Baby Farming

Baby farming was a form of informal foster care, common in Britain and other countries during the Victorian era and the Industrial Revolution, in which a person unrelated to a child took custody of an infant in exchange for payment from the mother or parents, often single mothers or working class families unable to care for the child themselves. Arrangements ranged from short-term wet nursing to effectively permanent placements, and because the practice was largely unregulated, baby farmers were financially incentivized to spend as little as possible on the children in their care, which contributed to widespread neglect and, in a number of notorious cases, infanticide and criminal prosecution. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/