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Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in issues involving child welfare and adoption. Nobody’s Children is a well-written and well-informed book, as well as an extremely controversial one.

If you are looking for a very clear description of the history and politics of child welfare, you will find it here. Bartholet brings the trends and laws right up to 1999, through the swing of the pendulum towards Family Preservation and away. In fact, this book breaks with the favored welfare theories of the 1990s. Bartholet questions the wisdom of leaving children with parents and kin and away from the interference of government welfare agencies. She supports policies that limit the time and energy invested in parents who do not demonstrate an ability to take care of their children.

To quote her:

“We should press for increased family support services, but should not condition child protection on their availability. We should instead use coercive measures as needed to shield children from abuse and neglect and give them the opportunity to grow up in nurturing homes. We might discover that this works better than the old system to create pressure for increased social services. But whether or not increased support services are forthcoming, and even if state intervention appears likely to have a disproportionate impact on poor and minority group parents, we need to act. Children, like their parents, come in black and brown skins, and suffer the ravages of poverty. We should not refuse to protect them from child maltreatment simply out of fear that this will have a discriminatory impact on their parents.” (pgs. 238-239)

Bartholet’s solution to the problem of child protection is to find adoptive homes that will protect children from not-good-enough families, from foster care drift, and from institutional care. She is very aware of the politics behind her position and describes them cogently in her book. She thinks very clearly on such topics as “Underintervention vs. Overintervention”, “Race, Poverty, and Historic Injustice” and “Taking Adoption Seriously.”

If you are interested in the theory and practice of child welfare, read this book. Whether you agree or disagree with her solutions, you will learn from her presentation of the issues.

—Libby Colman, Ph.D.