The first orphans I loved were the Boxcar Children. In first grade, I inhaled the—many!—stories of those four scrappy siblings whose parents were conveniently out of the picture and imagined myself into their shoes. Precocious and in need of little help from adults, the Aldens could seemingly do anything—make beds from pine needles, dam up a stream to make a swimming hole, find the ingredients for stew in the forest. Their lives were thrilling, in part because they conjured a primary fear of childhood, the fear of losing the people who are most central to your life. But, as is so often the case with fears, that worry is also very much a wish. What child doesn’t want their parents to disappear and leave them to their own devices even as they are terrified of that possibility?

My love of orphans—which continued with Jane Eyre, Anne Shirley, Mary Lennox, Pip, and Harry Potter—is certainly not unique. Orphans are narratively convenient in children’s books, quickly offering pathos while expediently dealing with the limitations that a parent might place on a character embarking on dangerous adventures. And yet, as Kristen Martin points out in her new book The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood, these stories of orphans have deceived us. In fact, she points out that even the definition of an orphan isn’t quite what we think; most of the children who have been labeled orphans historically actually had living parents but were separated from them. And even as we know the stories of Annie and the Boxcar Children are fiction, she suggests, we cannot help but begin to see children who don’t have parents, or who have been taken away from their parents (as is much more often the case), as symbols of self-reliance, ingenuity, and resilience. And yet, the reality of orphans in America is much more brutal than any of these works of fiction suggest.

In the book, Martin looks closely at the mythology of the American orphan from Annie to Ryan Atwood in The OC and then traces the reality of what it means to be an orphan in America. She describes the lives of nineteenth-century children who were taken to orphanages, placed in Native American boarding schools, or sent west on the orphan trains, an intervention where poor children were shipped from Northeastern cities to the rural Midwest, where they were often treated as unpaid servants. In the twentieth century, Martin outlines the beginning of the state becoming involved in the lives of poor children and shows how completely the systems that have been put in place to help children have failed them. Martin, herself an orphan, asks us to give up our fantasies of orphanhood and instead see the complex truth of what it is to be a vulnerable child in America. We spoke earlier this month by phone. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Heather Radke

Heather Radke: What is so troubling to you about the canon of orphan stories?

Kristen Martin: I think that part of why it’s troubling to me is that a lot of propaganda is being spread. Annie is a good example. Annie is constructed as this figure who embodies self-reliance, grit, spunk, and resilience. There’s this idea that she can pull up her own bootstraps and make things happen for herself. It happens again and again in the comics, when Daddy Warbucks goes off on business, or he’s kidnapped, functionally orphaning Annie again and again.

There’s a fantasy of individualism where Annie makes money for herself and helps other people at the same time. For example, Annie inspires Daddy Warbucks’s rich friends to adopt her friends from the orphanage. There’s this idea that if people who have more are taught to have more goodness in their hearts, and they’re willing to help, that they will fix everything for the people who don’t have enough. Meanwhile, the residents of the Hoovervilles in the musical aren’t getting shit.

We don’t have accurate portrayals of the way that orphanages worked or the way that foster care works now.

In the book, I also write about all of these 1990s and 2000s television shows that totally sidestep the existence of foster care. This absence promotes the idea that foster care is something so horrible that we can’t even talk about it. It also suggests that the solution is to keep kids out of it. The shows depict unbelievable scenarios like having a teacher take care of a child after his parents abandon him on Boy Meets World or having a child be adopted and saved by his public defense lawyer, who whisks him off to a massive mansion, like on The OC.

The reason why this is so pernicious to me is because we don’t have accurate portrayals of the way that orphanages worked, or the way that foster care works now. We have this idea that things are okay, or we don’t think about or question how the systems may have worked in the past. We’re very much attached to this myth of benevolence, which is spread by pop culture and media. If you live in a part of American society that is not touched by Child Protective Services or foster care—and many people are not touched by these things—then you have no reason to question what might be true based on what you’re seeing in pop culture.

