Who watches the watchdog? (In Massachusetts and every other "child advocate" / "child welfare ombudsman" office.)

 The Massachusetts Legislature has named a nominating committee to recommend candidates to become the next leader of the state’s Office of Child Advocate.  I have written often about the failings of the current Child Advocate. Given who is on the committee, and how badly they organized a recent "listening session” I’m not optimistic that they will make a wise choice. 

Nevertheless, I sent them the written statement below. The recommendations concerning how the office should operate and how to restructure its governance apply not only in Massachusetts but also to most if not all similar offices.

_________

Thank you for the opportunity to submit this written statement.  I will conclude it with an introduction to my organization and our long history following child welfare in Massachusetts. 

But I want to start with the heart of the matter: what I hope you will look for in the next Child Advocate.  To do that, I want to start more than 3,700 miles from Massachusetts – in Sweden. 

That was the scene of the latest, and perhaps most horrifying, in a long line of studies documenting the enormous inherent harm of tearing children from their families, and the need to take this action far less often than Massachusetts does it today. 

The Swedish study looked at more than 20,000 cases. Conducted by a scholar based both in Sweden and at MIT, and using a methodology pioneered by another MIT scholar, the study compared the fate of children placed in foster care to that of children alleged to be comparably maltreated, but left in their own homes. Please note the part about comparably-maltreated. The foster youth did not have worse problems; they did not suffer worse alleged maltreatment. 

And yet, by age 20, those placed in foster care were more than four times more likely to have died.  Let me repeat that: More than four times more likely to be dead. The most common cause: suicide. 

One might argue, I suppose, that somehow the Swedish foster care system is vastly worse than the one in Massachusetts. But it would be hard to make that argument with a straight face. 

The findings from the Swedish study come on top of all those other studies, one after another after another, documenting worse outcomes for foster youth than for allegedly comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. 

That’s not because foster parents are evil; most want to do the very best for the children in their care. Even group homes and institutions often are staffed by well-meaning people. Rather, it’s a testament to the inherent harm of family separation. Think back to the children torn from their parents at the Mexican border. Listen to their cries in this audio. Yes, there is a difference: caseworkers for the Department of Children and Families almost always mean well. But the children cry out the same way for the same reason.

 None of this means that no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. But it does mean that foster care needs to be used sparingly and in small doses.  But for decades, Massachusetts has prescribed mega-doses of foster care. As of 2024, Massachusetts was tearing apart families at a rate more than 40% above the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

All this means that Massachusetts needs a Child Advocate who understands this, a child advocate who understands that in child welfare, the errors, including the worst errors, go in all directions, a child advocate who understands the need to call out, and learn from, the errors in all directions. 

Perhaps the only thing about Massachusetts child welfare about which everyone agrees is that caseworkers are overwhelmed and underprepared, rushing from case to case.  Under those circumstances, it should be obvious that there will be terrible mistakes in all directions. An office that finds errors only one way, concluding that workers constantly leave children in dangerous homes and never take children needlessly – or vice versa – probably has a structural problem and definitely needs better leadership. 

Yet for the current Child Advocate, the errors go only one way. Her reports follow the same pattern: Find the worst horror story, draw sweeping conclusions from that single case, and press for measures bound to lead to taking away more children. That approach only further overloads the system, doing enormous harm to children needlessly taken, while leaving workers with less time to find the relatively few children in real danger - making the next horrible tragedy more likely.  An advocate who sees error in only one direction encourages a system that makes all children less safe. 

The one time the current advocate accidentally faced real accountability was revealing. She led a commission on mandatory child abuse reporting laws. For more than a year, that commission heard only what the child advocate wanted it to hear – so its initial draft called for further expanding mandatory reporting. 

But then, when OCA had to hold a public hearing, a bit like this one, the commission heard from all sides. They heard the evidence that mandatory reporting has backfired, increasing the danger to children. Commissioners were, in their own words, “shocked,” “surprised” and “taken aback.” 

The commission rebelled. It chose to make no recommendations at all. 

The other key reason to change OCA’s approach is the simple fact that the current advocate’s approach hasn’t improved anything.  The current Massachusetts Child Advocate has been in office for ten years. In that time, she’s produced a ton of sensational headlines. But there is no evidence that any of it actually has made Massachusetts children safer. 

