UNITED STATES LEGISLATION
1938: Fair Labor Standards Act
Under the Fair Labor Standards act, children under eighteen cannot work certain dangerous jobs, and children under the age of sixteen cannot work during school hours. The Fair Labor Standards Act affected 700,000 workers, and President Franklin Roosevelt called it the most important piece of New Deal legislation since the Social Security Act of 1935. Read more about the act here.
1944: Prince v. Massachusetts
Sarah Prince, a Jehovah's Witness in Massachusetts was convicted for violating child labor laws when she brought a nine-year old into a downtown area to preach on the streets. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the government has broad authority to regulate the actions and treatment of children. Parental authority is not absolute and can be permissibly restricted if doing so is in the interests of a child's welfare. While children share many of the rights of adults, they face different potential harms from similar activities. Read more about the case here.
1974: Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act
In 1974 Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which created the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect and allocated federal funding to states in support of prevention, assessment, investigation, prosecution, and treatment of child abuse. It also provides grants to public agencies and nonprofit organizations for demonstration programs and projects. Read more about it here.
1978: Indian Child Welfare Act
The ICWA was enacted in 1978 because of the disproportionately high rate of removal of indigenous children from their homes. Before enactment, as many as 25 to 35 percent of all indiginous children in the United Staes were being removed from their homes and placed in indigenous homes. In some cases, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was found to be paying the states to remove indiginous children and to place them with non-indiginous families and religious groups. With hopes to remedy this, in 1978 Congress passed the ICWA, which allows tribes exclusive jurisdiction over child custody proceedings cases. Read more about the ICWA here.
1997: Adoption and Safe Families Act
The ASFA was enacted in an attempt to correct problems that were inherent in the foster care system that deterred the adoption of children with special needs. Many of these problems had stemmed from an earlier bill, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, although they had not been anticipated when that law was passed, as states decided to interpret that law as requiring biological families be kept together no matter what. The ASFA marked a fundamental change to child welfare thinking, shifting the emphasis towards children's health and safety concerns and away from a policy of reuniting children with their birth parents without regard to prior abusiveness. Read the New York Times report on the ASFA here.