HR: Are there any stories or encounters with people in foster care, or stories about foster care that you encountered in your research, that do feel more representative?

KM: The thing is that foster care is bad. Just the fact of being removed from your parents or primary caregiver by Child Protective Services in itself is traumatic. It is true that people who spend time in foster care have a harder time in life afterward, by basically every measure. There are higher levels of homelessness, lower levels of educational attainment, finances are harder, physical health problems are worse, mental health problems are worse. These are documented facts. The people I spoke to who had spent time in foster care did not have good experiences there, but none except for one had a “terrible” experience.

I spoke to this woman, Emi Nietfeld, who’s written a memoir about why she ended up in foster care and her experiences there. Her situation is less common, she entered foster care by voluntary placement by her mother, who was a hoarder and who had mental health issues. Emi is white, she’s from Minnesota. I think that she wasn’t treated in the way that she ideally should have been by the system, but she did end up in a foster care placement at one point when she was a teenager, and she was not abused by those foster parents. By all accounts, they sound like they were nice people, but it was still not a good experience for her. It was uncomfortable. Her foster parents were homophobic, and Emi is bisexual. She had to leave the house when she disclosed this, as she was essentially kicked out of the placement.

But there’s even this base level of discomfort where you’re being placed with strangers and your life has completely changed. Even if they’re showering you with gifts, it’s not your family, and it’s never going to be your family. So I don’t think foster care is very happy. I think the happiest would be if you’re placed with kin, with family members, which does happen, and those family members are given the support to take care of you and have it not be a hugely stressful situation.

HR: In the book, you articulate the many problems with foster care, and the negative outcomes that are the result of young people being taken out of their homes. I think somebody might say, “Well yeah, the state gets involved, and they have to go to this other family, and it’s very traumatic, but surely they’re coming out of a situation that was also really traumatic to begin with. It’s too bad that there’s not a better solution, but surely it’s good to get them out of this house where something isn’t going right.” You question that mode of thinking in your book.

KM: In the early 1960s, there was a moral panic that spread where people started to believe that parents were beating their children, physically abusing their children, horrifically and in large numbers, and that it was this invisible epidemic that was happening. This began because a pediatrician out of the University of Colorado wrote an academic paper in the academic journal of the American Medical Association called “The Battered Child Syndrome.” He posited that, based on surveys he conducted with responses from around seventy hospitals, emergency room doctors, lawyers, and on X-ray evidence, that children were being presented to hospitals with injuries that could not be explained by the causes their parents were saying. This blew up. It was all over mainstream media; Newsweek and the Times did articles on it, and it eventually led to congressional hearings.

Before that, it led to some recommendations by the Children’s Bureau, which is a part of the Department of Health and Human Services that makes references for the safety of children. They put forward their ideas to identify how children were being abused, where doctors should be responsible for reporting suspected physical abuse of children, and that those children could end up in foster care.

Eventually, in the early 1970s came the passage of a bill called CAPTA, or the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Services Act. It created requirements for states to follow if they wanted to get funding and set up an apparatus to identify children who were being abused and essentially punish their parents. At hearings, there was this idea that as many as four million children were being abused by their parents every year, and that this was a problem that was widespread in American society. It came with the concept that there was some pathology or mental illness in parents that was causing them to hurt their kids.

Even then, people testified saying this was not accurate. Child abuse and physical abuse is associated with poverty, not because poor parents are evil but because poor parents are more stressed and more likely to lash out because of that stress in meeting the basic needs of their family. There was also evidence that presented that this figure of four million children being abused yearly was complete nonsense. Despite this, the law got passed and created federal funding for states who adopted certain definitions of abuse and neglect, wrapping neglect up and putting it on equal footing with abuse. States adopted those definitions and set up hotlines where people could report suspected abuse and neglect in exchange for federal funding.

