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

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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 responsibilities, primarily rejecting dependent kids in favor of delinquent children with a host of emotional and physical problems. Chapin Hall became a "residential treatment facility" staffed with dozens of highly trained professionals working intensively with the youths. When the state government began a policy of "deinstitutionalization" in the 1970s, a policy that sought to remove as many children from public orphanages and asylums as possible, Chapin Hall failed to respond to the new reality and closed after running deep deficits for several years. The institution reopened as a children's research center under the ownership of the University of Chicago.

Cmiel's book is a wonderful work because it succeeds in personalizing the history of the Chicago orphanage. The author consistently brings to the foreground the personal elements of social history that are often lost in lengthy descriptions of changing policies, power struggles, and theories on childcare. The reader gains a very real sense of what it was like to live in an asylum. For instance, Cmiel describes how the children living in the orphanage in the late nineteenth century, both male and female, had their heads shaved in order to prevent lice. And the descriptions of youths with serious mental and emotional problems in the later years of the orphanage, children abandoned by their parents and left to languish at Chapin Hall for years, brought tears to the eyes of this reader. It is rare for a history book to elicit this sort of reaction. Arguably the most surprising element in the book concerns the process of deinstitutionalization, and who started that process. Conservatives usually shoulder the blame for closing down hospitals, mental asylums, and other shelters. But Cmiel's research points the finger at liberals coming into power in the 1970s. They supported reducing the number of children in institutions with programs designed to keep kids at home or in small group houses scattered throughout the city. It was only later that Republicans signed on to the policies when they too discovered the amount of money the state would save in the process. It seems there is enough guilt to go around for both parties.

It is difficult to find problems with Cmiel's study due to the excellent research and strict parameters of the study. Yet there are a few areas that could use additional explanation or elaboration. For example, at several points in the narrative the author contends that Catholic facilities eluded Progressive efforts to exert financial and operational control far longer than most of the city's other institutions. Not until the DCFS pumped massive amounts of money into privately controlled facilities did the Catholics turn over control. Why were Catholic operations impervious to the earlier Progressive attempts to unite Chicago's childcare institutions under a broad operational umbrella when others were not? Was Catholic unity the reason these asylums resisted change for so long? Or was it something else? If it was the latter, could the Protestant organizations like Chapin Hall have done something similar and thus explored other options to keep control of their institution, if even for awhile longer?

This book takes you back to the mid 1850's when a couple women decided to open up a daycare for children who were left to fend for themselves due to a working single parent (or other...) and had no other resources to care for their baby or small child. Eventually this daycare grew & grew along with the awareness of this resource and the desperate need for it...and it evolved into the Chapin Hall for Children Orphanage where I spent 5+ yrs as a child.

This book uses the lens of the beginning of this daycare through the end of the orphanage, in 1984 and beyond, to explore the journey of the ever changing views about what children need and how to provide it. The institutions had become dependent on DCFS funding and if they were to survive to continue it's mission of providing children with much needed care, they had to conform to rapidly changing rules and demands. Eventually, DCFS decided to do away with orphanages and institutions...
From my perspective, this book gives an institutional context that created the circumstances for much of the emotional chaos I experienced at Chapin Hall.

While the author takes a peripheral look at the similarities and differences of other similar institutions and 'child welfare' providers, he does not delve into the damage wreaked on those trapped within the tumultuous climate. He provides lots of details (names, dates, details, etc...) but very little insight from the children's perspective.
I found it to be engaging and interesting institutional history of a place that played a vital role in our emotional development.

Child Abuse by the State

by Patrick Quinn

Child 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 budgets need to be justified, those who work in the system have been turned into paper jockeys. As a therapist coworker once told me, "I got into this field to try to help children, but 60-70 percent of my job is paperwork."

Or perhaps you are particularly bothered by arbitrary power. Now, imagine combining arbitrary and largely unstoppable power with the pseudo-sciences of psychiatry and social work. That mix is what exists in much of child welfare work. I have had the utterly enervating experience of witnessing this combination of forces used to dismantle children psychologically and spiritually.

