Child-placing in Families


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Child-placing


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Fostering on the Farm


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From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide. Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, Megan Birk scrutinizes how the farm system developed--and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. Birk reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. She also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, Birk traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.




Paths to Child Placement


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One Heart at a Time


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“You’re listening to Delilah.” Delilah, the most listened-to woman on American radio, has distinguished herself as the “Queen of Sappy Love Songs” and America’s ultimate romance guru. But Delilah’s life off-air is all the more extraordinary—a life full of trials, forgiveness, faith, and adventure. In One Heart at a Time, Delilah’s heartfelt account of her own story reveals what shaped the voice that 9 million listeners know and love. Today, Delilah is the founder of an NGO called Point Hope, the owner of a 55-acre working farm, and an inductee of the National Radio Hall of Fame. But to achieve this, she often had to pave her own way. Disowned by her father, divorced, and fired from a dozen jobs over the years, Delilah pushed forward through family addiction and devastating loss, through glass ceilings and red tape. Her consistent goal to help those in need took her everywhere from the streets of Philadelphia to refugee camps in Ghana. Along the way, Delilah was blessed by thirteen children—ten of them adopted. Though many of them contend with special needs and the forever effects of a broken foster care system, her children have been able to transform their own remarkable lessons into guiding lights for other kids in need. Just as Delilah has done. One Heart at a Time exposes the real woman behind the microphone. In her easy-going style and characteristic, beloved voice, Delilah tells her deeply moving life story as the series of miracles it is.










A Child's Journey Through Placement


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Originally published: Indianapolis, IN: Perspectives Press, 1991.




To the End of June


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A New York Times Notable Book that “casts a searing eye on the labyrinth that is the American foster care system” (NPR’s On Point). Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children in their search for a stable, loving family. Beam shows us the intricacies of growing up in the system—the back-and-forth with agencies, the rootless shuffling between homes, the emotionally charged tug between foster and birth parents, the terrifying push out of foster care and into adulthood. Humanizing and challenging a broken system, To the End of June offers a tribute to resiliency and hope for real change. “A triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling.” —The New York Times “[A] powerful . . . and refreshing read.” —Chicago Tribune “A sharp critique of foster-care policies and a searching exploration of the meaning of family.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Heart-rending and tentatively hopeful.” —Salon