Now if you live in certain states, every adult is a mandatory reporter. In other places, it’s teachers, doctors, and other professionals who come in contact with children. If they suspect a child is being abused or neglected, they are required by law to report it. Otherwise, there can be consequences for them. In some places it’s a misdemeanor not to report. In other places, it’s a felony. There are millions of calls to state hotlines every year, but only a really, really small proportion of those calls lead to indictments upon investigation. We have this huge investigatory apparatus of Child Protective Services workers who are knocking on the doors of people’s homes and demanding to investigate, but the data shows that most are completely unfounded. Of the ones that are founded, there’s only a percentage of those where the kids end up in foster care because there has been enough evidence to remove children by court order. Often the parents go to family court, and they have to work plans in order to get the kids back, usually things like parenting classes, anger management, substance-abuse therapies, things like that. They don’t receive material assistance to fix unsafe housing situations.

So that’s how the system continues to work now. Our laws assume that the best thing to do is to punish a parent and remove the child from their care. Now, if you have a case of neglect, and it is a poverty-related neglect where, for instance, there’s unsafe or insufficient housing, maybe the family is living in public housing with too many people in the apartment, or it’s poorly heated, or there’s roaches, maybe the mom can’t afford to go to the laundromat so the kids are going to school in dirty clothes, maybe they don’t have new coats for the winter. According to our laws’ assumptions, the best situation for that parent and those kids is to separate them and send the mom to anger management or parenting classes. Does that solve the problem? No. And there are kids who end up in foster care for situations like that, is it materially better for them? They’re probably being placed in a house where they have their own room or share a room with another child. There are regulations in each state or county about how these things work, but they’re probably warmer, getting more food—the foster care won’t always be neglectful or abusive. But is it better for the child emotionally? Are they being assigned to a different school? Are they keeping cultural contact with their community? It comes down to punishing a parent for poverty in cases like that.

HR: And what about in cases of physical abuse?

KM: Those cases are only about 12 percent of kids who end up in foster care right now. There are people who have studied all of this and are social work experts or foster care abolitionists, and they believe that even in cases of abuse, maybe the parent and child should be separated for a period of time, but the child should remain in the community with their parent, and there should be more of an examination of what is causing the physical abuse. Is it related to stressful situations responding to material needs? Is it cultural, where it’s not cut and dried?

The other thing that comes up is substance abuse. Part of the problem with the way that foster care works for parents with substance-abuse disorders is that they have a really short period of time in which to get clean or get their kid back. There’s a law called ASFA—the Adoption and Safe Families Act—that was passed in the 1990s under Bill Clinton that sets this time crunch for how fast parents have to work their case before their parental rights are legally terminated, and they no longer have custody over their children in any way, so there’s no way for them to get custody back ever. They have no more legal relationship with their child, and the child is made available for adoption. It’s about fifteen months to work this plan, and addiction doesn’t work this way.

Moreover, the substance-abuse counseling that is available through the system is really poor quality, all abstinence-based as far as I’m aware. So is the best solution really to take the kid away from the parent and do that? Or maybe the parents and the child go together to a rehab—those places exist, especially for babies and younger children. The parent [could have] access to things like methadone. It is true that kids can be in really unsafe situations at home with their parents, but the current solution is not the solution that seems to prioritize solving the problem and instead punishes the parent and removes the child, which often also punishes the child.

HR: I wonder if you can help us understand how we got here. For the entire history of the United States, it seems that there has been no adequate answer to the question of what to do with children who don’t have parents or face neglect and abuse. Why is it such a hard problem to solve?

KM: Part of it is that the federal government has only been trying to even touch on this problem for the past one hundred years. So going back to the time period of orphanages in the 1800s or late 1700s, they were entirely the purview of charitable institutions. By that, I really mean religious institutions. The federal government was not working to take care of vulnerable children at all. Instead, each religion had their own orphanages. Public orphanages didn’t come into play until the 1800s, when children started ending up in poor houses, which were the local governmental solutions—cities and counties had poorhouses because the federal government wasn’t doing anything.