            Massachusetts children need an advocate who will demand accountability, and demand that we learn the right lessons both when children are left in dangerous homes and when children are torn from everyone loving and familiar and consigned to the chaos of foster care. 

            A child advocate who understands that the errors go in all directions would commit to a key method for discovering errors in all directions: an annual audit of a random sample of cases to assess system performance and make recommendations. 

The audits should be conducted by a diverse team of stakeholders — former family defense attorneys and former child abuse prosecutors, for example. At my organization’s suggestion, New Jersey’s first child advocate, Kevin Ryan, pioneered a similar approach 19 years ago, producing a report that found — no surprise — errors in all directions.  

Restructuring the office 

            Though it is beyond the mandate of this committee, I want to urge it to recommend not only a new child advocate but a new structure for OCA. 

            We all know the cliché: Knowledge is power. The corollary, though, is that anyone who has a near-monopoly on knowledge will have enormous power to shape public opinion. That enormous power brings enormous potential for abuse. 

Agencies like DCF tend to be more secret than the CIA. So whoever becomes a state’s “child advocate” has that enormous power. But while such offices are conceived as a way to watch over state child welfare agencies, lawmakers sometimes forget a crucial question: Who watches the watchdog? 

So a new child advocate isn’t enough. I hope you will urge lawmakers to restructure the office. 

Right now, as you know, three public officials name the child advocate. S/he serves a fixed five-year term. While the advocate demands accountability from everyone else, s/he is accountable to – no one. No one can set her priorities, no one can remove her except for cause, no one can fact-check her, no one can serve as a check and balance against any biases s/he may bring to the job. 

Many who spoke at this committee’s “listening session” spoke of the need for the child advocate to be independent. He or she already is entirely independent – independent to a fault. Because while it is reasonable, indeed essential. that OCA as an office be insulated from political interference, someone still needs to watch the watchdog.  Here’s how it could be done: 

OCA should be governed by a board of directors that is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability; vital for a state with a child welfare system where Black, Native American and Hispanic children are grossly overrepresented. It also must be diverse in terms of lived experience and viewpoints. The board should include current and/or former foster youth, foster parents, kinship foster parents, birth parents who lost children to the system, current or former frontline caseworkers, representatives of the disability and LGBTQ communities, child abuse prosecutors and family defense attorneys. 

But it can’t stop there. Mental health and domestic violence are constantly cited as reasons for child welfare intervention. So the board would need mental health practitioners, people who work with survivors of domestic violence, and survivors themselves.  In addition, in Massachusetts, as in most states, the system focuses almost exclusively on poor people, often confusing poverty with neglect. So the board should have leaders of anti-poverty organizations. 

Then, after what would, no doubt, be vigorous debate, this group should choose the Child Advocate. The board would also set the office’s priorities, determine its approach and review all reports before publication. 

This way, OCA as an office remains fully independent, but the leader of that agency is subjected to internal checks and balances to increase the likelihood that recommendations will be wise and unbiased. 

Because independent does not equal unbiased. I was surprised to hear one speaker equate the two during the listening session. 

We all have biases. And in a field as fraught as child welfare, the biases can run deep. Whoever is named the next child advocate almost certainly will have a background in the field. The personal experiences one encounters in any part of this field can be searing. And while any honorable leader seeks to check and control her or his biases, that is not enough. They need the guidance of others, in this case, a board whose diversity of personal experience allows for a check and balance against the biases, however unintended, of any one individual. 

The problem of bias would be even worse if, as seemed to be suggested by one speaker, the child advocate were allowed to become a virtual dictator, whose every recommendation would have to take effect. This would be an abdication of responsibility by the state’s elected representatives. They are ultimately responsible for determining policy and practice in child welfare, and every other field subject to governance by the commonwealth, on behalf of those they represent.

            This committee, of course, does not have the power to make the changes I recommend here. That, too, would rest with the elected representatives of the people. But it does have the power to recommend a restructuring. And it certainly has the power to recommend a child advocate who understands that the errors go in all directions. 

            Thank you.

About NCCPR 

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform is a small nonprofit child advocacy organization dedicated to trying to make the child protection system better serve America’s most vulnerable children. We are a Virginia-based organization with Massachusetts roots. 

