Alternative group foster homes; a new place for young people to live

After a brief historical survey of child placement practices in the United States, this paper will address itself to an innovative form of placement for adolescents, "alternative group foster homes." The origins of two of these homes in "runaway houses" and their ideological underpinnings in the social and political critique of the counterculture will be discussed. The two homes will then be described and their functioning contrasted. One of them, Frye House, has managed to remain faithful to the radically democratic principles which animated its founding, and the other, Markham House, has not; the emphasis here will be on this difference and on its consequences for the homes as a whole and for the young people who have lived in them.