At that same time, adults considered too poor or “undeserving” had to work in poorhouses. People who were mentally ill or criminals ended up there too. There was this moral panic in the late 1800s that kids shouldn’t be mixed in with all those “undeserving” adults. But this idea of who is deserving and undeserving of poverty aid is something that we still see. Republicans want to create work requirements to access Medicaid now because there’s still this idea that if you’re not working, you’re completely undeserving of aid. Children were largely considered deserving of aid, especially as the middle classes began to value childhood more.

Essentially, the two reasons it’s been fucked up from the beginning are that the government did nothing in response until the 1900s and because we have this deserving/undeserving poor breakdown. Adults who are poor are undeserving and children who are poor are deserving, and if they live in the same household you break them up.

HR: One of the things you’re arguing through the whole book is that the deep pathologies of America are replicated and amplified in the ways we deal with orphans and children in crisis. Over and over again, you show us how eugenics, racism, and biases against poor people, Catholics, Native Americans, and many others are threaded into the systems set up to deal with children in need.

KM: Yes. We act out our fears about poverty and race on vulnerable children. They’re pawns in these larger moral panics. It’s ultimately rarely about what’s best for the children. Orphanages were never good for children. The orphan train movement was not good for children, putting Native American children in federal Indian boarding schools and performing cultural genocide against them was not good for them. Completely excluding black children from social welfare during slavery and then re-enslaving those children under indentureship, that wasn’t good for them. It’s never been about what’s best for children, it’s always about these bigger ideological battles.

HR: One thing I kept feeling as I was reading—I’m wondering if this is something came up for you as you were writing—is that I kept finding myself wrestling with the idea that on one hand the government “should” take control over some things, health care for example, but on the other, they can be quite bad at taking care of societal problems. I’m curious if you could say more about your reporting and if you ran into similar contradictions or complications.

KM: The government has done a really bad job here. When I first started doing research and reporting, I didn’t know that much about foster care. One thing that I came to feel strongly is that the system as it currently works is dysfunctional. Part of why I believe it is bad is that the federal government got involved so late. The early orphanages founded on religious charity were using this position of taking care of vulnerable children in order to inculcate them and to exert control over the families, keeping Catholics Catholic, Protestants Protestant, make some Catholic kids Protestant, that sort of thing. This probably still happens with regard to foster care on an individual level, where so many evangelical people get into fostering as a part of larger religious missions. There’s also often a desire of people who become foster parents because they want to adopt children, but fostering is less expensive and easier than private adoption. These intentions really poorly serve the families and children who are subjected to foster care or have their kids taken away.

The current system does not meaningfully, carefully, or efficiently address the root causes of why children end up in foster care.

When I went into the book, I thought that the solution would be for the federal government to have more oversight over this, to professionalize the role of foster parents. The more I did the research, the more I was like, no, they fucked this up on nearly every level, and we actually need to dramatically narrow the door into foster care. Politicians are really susceptible to the moral panics, susceptible to these portrayals of horrific child abuse in the news. There is this cycle, where a family known to CPS authorities doesn’t have their children removed, and then a child dies at home, or is beaten or neglected or starved, and then after that there’s a bigger panic and then a larger legal response. They create stricter laws where more kids end up in foster care, which never solves problems.

If there were more people in Congress who were really engaging with the system on the ground, that would be a better place to start. There is bipartisan legislation that literally just got passed that I think will maybe improve things in the system. Since 2018 there has been more emphasis on preventing kids from ending up in foster care, preventing family separation. Now federal dollars will be eligible to be spent on housing, nutrition, transportation, and other material needs that could keep families from that “vulnerable” state where CPS gets involved. Much more money needs to be spent on things like that.

The fact that a couple of people were willing to take this on is huge. So I do think that the federal government can fix things and get more involved by giving people money. I really believe this will reduce the foster care population and reduce the number of CPS calls. We saw it work during the pandemic, when the child tax credit was expanded. There were studies that have found that there was less child maltreatment, not just less calls during that time. I still can’t believe they didn’t pass that thing in the long term.

