SOLOMON'S SWORD: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away.

• Author: Russakoff, Dale
• Position: Review

SOLOMON'S SWORD: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away By Michael Shapiro Times Books, $25

When shoyuld the state take children away from their parents?

YOU MIGHT REMEMBER THE 19 MELTON children of Chicago, who were found living in disgusting squalor in a two-bedroom apartment in 1994.

You may also recall the brutal custody battle between Megan Marie LaFlamme's birth mother and her adoptive parents in 1992. Most of us were outraged by what we took to be the brainlessness of the judge or case-worker or lawyer--not to mention the birth parents--who made misery of these children's lives. But by now, the stories have generally faded from the public consciousness except for the bare outlines, in part because they sound so much like so many child welfare horrors in other cities and towns.

In Solomon's Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away, Michael Shapiro has brought these cases back to us, in a way we never saw them the first time around. Widening his lens far beyond the events and players that seemed at the time to tell the full stories, Shapiro turns the cases into windows on the social and intellectual history of child protection in America. He reminds us that in historical terms, child welfare is a remarkably modern concept. Until the Industrial Revolution, children were workers, often indentured to strangers, far away from their families. Disease control was such that parents could not assume children would survive to adulthood. In the relatively brief time that our society has wrestled with the question of what constitutes "the best interests of the child," Shapiro shows we have had little patience for the complexities of poverty, dependency, and family dysfunction that define this dilemma and a voracious appetite for quick fixes that in the end only have made things worse. Thus we turned our backs on Jane Addams' settlement house movement well before she won the Nobel Prize in 1931 for her work. Instead, we repeatedly have embraced what Shapiro and others call the "rescue fantasy," "saving" children from presumably bad parents simply by removing them--at times, en masse.

As Shapiro re-introduces us to these two cases, in all their depth and complexity, it is hard not to be ashamed of having thought on first inspection that we understood what was right for these children. It is equally hard not to see our simplistic presumptions as part of the larger problem. "It is not ignorance as such which is harmful, but...