ABSTRACT
When one looks at current U.S. policy and academic discourses about social change and a responsive welfare system, a certain presentism appears. It heralds the bringing of the parent and community into contact with welfare agencies of the child as a new, progressive reform that will bring about a prosperous country and a realization of its commitments to equity and justice. But such rhetorical claims of a progressive evolution toward a utopian vision ignore the historically bounded reason through which action and participation are constructed. Such reveling of the present ignores the ways in which the family, the child, and the community have been objects of concern that circulated in state, public health, moralists’, and educators’ discourses since at least the nineteenth century. 1