HR: So that brings me to the question of the abolitionist vision. By the end of the book, you end up in a place where you advocate for the abolition of the child welfare system as we know it and point to activists like Dorothy Roberts, who has been advocating for a radical rethinking of what these systems are for and what else they might be. I wonder if you can expand on this more abolitionist vision of foster care or child welfare?

KM: Activists call it “family policing” instead of “child welfare.” By the end of the book, I’m calling it family policing as well. I think it can be hard for people to get on board with that term. There’s a movement called the UpEND movement that I write about toward the end of the book in which a group of social workers and other activists propose the abolition of the existing system. What that means is not completely getting rid of what we have now and calling it a day. It’s more about building up lots of other ways of supporting families and children and communities, which would make what we currently have unnecessary. That’s a big part of any abolitionist vision. It’s the same thing that we think about with prison abolition. It’s not about suddenly letting everyone out, opening the doors. It’s about building up all of these other supports first.

So the current system does not meaningfully, carefully, or efficiently address the root causes of why children end up in foster care. The abolitionist idea is to address those causes. What are the societal failures that make this system what it is? Universal childcare would be one thing that a lot of abolitionists promote. Making daycare centers not be mandatory reporters, dismantling this huge surveillance apparatus that doesn’t even keep kids safer. The current system is so overtaxed by investigating all of these unfounded home calls, and we’re still missing cases of children who are harmed in the home. As an alternative to mandatory reporting, mandatory supporting is one thing a lot of abolitionists talk about. Instead of a doctor having to call a hotline and say, “This kid is experiencing xyz at home,” to then have them call support systems that can actually make a difference in what’s happening to that kid at home, more holistically. Creating more community support so that when things go wrong, the community can step in and help the family too. CPS investigations are out of control in many communities, black and brown communities specifically, so ending and sort of changing the roles there.

HR: I want to finish by talking about the personal part of this book. You are an orphan—both your parents died when you were a child—but you’re not in the book very much. I’m wondering why you made that choice and how writing this has changed your identity as an orphan.

KM: I think that when I first started the research, one of the things that I was trying to figure out was how many orphans there are in the United States. How many full orphans like my brother and myself—people who lost their parents as minors. That answer was basically impossible to answer because the federal government does not count such things. The closest answer I found was an estimate from this one survey that the Census Bureau does about income and work, held a couple of years ago. They asked people if they lost their parents and when. What that survey reveals is that it’s a really, really, really small percentage of people who are estimated to have lost both their parents by eighteen. I think it’s like 0.3 percent of the population, really small. So if you apply that to the current population of children, it’s like only two hundred thousand children. Realizing how rare my personal experiences are from a statistical standpoint and then comparing that to how widespread stories we have in our culture about orphans was like, “What?”

What instigated the book for me was the question, “Why are there so many stories about orphans?” And then what is the actual history because I knew so little about it growing up, even into adulthood. I wanted to learn about how orphanages worked and how foster care works. Growing up as a middle-class white kid on Long Island, nobody was in foster care. I would have never ended up in foster care, it was never discussed. I don’t think I even knew what it was when I was fourteen after I lost my dad and my mom had already passed away two years earlier. Realizing that I had completely sidestepped any of that system, and how lucky I was to have not had any contact with Child Protective Services or foster care as a teen drove me forward. That’s why my story is less a part of the book than I think I originally felt it was going to be. My personal history intersects very little with a lot of what happens in the book.

As I reported on the history, my mind was just so blown by how dark the history is, and how much we just don’t know. I am an orphan, and I didn’t know this stuff until I started writing the book. It’s just not in the public consciousness. The history of orphans in America intersects with so many other things; it’s a way of understanding American families, poverty, classism, racism, womanhood, motherhood, childhood, all of these things. It was more fascinating to open things up than to look at myself.