 The group was established at a 1991 Harvard Law School conference by the late Betty Vorenberg, a former member of the National Board of the ACLU, former Deputy Director of the Department of Public Welfare during the Dukakis Administration and former Deputy Director of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center. 

You can read all about our distinguished Board of Directors here https://nccpr.org/nccpr-board-and-staff/ and about what others in the field say about us here: https://nccpr.org/what-others-say-about-nccpr/   My own background is in journalism: 19 years as a practitioner, including two at WGBY Public Television in Springfield, three as a professor.  I spent much of my time covering child welfare, work that culminated in publication of a well-received book, Wounded Innocents (Prometheus Books, 1990, 1995). 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Nov. 23, 2025

Publishing early this week because, let’s face it, by Wednesday, who’s going to be around?

 Two stories this week illustrate the hypocrisy that permeates family policing.

● The New Jersey Monitor reports that the state Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors cannot simply assume that if a child dies of otherwise unexplained head trauma with a particular set of symptoms, it’s so-called “Shaken Baby Syndrome” and then claim it proves the child died of abuse. The widely-questioned “syndrome” (so widely-questioned that proponents slapped a new name onto it: “abusive head trauma”) has been abused by some doctors and family police agencies, who rush to blame abuse and rule out any other explanation. From the story: 

Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis, in a lengthy majority decision that five other justices joined, said the syndrome has not been generally accepted in the biomechanical community, making expert testimony about it unreliable and inadmissible in court. … “Regardless of the severity or viciousness of a crime … Thursday’s decision affirms lower court rulings that had declared shaken baby syndrome “junk science.” 

● But are there also times when medical experts will do amazing rhetorical handstands to avoid labeling what happened to a child as abuse, and come up with other explanations, no matter how implausible? Of course! Provided those under suspicion are foster or adoptive parents. Honolulu Civil Beat has a case in point. 

● A stunning expose from the Arizona Republic: A group home operator gave $400,000 in campaign contributions to the governor. Shortly thereafter, that operator got a 30% rate increase. The state family police agency says the two are entirely unrelated.  But the agency’s explanation is nearly as bad. I have a blog post about it. 

● Arizona claimed they had to give that big increase because of a supposed shortage of foster homes. But when a desperate family, finding no place else to turn for help with their severely autistic son, turned to the state family police agency, the agency then refused to give the child back – for years. KNXV-TV reports that the family just won a big lawsuit. Bad as their ordeal was, at least it didn’t end the way it did for a Baltimore family in a similar situation. 

● Remember how Georgia responded to the government shutdown by cutting back on services to keep families together – instead of curbing its use of institutionalization, a “service” it uses at six times the national average? Well, now the shutdown is over and everything’s back to normal, right? On the contrary. The Imprint reports that Georgia is cutting back further. No, not the institutions, the Wraparound services that help therapeutic foster parents keep children out of institutions. (The institutions are taking a small hit – affecting services that let children visit their parents and attend court hearings – of course!)

● And speaking of institutions, when a chain of Nevada group homes came under fire for alleged abuse of residents, and the state Medicaid office announced it would terminate their contracts, a county judge rushed into action: She issued a temporary restraining order barring state and county agencies from inspecting and investigating the group homes! KLAS-TV in Las Vegas reports she has lifted that order. But the lawyer for the group homes is unhappy:

“It’s the annihilation of my client’s business,” [he] said. “What’s the hardship to the defendant?”

● The Imprint reports on Keeping Families Connected Minnesota, “launched in early October, [that] provides free or low-cost consultation and representation to kinship caregivers.” 

● It’s not just kin who often can’t get legal help.  WTVT in Tampa reports on the plight of foster children who have no one to fight in court for what they actually want. That’s because, unlike in some other states, they don’t get a lawyer. And, though the story doesn’t mention it, the biggest obstacle to changing that is, of course, the Florida CASA program, something we wrote about in 2019. 

● The New Yorker reports on a key problem with the Trump Administration’s so-called “fostering the future” initiative – and how it has a familiar ring.

● We’ve published our annual call on the child welfare establishment to stop those obscene celebrations of family executions.

