Until recently historical studies of child health and welfare assumed a ‘Whiggish’ tone, that is, they usually saw legislative developments in terms of ‘progress’ – a continually improving position [23; 24]. (But not all scholars subscribed to this view [87] and, unsurprisingly, political histories of welfare offered more searching examinations [88].) Older histories, along with several current standard textbooks on social policy, tend to describe the gathering pace of the legislation in terms of what Jean Heywood calls ‘the growth of state obligation towards the child’ [24: 94; also 89–91]. Since the late 1970s, however, a new and more critical history has appeared, often influenced by Marxism, liberal radicalism, Foucauldian perspectives and, to a lesser extent, feminism [11; 14; 16–18; 26; 27; 32; 55; 92–7]. Most of these modern views, while not denying either a degree of legislative progress or the increasing role of the state, propose a more complex and varied set of causes and consequences, seeking as they do to be more precise and more analytical in their accounts.

Approaches

In order to illustrate the variety of ‘overarching’ understandings of child welfare, this section selects several approaches adopted by different scholars.

In pursuit of a broader conceptual framework, it has been tentatively suggested that the history of child welfare might be usefully examined through, on the one hand, two ‘dualisms’: bodies/minds and victims/threats and, on the other, through the notion of children as investments [59].