| Summary: | This study deals with the qualities of professionalization of public child welfare. Its relationto general social policy is emphasized. The potentials of welfarism are explored as a part ofthe study of crisis of legitimacy and rationality prevalent in welfare systems.The special situation of child welfare in Iceland with a large variation in local socialservices forms an important background of the work. This is related to sociologicaltheorizing and a position taken turns against viewing professionalization as an accumulatingprocess of power as well as the opposite, the blindness of belief in extensive professionalismas a means for creation of "the good life". The line of "family-state-individual" is traced inrelation to the emergence of social work. Child welfare is found to be imprisoned bytradition, since the idea behind children's placement is not thoroughly explored. The issueof a noted technifying and expansive tendency of professional action in cases of child abuseand custodial disputes is treated. A biased treatment of the family is here called "the childwelfare trap". The search for qualities in what traditionally is identified as "bad parenting" infoster care is suggested to be a potential to transcend central dilemmas of the field.A documentation study of poor relief and the support of mothers in the capital of Iceland,Reykjavik of th e 1930's showed an early coexistence of administrative and client-centeredapproaches. In a survey of records on children's placements in the capital of Icela nd,Reykjavik, it was confirmed that this work in an organization with professional employeeswas predominantly bureaucratic and not child-centered, also other results were similar asfound in Nordic studies. In an interview study of two small towns a passivity was shown toprevail in a laymen dominated child welfare practice at the cost of c hildren's needs, whileschool and day care provided support for families. Three significant achievements emergingin interplay with professionalization of social child care, found ...
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