In imperial and Weimar Germany, youth welfare was the most contentious field of preventive social welfare. Not only were its fortunes most closely identified with those of the larger welfare state idea. It was also in this domain that the socialization of liberal jurisprudence ultimately advanced the furthest, thus revealing most fully the contradictions and ambiguities of social citizenship and the preventive project.

The new youth welfare was based on the recognition that waywardness could be most effectively prevented, and punishment itself perhaps rendered unnecessary, by providing corrective education to children who were neglected and endangered, but who had not yet run afoul of the law. Since the forms of social intervention required to put this preventive project into practice conflicted with traditional liberal principles of family law and social assistance, Progressive reformers were, therefore, forced to rethink the liberal social contract, and in so doing they alternately challenged these liberal principles in the name of the welfare of the community, the family, and the child. The cornerstone of their approach to this problem was the idea of a child's “right to education,” that is, the right to an upbringing that would insure that children developed the physical, intellectual, and moral capacities that they would need in order to fulfill the diverse social obligations that would later be expected of them as adult members of the community.