From Boys Town to Oliver Twist: Separating fact from fiction in welfare reform and out-of-home placement of children and youth.

Recent debate following the suggestion to place children of "welfare mothers" in "orphanages" illustrates the need to evaluate the relative goodness of residential care and to examine many of the basic assumptions underlying current welfare reform proposals. Nearly half a million children and youth are currently in government-funded out-of-home care in the United States. As custodians of this challenging population, child and youth care workers are neither parents nor therapists, but appear to perform both of these roles as "therapeutic parents." Two comprehensive and mature literatures--common factors of therapist efficacy and parental correlates of offspring psychopathology--provide theoretical and empirical support for this model of child and youth care. Current welfare reform proposals are evaluated in the context of the therapeutic parent model; assumptions about welfare mothers are also examined.