Child welfare policy has been around for many years. Since the 1960 's, the focus of child welfare policy has been child protection services, adoption, foster care and Head start (Karger, Stoesz, 2010). In the 1960 's, child welfare suffered many hits that led many programs in chaos (Karger, Stoesz, 2010). Child welfare policy causes a lot of controversy and brings up many challenges. Every state has its own structures and programs to address the needs of children and families (Child Welfare Information Gateway, n.d.). More specifically, certain programs are needed because some families are not able to provide for their children, such as Adoption (Karger, Stoesz, 2010). Adoption is a legal process in which a non-biological parent becomes responsible for a child due to unfortunate reasons (Child Welfare Information Gateway, n.d.). This paper will go into more detail on the history and analysis of adoption. …show more content…
In the 1800 's there were about 250,000 immigrants that arrived in America, specifically in New York (Jalongo, 2010). There were many children who were arrested due to living on the streets and put in prisons with adult criminals (Jalongo, 2010). Families could not provide for their children and many orphan asylums were very limited around that time period (Jalongo, 2010). Children were received in these asylums by their parents. With the growing number of orphans, orphanages were crowded and were incapable of providing care for children (Cook,