Children's Aid Society

THE CHILDREN's AID Society (CAS) was founded in 1853 in New York City by the Reverend Charles Loring Brace. Although it is best known as the original sponsor of “orphan trains” that carried about 150,000 dependent urban children to new homes in rural areas, the 19th century Children's Aid Society of New York was a multiservice agency. The CAS pioneered industrial schools, day schools for children with disabilities, visiting nurses, free dental clinics, and camping for poor children. In the 21st century, the CAS remains a child welfare agency offering a range of family and children's services at numerous sites in New York City. Other societies of the same name operate in large cities around the world.

The CAS of New York was founded during a period of high European immigration to the United States, accompanied by overcrowding of major cities. Poor families suffered from low wages, dangerous working conditions, high rates of morbidity and mortality, and few sources of help for the destitute. The middle of the 19th century was a period that embraced the “institutional ideal,” the vision that people needing society's aid were best served in specialized hospitals, orphanages, and asylums.

Accordingly, voluntary and religious groups in most U.S. cities built orphanages for dependent children. Many of their wards were not complete orphans, but rather children who needed aid due to other family circumstances, including illness or death of a parent, desertion or family separation, acute poverty, or maltreatment. However, the existing institutions could not meet the extensive needs in large urban areas. Brace, a Protestant minister who had become aware of New [Page 155]York's street children as well as those in institutions, was convinced that both groups of children could best be helped by placement with farm families in rural parts of the country. He founded the CAS of New York and began a program of placing children out of the city, the best-known service of the early CAS. Actually, the CAS helped children, young people, and their families in a variety of ways, and one study shows that only about a quarter of them fit the profile of orphaned, homeless, or abused “waifs.”

Brace chronicled his work in The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, published in 1872, and he directed the CAS until his death in 1890. His legacy, and that of the early society, are somewhat mixed. During the years of the placing-out program, there was serious opposition from non-Protestant immigrant communities to the placement of their children in predominantly Protestant families and regions. More recently, the society's early work has been criticized for frequently disrupting poor families, and praised for including moral reform, as well as tangible assistance, in its work with poor families. Most commonly, the society is recognized as laying the groundwork for modern foster-care programs.

The CAS of New York has evolved into a complex child welfare agency, offering traditional, therapeutic, and medical foster care as well as adoption, health and dental care, school-based social services, teen pregnancy prevention, services for the homeless, community building, and camping and recreation. It has an annual budget of more than $70 million and serves an estimated 120,000 children and families each year, including some in teen pregnancy programs and school-based services in U.S. cities outside of New York.

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