Our annual call to end child welfare’s public celebration of family executions

Saturday, on “National Adoption Day, who will stop to remember that for some children and some young adults, every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals?

 

Termination of parental rights is child welfare's "death penalty."  So why do
some of the very judges who order a family "executed" preside over
public celebrations of the aftermath?   


This post originally was published on November 15, 2020

             There was a time when, as a people, we were so uncivilized that executions were a form of entertainment – a public spectacle to be celebrated. 

In Canada, for example, 

Before they were banned in 1870, executions in public places could draw thousands of spectators, including families and young children. Boisterous behavior and a less-than-solemn attitude marked these macabre gatherings.  “When the day of a public execution arrived, the businessmen closed their factories and their stores and the people put on their holiday dresses,” noted an 1894 article in the Evening Star about hangings in early Toronto.   

The last official state-sanctioned public hanging in the United States drew a crowd of 20,000.  Even then, reporters condemned it as a “carnival.” (I probably don’t even need to mention that the man they hanged was Black.) 

Fortunately, nearly a century later, we have, of course, outgrown such practices. 

Except in "child welfare." 

Termination of parental rights (or, as it should be called, termination of children’s rights to their parents) often is described as child welfare’s death penalty.  It is the prerequisite to any adoption of a child from foster care. 

And every year, all over America, we celebrate these family executions with a joyous public spectacle.  It’s called National Adoption Day.  This year it’s happening on Nov. 22. 

You know the drill. Open the court on a Saturday, bring in ice cream, cake and balloons, finalize foster-child adoptions en masse – and reinforce every stereotype about how the system supposedly “rescues” children from horrible birth parents and places them with vastly superior adoptive parents.  The same judges who are supposed to decide impartially on termination cases often lead these celebrations.

            In 2020, when celebrations still often were virtual due to COVID, organizers of the Los Angeles County event added a particularly macabre 21st Century touch: “A pool camera will be permitted at a pre-selected adoptive family’s home for coverage as the family’s virtual adoption ceremony takes place.”

  The whole spectacle also gets the courts and the local family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) a guaranteed puff piece in the local newspaper celebrating what is, in reality, the aftermath of an execution.  And, of course, as with those other public executions, a disproportionate share of the families “executed” are Black. 

I’ve previously written that this day should be called National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day – since while "child welfare" systems always piously proclaim that their first goal is to reunify a family they’ve torn apart, the outcome that brings them true joy, the one they celebrate, is when that child, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite, is adopted by someone who often is neither. 

Unlike some of my friends in the family preservation movement, I am not opposed to all absolutely all involuntary adoptions of children taken from their parents.  I am not opposed to absolutely all terminations of parental rights.  On those very rare occasions where this is appropriate, I am not opposed to an adoptive family having a private, quiet celebration.  But each of these things should take place far less often than they do now.

 So in that sense, my previous column was too kind.  It said adoption was sometimes an appropriate second choice after reunification and sometimes the appropriate first choice.  In fact, adoption should be farther down on the list, after not only reunification but also guardianship and perhaps other options as well, such as tribal customary adoption, a practice used by some Native American tribes that might well be adaptable elsewhere.  And while a private celebration is one thing, it should never be a mass public spectacle – it rubs salt into too many open wounds, and not just for parents. 

Prof. Christopher Church, senior director of strategic consulting at Casey Family Programs, has argued that using the term “civil death penalty” to describe the terminations that come before the cake, ice cream and balloons actually understates the trauma to the child.  Horrible as it is to lose a parent to physical death, losing a parent to termination of parental rights can be worse. 

“When a child knows somebody is out there but they have no way of connecting to them, that is ‘ambiguous loss,’” Church said at a recent conference.  “That is a more complex trauma for children than death loss.  … Death is finality and [children] can comprehend that better.” 

Church also reminds us that before the joyous public spectacle there’s sometimes another ceremony, if you can call it that.  It’s called the “goodbye visit.”  Children are told they will never, ever see their parents again, and now they all must say goodbye.  No cake and balloons here; just tears and anguish. 

The children are not always saying goodbye just to their parents.  If one child is adopted and the others are not, the sibling bond is severed forever.  If a parent later has another child whom s/he is allowed to keep, the child who was adopted amid the ice cream and cake may never know that sibling – unless, when they are adults, they find some way to find each other. 

