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Bringing Up Foster Parents and Foster Children: Educating a Swedish Rural Local Community into Fostering, 1860-1939
| Moving children from cities to foster homes in the countryside has often been used to solve the problem of street children, orphans and abandoned children in urban areas for at least three hundred years. Some rural local communities became specialized in fostering these children since they either suffered from lack of labour, needed extra cash income due to poor profits from agriculture and since they had good travelling communications to a city (for instance railways, canals, steamboat lines, roads). This geography of fostering is known from several studies from different countries (Ransel 1988; Irvin Holt 1992; Parr 1980; Kertzer 1993). However, not so much emphasized in previous research is how these local communities were organized when many children were placed there and how the local communities influenced the children.
This article explores a rural local community in Sweden – Gålö, which became a centre of fostering 1860-1939. This was due to one of the orphanages in the city of Stockholm – Prins Carl’s uppfostringsinrättning – that decided to move it’s activities outside the city. The orphanage bought an estate on Gålö, an island in the Stockholm archipelago. The approximately 20 peasant households whom rented land on Gålö now had to take in ca 80 foster children. The board also decided that these peasant foster parents had to be educated to be good models for the children. This article focuses on the board’s efforts in bringing up foster parents and foster children and how this affected the organization and the economy of the local community.
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