Familial Fitness

Disability and child welfare, together and apart, are major concerns in American society. Today, about 125,000 children in foster care are eligible and waiting for adoption, and many children wait more than two years to be adopted; children with disabilities wait even longer. Familial Fitness illustrates the historical dynamics of disability, adoption, and family. It explores disability and difference in the twentieth-century American family, particularly how notions and practices of adoption have (and haven't) accommodated disability, and how the language of risk enters into that complicated relationship. It reveals how the field of adoption moved from widely excluding children with disabilities in the early twentieth century to partially including them at its close. During and after World War II, adoption professionals determined that disabled children's fitness rested on whether agencies and adopters regarded these children as desirable for placement (instead of on any intrinsic undesirability), and whether a growing number of programs and policies to facilitate placement were effective. The book traces this historical process, highlighting forces that overlap with and impact this history. The book ultimately reveals that concerns about, and actions related to, disability invariably shape experiences of familial belonging, fitness, and worth, and, as the author argues, also reflect deep feelings of reticence and love--