One of the group homes where I worked was set in a quiet residential neighborhood on Chicago's northwest side. One of the boys, Shannon, was a model child, not just in our institution, but among all of the neighborhood children as well. Shannon was utterly reliable. We allowed him free reign in the neighborhood, gave him an allowance, let him join the local YMCA, and even sent him shopping when essentials ran out.

One day, some psychiatric social workers from the state visited the home, a "private" contractor with the state. Their putative function was to act as a kind of meta-authority within the system, looking into special cases, or performing investigations of problems, and so on. They were interested in Shannon because of his unique situation. Altogether, he had nine family members in the custody of the state, including two younger brothers who lived with him at our home, and his oldest brother, who had just been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in Arizona. Shannon didn't know his oldest brother, but the social workers thought it appropriate to probe his thoughts on the sentencing, and in the process to review his situation to see if any changes were warranted.

For reasons known only to themselves, the workers began suggesting to Shannon that they would separate him from his two younger brothers at the home by placing him elsewhere. Most likely, they were simply under pressure to change his "treatment plan," which is the name given to the state's plan for dealing with individual wards. Treatment plans represent an effort to quantify the services given to wards (e.g., length of stay in the system), as well as to specify the nature of the services rendered (e.g., foster care vs. institutional settings, medication vs. behavior modification). Since treatment plans are tied to state budgets, there is constant pressure to tinker with them, a process that often does not consider a child's best interests. From the vantage-point of those actually raising Shannon -- me and my co-worker -- there was absolutely no reason to move him.

Not surprisingly, Shannon was bothered greatly by the suggestion. As I've said, he was a sweet, good little kid. But every human has a touchy spot, and the thought of separation from his brothers, understandably, was his. Loving and watching over his two little brothers -- was a responsibility Shannon had understandably (and proudly) bestowed upon himself, given the condition of his family.

So he became combative with the workers. Not violent, mind you; just angry enough to raise his voice to the complete strangers who were proposing to shatter what was left of his life. In response, they had him summarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. Shannon, the good kid, was no more.

As justification for their move, the social workers engaged in a bit of revisionist history. As it turned out, Shannon had the swimming ability of a rock, and about a week earlier had nearly drowned at the YMCA. He was revived on the pool deck, and was fine after a short observation. The social workers decided to call this a suicide attempt. Suddenly, Shannon was a depressed youth suffering from suicidal ideation.

And of course, on the psychiatric ward, he was medicated for the first time in his life. When he began having nightmares (presumably from the drugs, as is so often the case) he was tagged as suffering from a psychotic episode. And, his (perfectly sensible) refusal to cooperate at all at the hospital was taken by the social workers as "evidence" of their having made a keen diagnosis, and as justification for their intervention.

Such is the circular, arbitrary reasoning of psychiatric social work.

Monolithic Welfare

One of the most troubling aspects of all this is that child welfare work in America is a monolith. The problems I've been describing are systemic and nationwide. Just as public education has withered the private school sector, so too has the government's role in caring for delinquent and dependent children reduced the options for such children. Sure, there are a few largely private organizations that have endured the state's takeover of child welfare work. Boys Town, one of the largest and most famous, accepts only about ten percent of its income from the state. But these institutions are the exception. The rule for children whose families don't function for them is the labyrinth of public and quasi-public homes and agencies that the government has created, including the perennially troubled juvenile court system.

Even the "private" homes like I worked at are funded and controlled by the state. One group home that I worked for called itself a private organization, but it received nearly 80% of its operating income directly from the state and was thoroughly controlled by the state, right down to the minute detail of what the children could have on the tops of their dressers. Even the option for children that is furthest removed from the state -- foster homes, private homes where children are placed by the state -- is tightly regulated by government bureaucrats.

And the results are what one might expect of government bureaucracy. Child welfare bureaucrats constantly claim that resources are too scarce. But in reality, inefficiencies and politics are squandering resources that desperately need to be utilized. In Illinois in 1991, for example, DCFS admitted that of the 14,000 foster homes it had licensed, only 6,000 were in use at any time.

Given all of this, it is more than worthwhile to