But hey, don’t let that spoil the party. 

I can imagine some readers thinking: But wait. We have to do this, don’t we?  After all, if a case goes to termination of parental rights, the parents must have been the worst of the worst, right? 

Wrong. The termination phase is as arbitrary, capricious and cruel as every other decision-point in child welfare.  As Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan, has written: 

[C]ourts seem to terminate parental rights out of a sense of convenience. A child has been in foster care for 15 months, so let’s terminate. A foster parent prefers to adopt a child, so let’s terminate. A parent hasn’t fully complied with services, so let’s terminate. 

            Still another indication of what’s really behind termination cases can be seen in how different the outcomes are by age.  Among children torn from their parents during their first year of life, only 36% are reunified; 46% are adopted.  Then, year after year, reunification rates inch up almost every year until age 14. Nearly 54% of children taken at age 14 were reunified. 

            So are parents of infants vastly worse than parents of 14-year-olds?  Or do caseworkers have their own rescue fantasies triggered by a child about whom they can gush, “Awwww, he’s so cute!” 

            No, we don’t need adoption and the attendant spectacle of mass public family execution to give children “permanence.”  In fact, we don’t know how often adoption does that.  Child welfare systems don’t like to ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers, so we don’t know how often, when, say, that cute baby becomes a teenager, the adoptive parents change their minds.  

            But even when the adoption doesn’t fall apart, and even when a child really can’t live safely with her or his own parents, the obsession with adoption still hurts children.  As Prof. Sankaran explains: 

Families, and the relationships within them, are far more enduring and resilient than we want to acknowledge. In our quest for legal permanence, we forget about a child’s need for relational permanence, often defined as a child’s lifelong connection with caring adults. For example, too often, we ratify adoptions with the hope of providing a child with a legally permanent home. But in doing so, we cut off the child’s ability to have permanent relationships with those who have – and will always – matter to him. A mother. A sibling. A grandparent. Hence the countless number of stories of adopted children searching for their kin.

           Other options, such a guardianship, don’t require a child to sacrifice any relationships. 

So this time, when National Adoption Day rolls around, remember that for some children and some young adults every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals. 

Again, that doesn’t mean adoption by strangers and termination of parental rights are always wrong.  But it needs to be moved much farther down on the list of options for children.  And while, on rare occasions, we still need to impose child welfare’s death penalty, can’t we at least have the decency to stop celebrating it? 

Arizona’s great big rate increase for a group home provider: State officials deny it was pay-for-play; but their own explanation is nearly as bad.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs

Shortly after taking office as Governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs announced what could have been a breakthrough: She named a real reformer, Matthew Stewart, to run the state family police agency, the Department of Child Safety. For the first time in decades, the agency would have a leader who understood that the root of Arizona’s child welfare problems was the fact that it tears apart families at a rate well above the national average. That’s compounded by Arizona’s obsession with institutionalizing the children it takes. 

  National Average       Arizona
                  Source: U.S. Deparrtment of Health and Human Services AFCARS Dashboard               

Indeed, the culture of child removal runs so deep that workers in one office thought they would get away with wearing t-shirts that said: “Professional Kidnapper.” 

Right after the governor named Stewart, I wrote a column for the Arizona Republic praising her decision. “Stewart will need ongoing support from the governor,” I wrote. “It looks like he’s going to get it.” 

Boy, did I ever get that wrong! Just weeks after he was nominated, while on the job but still awaiting a confirmation vote from the State Senate, Hobbs withdrew the nomination and replaced him with David Lujan. 

It’s never been clear why. But one possible explanation has emerged, thanks to some great investigative reporting by the Republic. 

The story recounts this chain of events: 

● Sunshine Residential, an Arizona for-profit operator of group homes, run by Simon Kottoor, donates $300,000 to Hobbs’ campaign and another $100,000 to her inaugural – the latter in response to a personal request from Hobbs herself.

● Sunshine Residential asks for a 30% rate increase. They threaten to refuse children from DCS, claiming they got a better offer from the federal government to house migrant children. Three other providers also seek increases.

● Matthew Stewart says no.

● Stuart is replaced by David Lujan.

● Lujan says yes – to Sunshine Residential.

