ABSTRACT
There have been four main developments in post-war social policy, only one of which was clearly concerned with children as investments, though all used notions of victims and threats, albeit in different combinations, to fashion policies convenient for dominant economic and political interests. The period began on a wave of optimism which was largely the product of war-time reconstructionist thinking along the lines of planning for democratic families, ‘problem’ families, and the creation of universal welfare schemes. Despite all the revisionist historical writing which has correctly called into question the extent of the post-war consensus and the reality of so-called social solidarity, it remains true that for thousands, if not millions, of Liberal and Labour voters in their working lives the new social services and the desire to build a more egalitarian democracy than had existed in the inter-war period represented years of hope, of a belief in the possibility of change. Children were given roles in this scenarionot large or significant roles in and for themselves, but none the less positive roles. The other influence on the new perception of child care emerged from the evacuation experience, especially as it affected middle-class social attitudes in alerting the philanthropic and professional caring sections of the class to the extent and nature of life in the slums. However, it was not simply the trauma of evacuation that attached a new importance to childcare. Professional (and perhaps even governmental) attitudes were influenced by the knowledge gathered from the 1920s through the child guidance movement, and from the war-time psychological studies of Susan Isaacs, John Bowlby and Anna Freud.
