28/04/2026
Reading Disability, Writing Childhood: The Children at Rinnekoti
How were institutionalized children seen, described, and understood?
A short reflection on classification, care, and the making of disability.
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What happens when children are placed in institutions – and described through labels they cannot contest?
In this short text, I explore how disability was not simply observed but produced through interpretation, care, and classification. This took place at a time when childhood was increasingly becoming an object of scientific, social, and institutional concern.
Rinnekoti, founded in the 1920s within the Helsinki Deaconess Institute, was a residential community for “feeble-minded” children, shaped by a diaconal tradition that combined care, work, and moral guidance.
In 1933, the primary school teacher Risto Kuosmanen visited Rinnekoti, and later described his impressions in a series of articles in the journal "Lapsi ja yhteiskunta" [The Child and Society]. What Kuosmanen encountered was not a uniform group of children, but striking diversity.
Among the fifty-three children living there, he found it difficult to place even two individuals in the same category. And yet, they were all described, named, and classified as one – “still referred to as imbeciles, idiots, or something similar.”
This tension – between difference and categorization – points to something fundamental: disability here did not simply describe the child; it functioned as a label, a way of making the child intelligible, legible.
Kuosmanen’s account is revealing precisely because he was not a medical expert. It offers one way of approaching these questions. He wrote as a teacher, and his descriptions moved between empathy and classification.
The children appeared not only as individuals, but as objects of interpretation – read through their bodies, behaviors, and perceived potential – often shaped by broader assumptions about class, gender, and normality.
Consider the case of six-year-old Tor-Ove. When he was brought to Rinnekoti, Kuosmanen writes, he “barely met the minimum condition of life: he vegetated.” He is described as “living flesh” – a passive body, without a clear response to the surrounding world. Here, the child is reduced to bodily functions. The absence of reaction was read as an absence of inner life. His blindness is described as closing “the most important window from the external world to the soul.”
A very different child is eleven-year-old Paul. He remembers his home, and speaks “with shining eyes,” and works in the garden. He shows emotion, engagement, and development. And yet, he too remained within the same category. “Paul has the poor soul of an imbecile,” the headmistress reportedly remarked.
His activity did not undo the label.
What we see, then, is not simply different children, but different ways of making children visible. Some are described as bodies. Others as developing subjects. But both are read through the same classificatory framework.
From a theoretical perspective, this invites us to think of disability not as a fixed condition, but as something produced in practice. As scholars of the history of childhood, medicine, and disability have shown, categories such as “feeble-mindedness” or “psychopathy” did not merely reflect reality – they helped construct, organize, and stabilize it.
Through observation, description, and comparison, children were placed within systems of knowledge that shaped how they could be understood.
This process was not neutral. Kuosmanen’s text is saturated with emotion, pity, concern, and even discomfort. These affective responses were not separate from classification; they were part of it. They helped determine what counted as development, what counted as deficiency, and what could be hoped for.
At Rinnekoti, care was shaped by a diaconal tradition grounded in Christian ideals of compassion. The aim was not only to observe, but to nurture, guide, and develop. Yet even within this framework of care, the label remained powerful. It followed the child, structuring expectations and possibilities.
And still, the children were not entirely silent.
They appear in fragments: in gestures, in fleeting reactions, in
moments that resist easy interpretation. A smile, a look of fear, a memory of home. These traces do not overturn the categories, but they complicate them.
Perhaps this is where we need to listen more carefully. Not by trying to recover a pure “voice” of the child – something the sources rarely allow – but by paying attention to how these children were seen, described, and made meaningful.
Not by speaking for them,
but by asking different questions
of what remains.
How were these children written into being?
What kinds of childhoods were made possible,
and which were not?
How were ideas of normality, deviance,
class, and gender
woven into these understandings?
And what did the children themselves think?
That, we can only rarely glimpse.
Kuosmanen, Risto: Rinnekodissa käytyä I [A Visit to Rinnekoti]. Lapsi ja yhteiskunta, 01.03.1933, 3.
Kuosmanen, Risto; Rinnekodissa käytyä II. Lapsi ja yhteiskunta, 01.05.1933, 5.
Kuosmanen, Risto, Rinnekodissa käytyä III. Lapsi ja yhteiskunta, 01.06.1933, 6.
Photo: Headmistress Sister Aino Miettinen supervising children’s outdoor work at Rinnekoti.
The Deaconess Foundation.