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Children at the White House
In roughly 10-year intervals throughout the 20th
century, the White House has brought together prominent academics, physicians, social
workers, community leaders, and others to address issues involving America's children.
Whether the country was at war or at peace, prosperous or in an economic slump, each White
House conference reflected the challenges facing children at the time. Some of the
presidential gatherings were catalysts for significant and enduring reforms in child
welfare, while others produced few lasting results.
| 1909: White House Conference on Dependent Children
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This first conference, chaired by President Theodore Roosevelt, was the
brainchild of James West, a young lawyer and presidential appointee who had been raised in
an orphanage in Washington. Roosevelt intended the two-day conference to examine the needs
of destitute and neglected children, and it helped pave the way for a federal agency
devoted to promoting child welfare. The Children's Bureau was started in 1912 and remains
today as part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It primarily focuses on
foster care, adoption, and child-care standards.
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| 1919: White House Conference on Child-Welfare
Standards |
| President Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed 1918, while the United States was
at war in Europe, the "Children's Year" to try to inspire support for
safeguarding American children during a time of national peril. The Children's Bureau
organized the conference to set minimum standards for children's health and welfare.
Guests from other countries joined more than 200 American participants, including social
workers, pediatricians, public-health nurses, economists, judges, and parents. The
panelists' recommendations helped steer legislation setting standards for child labor and
employment, child protection, and medical care for infants and mothers. Recommendations
from the gathering laid the groundwork for maternal- and child-health programs under the
Social Security Act passed by Congress in 1935.
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| 1930: White House Conference on Child Health and
Protection |
| In the midst of the Great Depression, as child advocates were working
overtime to care for increasing numbers of impoverished children, President Herbert Hoover
saw a national conference as a way to build public support for children's services and
laws designed to protect young people. The president tapped the secretary of the interior
to be chairman and the secretary of labor to act as vice chairman. The event was financed
with $500,000 in leftover funds from the First World War. More than 1,200 participants
divided into 138 committees to review subjects such as pediatric-health services and
education and training. The committees' reports combined to form the first national
"Children's Charter," which laid out the rights of children to attend schools
that were "safe from hazards, sanitary, [and] properly equipped," to be raised
in safe environments, and to be provided with proper medical care. The conference has been
credited as being a catalyst for advances in pediatric medicine. The charter--endorsed by
Hoover--set in motion employment protections that eventually would shield underage workers
from exploitation on the job.
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| 1940: White House Conference on Children in a
Democracy |
| The fourth White House conference focused on all children, not just those
who were poor. With World War II already under way in Europe, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt charged the 700 or so conferees with considering "how a democracy can best
serve its children and how children can be helped to grow into the kind of citizens who
will preserve democracy." Though the 1940 recommendations were modest compared with
those of previous conferences and called for no new programs, the gathering itself may
have helped provide momentum for subsequent federal action. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1941
declared the Fair Labor Standards Act constitutional, making its child-labor provisions
the permanent standard of protection for children.
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| 1950: Midcentury White House Conference on Children
and Youth |
| The theme of the midcentury conference--understanding child
development--reflected the significant gains in research on human development and child
psychology during that period. President Harry S. Truman's White House gathering brought
together more than 4,800 participants, 500 of them younger than 21. The diverse group of
professionals, students, pediatricians, labor leaders, and others examined ways of
fostering children's mental and emotional health. The conference endorsed the need for
research in developmental psychology, the importance of early intervention to promote
healthful lifelong habits, and the virtues of leisure time for building children's social
skills. After this conference, several governors convened similar state-level meetings.
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1960: Golden Anniversary White House Conference
On Children and Youth |
| In a time of material abundance, scientific discoveries, and
breakthroughs in technology, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used this conference to
address people's growing interest in children's values. The conference, attended by 11,000
people, examined the role of family, religion, community, and government in children's
lives. The conferees focused on the emerging problems of juvenile delinquency, school
failure, and illicit drug use by youths that many said symbolized a moral decline. Though
670 recommendations emerged from the conference, none formed the basis for enduring
nationwide action.
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| 1970: White House Conference on Children and Youth
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| The 1970 conference on children, chaired by President Richard M. Nixon,
focused on such topics as the effect of racism on young people, family neglect and abuse,
juvenile justice, and child care. The well-attended gathering, which included state
leaders, was a springboard for several national social and educational initiatives. The
meeting helped build public support for the idea of a U.S. Department of Education and
helped promote initiatives to prevent child abuse. After the conference, Nixon proposed an
expansion of child-care services. But just a year later, in 1971, he vetoed the
Comprehensive Child-Development Act, which would have laid the foundation for a national
network of child-care centers.
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| 1980: White House Conference on Families |
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Changing trends in the family was the theme of the conference called by
President Jimmy Carter. Conferees considered how cultural and social changes, such as an
escalating divorce rate and the growth of single-parent households, affected children. The
participants also looked at how economic circumstances had fostered certain migration
patterns--from rural to urban, and urban to suburban communities--during the 1970s and how
the increased mobility had affected young people. The leading areas of concern included
the availability of child care, the quality of education, the availability and quality of
health care, and work discrimination. At the conclusion of the conference, Carter called
on each state governor to designate a coordinator to address children's issues.
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| 1997: White House Conference on Child Care |
| Citing the importance of the first three years of a child's life,
President Bill Clinton focused on the importance of child care in the latest White House
conference on children. Child-development experts, medical professionals, and directors of
local programs met to share scientific findings on how children learn and how best to
provide enriching care for them. Of the five initiatives Clinton proposed at the meeting,
an effort to reduce the number of uninsured poor children was perhaps the most
significant. In 1998, Congress approved a children's health-insurance bill that extended
coverage to 3 million previously uninsured children through an expansion of Medicaid.
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| SOURCES: The Story of the White
House Conferences on Children and Youth, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare, 1967; Highlights from Past National Conferences on Children and Youth,
White House, 1981. |
--Jessica Portner
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