The Pinballs

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1976

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-14

Chapters 15-21

Chapters 22-26

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Historical Context: The US Foster System in the 1970s

Though various forms of foster systems had existed in the US since the mid-19th century, widespread aid to children in need was not organized until the early 20th century. Before then, the emphasis was on placing children in new homes, not on the safety or quality of those homes. In the early 20th century, however, new legislation ensured that the homes the children were placed in were suitable and were monitored to ensure the wellbeing of the child. In 1912 the Department of Labor established a Children’s Bureau, and in 1919, the Children’s Bureau published Minimum Standards for Child Welfare. These standards emphasized the importance of placing children who needed foster care into a stable home environment. With these changes, the emphasis shifted from organizations such as orphanages toward individual foster homes. In the 1950s, the number of children in foster care was equal to the amount in institutions. By the 1960s, the number of children in foster care was double the number of children in institutions. Federal funding to support foster care began in 1963.

Large social changes to the adoption system didn’t come until the 1970s and 1980s. In 1974, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was passed in the US. This legislation provided funds toward the support of children who were abused and required professionals who interacted with children (medical professionals, social workers, and teachers) to become “mandatory reporters” of suspected abuse. A year after The Pinballs was published, David Soukup, a judge in Seattle, developed the first Court Appointed Special Advocate, a volunteer who would stay with a child through various placements and advocate for them. This was a necessary move toward creating stability in a foster environment; one previous model of foster care was moving children around as much as possible to prevent them from getting emotionally attached to their foster parents. This type of approach led to children feeling like “pinballs,” as Carlie calls herself and the boys.

The foster system in America historically has not treated children of all races and economic backgrounds equally. Throughout the Civil Rights Movement and into the 1970s, most children in foster care were children of color, while white children were more likely to be adopted. Adoptive parents were more likely to be affluent since they paid for the legal services required for adoption as well as anything else their adopted children needed, as opposed to foster parents, who received a meager payment for the children in their care. Due to the historical inequalities in generational wealth and income that result from the legacies of American chattel slavery and systemic racism, white families were more likely to have the money necessary for adoption; they often adopted children of their own race, leaving children of color in foster care. For instance, in the late 1970s, while there were equal numbers of Black and white children available for adoption, 54% of white children were adopted while only 37% of Black children were adopted, and these children waited two and one half times as long as white children to be placed. This disparity resulted in more white children exiting foster care, leaving children of other races overrepresented in the foster care system.

Ideological Context: The History of Childhood

The complex history of childhood has animated many scholarly studies. In 1960, Philippe Ariès published the popular but debunked book Centuries of Childhood, which argued that the concept of childhood is a modern invention and that in the medieval and early modern periods in Europe, people thought of children as “mini adults.” In fact, all eras have deeply reckoned with what childhood means and how children should be treated.

It is true that childhood education in these early periods focused on preparing children for their eventual work or trade. This was especially true for working-class families. During the Enlightenment, philosophers became increasingly interested in childhood, symbolically associating children with innocence. This idea that children were a “tabula rasa,” or blank slate, influenced philosophers such as John Locke. He argued that this “tabula rasa” was evidence that humans had the freedom to define their own soul and character while preserving a certain measure of “natural rights” inherent to all humans. Victorian society also emphasized the innocence of children and the important role of family in protecting children.

Movements such as these initially seem to consider the social role of children. However, they involve people in places of power using the idea of children to craft ideological visions of what the “right” type of family or person looked like. For instance, the Victorian emphasis on the sanctity of children and the necessity of the family unit emphasized heterosexual, white, Christian marriage as the standard of an acceptable family. This sort of ideology led to decades of discrimination against parents who did not fit this demographic mold. These ideologies persevered as people in positions of power justified their prejudices by arguing that restrictions of certain types of childcare must be implemented for the sake of children. These ideologies also resulted in families that fit the Victorian ideal of the “right” family seeing childcare as Christian charity, and taking children away from more diverse caregivers was seen as a moral imperative necessary for the betterment of that child. For instance, the investigative podcast This Land by Rebecca Nagle of the Cherokee Nation documents how white Christian families in 20th-century America saw it as their religious duty to “civilize” Indigenous American children by adopting them and assimilating them into white society, thereby estranging them from their cultures.

These examples show how cultural conceptions of “childhood” say more about the ideologies of the adults who craft these concepts than about the children themselves. For instance, Harvey feels like his father’s tears over his broken legs and hospitalization are more a performance for the police and nurses than a concern for his son’s wellness. Betsy Byars’s novel shows how using children as ideological objects in this way affects the children themselves. This treatment elides the material conditions children must face, making them feel like “pinballs” to be acted on, rather than whole, autonomous people.