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In the past, many European countries were faced with the problem of providing care for boarded-out children. And very often the policies implemented up to the middle of the twentieth century were essentially similar and thus similarly inadequate. The problem with boarding out is that it was a measure in response to widely varying situations, not only in respect of the illegitimate as well as the legitimate children concerned, but also with regard to the reasons which led to boarding out. Orphans after the First World War with no relatives who could take them in formed a minority, and in several Swiss cantons the legitimate children outnumbered the illegitimate ones by far. Up to the First World War, the age group concerned was mostly that of children from birth to 14 years. There was considerable ambivalence in the motives leading to the boarding out of children, because they were the result of two conflicting concepts. On the one hand, the parents or the mother of an illegitimate child had to out-place her child/children because the mother had to go out to work, as was often the case with the spread of industrialisation and the frequently inadequate income of the working class. On the other hand, the local Assistance Board was often ready to split up poorer families and to take away their children with the argument that the family environment was considered morally harmful for their upbringing according to the contemporary view. Both parents and the local Assistance Board often chose the cheapest solution for different reasons. In numerous cases the children were placed with farming families quite unable to offer a proper upbringing and children were taken in only because they represented a supplementary source of income and an addition to the workforce. For the local authorities, be they rural or urban, in some cantons even during the interwar period, the auctioning of the children to families living in other parts of Switzerland was a frequent stratagem in order to pay the lowest possible boarding fees, and the level of these fees decreased enormously the older the child was since his/her work capacity increased over time. In most cantons, one of the main problems with boarding out was the totally inadequate supervision of the families to which the children were entrusted, either because of the geographical distance between the local authority and the children, or because of the inadequacy of the supervisory staff, often benevolent females with no clear rules existing for judging the adequacy of the entrusted families, or due to the general lack of interest for the destiny of the children.

This article has its roots in the basic contradictions, which go back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, between the self-interest and the care of others, exemplified by the delegation of responsibility for the care of children and other vulnerable persons. This splitting of human life-supporting activities has sealed women's dependence on men by setting off the lucrative area from the private, non-lucrative sphere of activities. These contradictions become paradoxical as soon as we consider the delegation of responsibility for the care of a child to someone not related to the child. This article addresses the question of how the child's developmental needs can be met without damage to his/her sensitivity, and his/her perception of others or of the cooperation involved. As soon as it is born, the child, a thoroughly interactive being, discerns the relationships it entertains with those who are in charge of him/her. The persons - mostly women - who take care of the child are not interchangeable, since they bring their own subjectivity into their dealings with the child and this is reciprocal. The women's skills, frequently thought to be “undefinable”, but which many women, whether related or not to the child, have developed or should develop, are brought into play and are either transmitted or acquired in the course of their care of the child; these skills are not by nature “feminine skills”, but they require a great deal of reactivity and sensitivity and therefore, many child professionals, mothers' aids and children's care-takers in the home are hurt and insulted by the low esteem in which they are held. These skills and human qualities, which are the result of feelings more than of formalised knowledge, techniques or theories - albeit these are also necessary - make child care and child rearing an art. These skills seem to be in total contradiction with those that are current in the world of labour, where the tempo of work, flexibility of working hours, the evaluation criteria and anxiety are conditioned by economic considerations and rest on purely monetary factors. Finally, a recognition of these sensitive qualities - when it is given - must of necessity be inter-subjective but also be societal. The latter requires a new, different organisation of the labour world, one which recognises the diversity of human activities, where each can find a sense of social usefulness by contributing to the satisfaction of others' social needs and having one's own needs satisfied by others - by many others. This would presuppose reversing the meaning of the division of labour and of life-maintaining activities by placing greater emphasis on “interest in others”.