From the story: 

“We are weak, no leadership, perfect time to get what they want,” Alex Ong, then the head of contracts and procurement at DCS, wrote about the requests from group homes. He wrote to then-Deputy Director Robert Navarro in late January 2023 that it wasn’t the time to approve higher rates. 

“I agree...But when simon gives money to the gov...it can make magic happen,” Navarro responded. 

Later, the Republic reports 

Ong would make an eyebrow-raising comment in May 2023. 

"We gotta pay to play now," he wrote. 

DCS spokesman Darren DaRonco said that comment was not related to group homes but made during a conversation about contracts for supervised visitation in DCS cases. 

Lujan says contributions had nothing to do with the rate increase.  But his own explanation isn’t much better. He says DCS needed the beds that Kottoor was threatening to take away. 

Lujan said Sunshine Residential is one of Arizona’s better group home providers.  As the story explains:

Their work was well-regarded by DCS officials, though the company has also faced scrutiny and is named in an ongoing lawsuit over the death of a 9-year-old boy. The boy, Jakob Blodgett, was allowed to refuse diabetes medication before his death. Earlier this year, pregnant 16-year-old Zariah Finley Dodd was murdered shortly after leaving her placement at a group home run by Sunshine Residential. 

And, using the sleazy argument agencies always use to institutionalize children, Lujan said Sunshine Residential's beds were needed to keep siblings together.

In fact, DCS doesn’t need those beds – from Sunshine Residential or anyone else. Rather, DCS still takes away children at a rate well above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. Children are more likely, by far, to be torn from their parents in Phoenix than any other of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

And no, that’s not because Arizona is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse.  

Of all the children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in Arizona in 2024, 89% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 59% of cases, there was not involve even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

But even more damning than the high rate of needless removal is where the children end up. DCS is obsessed with stashing away the children it takes in so-called “congregate care” – group homes and institutions.  Nationwide, on average, 15% of children taken in 2024 were placed in such settings. In Arizona, it was 41%! 

Stop doing that, and there will be plenty of room in family foster homes for the children who really need them - including sibling groups.

Perhaps Matthew Stewart understood that was the real problem. And perhaps that’s why his tenure was so brief. 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 18, 2025

 We start with two outstanding stories about a key example of the confusion of poverty with neglect: families torn apart because they can’t afford adequate housing. 

● Hearst Connecticut Media exposes the problem in one of the richest states in America, where it’s bad. 

● The Nation exposes the problem in Missouri, where it’s even worse – and getting worse still, thanks to the horrifying approach taken by the new head of that state’s family police agency. 

● I have Blog posts discussing both these stories. 

● Speaking of horrifying: The Oregonian exposes a tactic Oregon has been using when the state is sued by victims of abuse, whether in their own homes or in foster care: retaliate by suing a parent – even a parent who had nothing whatsoever to do with the abuse.  Consider what happened to a mother the story identifies as Jen: 

In a court filing, Jen’s daughter wrote that she felt “immediately intimidated and worried” for her mom when she learned the state had filed a lawsuit against Jen. She called it an “unfair and groundless flex of power.” 

Jen’s daughter considered dropping the case to protect her mother, Jen said. But part of her daughter’s healing has been strengthening her resolve, Jen said – and while her daughter was nervous about going forward, the teen felt like she couldn’t just let the injustice against her disappear. 

All the cases cited by The Oregonian occurred during the term of a previous state attorney general. The current Attorney General says he’ll at least curb the practice. 

● Two months after a Maryland foster child was found dead in a hotel, a death authorities say was a suicide, WMAR-TV reports that the state has moved all but one child out of hotels. But where are they?  Prof. Shanta Trivedi points out that we don’t know if the new placements are any better.  And she points out the only real solution: 

We’re subjecting kids and parents to the worst trauma we can possibly inflict on them, because we can’t use the money that exists in the foster system - which is a lot, by the way – to address these problems at the front end.

 And this seems to be a good time for a reminder of that new study from Sweden, which found that, by age 20, children placed in foster care are more than four times more likely to have died – and the major cause is suicide. 

