Children in Homes is part of the critical debates on this socially important topic. How did the guiding ideas of home upbringing develop, how did change the principles and practices of socialisation in certain values and identities (gender-specific, social, religious, national); how did the concept of ‘neglect’/‘Verwahrlosung’ change and with which gender-specific connotations was it connected, who were the actors of social work; what possibilities of self-determination were available to the boarders/‘Zoeglinge’; when and by whom were critical discourses developed, how was the sensitisation for the field of tension between institutional childcare/education and the subjectivity of the children/adolescents. The multifaceted questions are analysed from different perspectives using multi-layered sources from the 19th and 20th centuries in a broad geography.