policy attempts should serve as a sounding board to inform future foster care policy makers. …