● The Imprint reports that Texas has joined the growing list of states that are making it easier for relatives to become licensed foster parents. From the story: 

The new process will include simplified housing inspections that focus just on health and safety. Some unnecessary training will also be eliminated — for example, relatives taking in teens won’t be required to attend infant safety classes that foster parents generally must attend.

 ● For decades, family police agencies have used Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as a child welfare slush fund, diverting funds that should be used to help families become self-sufficient into foster care payments and family police investigations. Now, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, some states are making it even worse: 

Officials in Kentucky have justified the TANF reductions as a necessary step to support the state's overburdened foster care system. However, this approach is counterproductive and directly undermines the first of TANF’s four purposes, to “provide assistance to needy families so that children can be cared for in their home or the home of relatives.” 

Cutting a vital income source like TANF makes it harder for families to meet their children’s basic needs — such as food, housing, and medical care — which are often the factors considered in child neglect cases. … Rather than removing children from their homes, families should be provided with economic supports like TANF to help stabilize their circumstances and support their children’s healthy development.

In this week’s edition of  The Horror Stories go in All Directions

● Months apart in 2016 and 2017, in two separate homes, two children were, in effect, adopted to death. Both died of starvation in their adoptive homes. Their adoptive parents are in jail. It happened in Iowa, which tears apart families at a rate more than double the national average.   

As part of a legal settlement with the surviving sisters of one of the victims, the state agreed to set up a task force to look into how to improve the foster care system. Many states do that without being forced into it – so that, at a minimum, they can appear to care when children die in foster or adoptive homes. 

But, in a story that brought one of the anchors to tears, KCCI-TV reports that Iowa couldn’t be bothered to do even that much. The task force met only three times, most recently nearly two years ago. No further meetings are scheduled. In addition, “Task force members say there are no minutes or major documents from the state or them.” 

No responsible state official would talk to KCCI either. But the family police agency said in a statement that caseworkers now are trained to recognize malnutrition. 

Missouri’s shame: Rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, and skyrocketing numbers of children torn from their homes, is exposed to the nation by The Nation

For want of an air conditioner, a family was lost.

A foster-care panic, set off by the head of the state family police agency, is making everything worse. Her predecessor laments: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” 

Second of two parts (Read Part One here) 

Last week, Hearst Connecticut Media exposed the extent to which children are barred from living with the families they love, and sometimes are taken forever, because the families lack adequate housing. We discussed that story in yesterday’s post to this blog. 

At about the same time as the Hearst story was published, The Nation exposed the same problem, on an even larger, even more appalling scale, in Missouri. 

The Nation tells the story of one child denied any contact with his mother for months after being taken because the mother’s rental apartment didn’t have an air conditioner. The mother explained that “To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account.” 

In another case, a nine-year-old boy was taken because the family was living in an extended stay hotel.  Excellent local reporting from the Missouri Independent has uncovered similar cases. 

The Nation adds more context, including some stunning comments from the former head of the agency that is taking all these children. 

For decades, Missouri has torn apart families at a rate well above the national average.  That improved a little under former Children’s Division Director Darrell Missey. But as of 2024, Missouri still was taking away children at a rate more than 45% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  And that doesn’t include what appears to be a large number of hidden foster care placements.  But already, there are signs that Missey’s successor, Sara Smith is making things exponentially worse. From the story: 

In Missouri, a substandard apartment is reason enough for judges to agree to removals, said Kathleen Dubois, a retired family court attorney in St. Louis. “Nobody blames the landlord,” she told me. “They just take away the kids.” Kathy Connors, the executive director of the St. Louis homeless shelter Gateway180, sees the same thing: There are an “awful lot” of instances in which mothers living in her shelter have their children taken away if they can’t find permanent housing fast enough. … She has seen many families who come to the shelter working to reunify with their children. But since she began working there in 2016, she has seen only four successful reunifications. “It does seem like it’s a situation where the goalpost keeps getting moved further and further,” she said. 

And what does Smith have to say about this? 

Sara Smith

“In and of itself, we wouldn’t take homelessness as a report,” Smith asserted. “We would be looking at if the child’s basic needs are met, if the family does have some kind of housing.”

But, uh, isn’t shelter a “basic need”? So yeah, they’ll take away children because they’re homeless, or even for lack of an air conditioner. Just look at the agency’s own “risk assessment” form – as The Nation did:

A point gets added to a family’s risk score if “current housing is physically unsafe,” while homelessness adds two points.

