Practicality and Ideology: Examining Site Selection for American Children’s Institutions

This chapter examines whether changing cultural beliefs about American childhood translated into changes in practice at children’s institutions. Children’s institutions played an important role in American culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, the location of these institutions occasionally contradicted contemporaneous ideals about childcare within the United States. One of the primary cultural preferences that arose during this period was the idea that the physical proximity to undesirable individual in cities negatively influenced child development. This chapter uses time as a proxy for the increased application of these ideas to test if the location of children’s institutions adhered to these ideals. Children’s institutions in this chapter fall into two categories – children’s homes for white American children and Native American boarding schools. Using these categories, this chapter explores if adults equally applied social expectations for children’s care to children of different races. This meta-analysis draws from online-accessible information about children’s institutions to suggest that the application of child-rearing ideals at children’s institutions built for children of different races had unique patterns in site location. Suggesting that while ideas about childcare standards and ideals filtered into American culture, the application of these methods were not evenly distributed.