Note to journalists: Odds are there’s a similar risk assessment form in your state. 

And here’s where differences in agency culture from state to state show up. As is made clear in Prof. Kelley Fong’s brilliant book, Investigating Families, caseworkers in Connecticut are overloaded, but most of them probably would try to find a family an air conditioner. Even in Missouri, you can sometimes find compassion for families and an understanding of the harm separation does to children – from the Kansas City police. 

But not in Sara Smith’s Children’s Division.  Again from the story in The Nation: 

Even if all a family needs, as in Ortega’s case, is an air conditioner, caseworkers may not have the funds—and might resist calling around to find an organization that does. 

Caseworkers may also feel that this kind of work isn’t in their job description. … Dubois, the retired family court attorney, said that many caseworkers feel they shouldn’t “enable people” by helping them: “‘If [clients] are unable to handle things, we’re not going to do it for them.’” 

Oh, it’s not that the Children’s Division won’t spend money on concrete needs; it just depends on whose needs: 

Sometimes all that families need to remain stably housed and prevent a child’s removal is some extra money. But while the Children’s Division doesn’t use its funds to help these families with housing, the agency does directly fund the housing needs of foster families, as federal law requires. In Missouri, licensed foster-care families receive between $509 and $712 a month for a child, depending on the child’s age, to cover housing and other basic needs, plus an additional $91 a month for children 3 years and younger to cover things like formula and diapers. They receive between $320 and $700 a year for clothing, as well as monthly payments of as much as $2,034 for children with “elevated needs.” 

(Still, they can’t top North Carolina, which is paying some so-called “professional foster parents” $100,000 per couple per year, plus fringe benefits and -  free housing!) 

Paradoxically, it’s better if families don’t have to turn to a family police agency for concrete help, for reasons that should be obvious: Families are afraid, often rightly so, to seek help from an agency that can take away their children. There should be alternative sources. But in Missouri there are no alternative sources anywhere near able to meet the need. The Children’s Division not only isn’t helping, it’s even undermining such efforts. 

This is the culture Darrell Missey, a former judge, was up against when he tried to reduce needless foster care in Missouri. (I was too hard on him at the time for the way he was going about it. For that, Judge Missey, I apologize.) 

Missey is remarkably candid about how much worse things are getting now: 

“I was trying to get people to give folks the opportunity to come up with answers besides separating the family,” Missey said. Still, he often felt forced to remove children because he didn’t have any housing to offer their families. Missey left the position in late 2024. Smith, his replacement, reassigned the person Missey had hired to work on removal prevention to a different role and fired his deputy director, he said. There is a “mentality” that “pervades the state” of removing a child instead of finding a way to fix or find housing, he added: “Missouri’s leadership is not interested in preventing children from coming into foster care.” [Emphasis added.] 

Sara Smith’s actions make that abundantly clear. And the numbers show she is succeeding. The Nation story documents a surge in court petitions after Smith issued a memo warning that, in some cases, even Missouri’s hidden foster care system, which is a problem in itself, wasn’t severe enough. 

And when we compared entries into care for August 2025, the most recent month for which data are available, to August 2024, when Missey still was in charge, we found they’d skyrocketed by nearly 50 percent. From 325 in August 2024, to 462 in August 2025. If that trend holds for an entire year, Missouri’s rate of child removal could approach triple the national average. 

The Nation story also highlights a unique problem in Missouri, the fact that there are two agencies that can tear apart families and keep them apart, and one of them is uniquely unaccountable: It’s the Juvenile Office, the bizarre, and probably unconstitutional fifth wheel in the Missouri system. I’ve written about it several times, but the Nation story highlights something I’ve overlooked. For technical reasons related to how federal funding works, the Juvenile Office doesn’t even have to pretend to follow federal law requiring states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. (By the way, Sara Smith loves the Juvenile Office.) 

A lesson about laws 

The Nation story points out that 

About half of states exempt parents’ financial inability to provide things like shelter for their children from the definition of child maltreatment. At least three states have statutes saying homelessness does not constitute neglect. Missouri does not. While it has exceptions in its maltreatment statutes for corporal punishment and refusing medical care on religious grounds, it has none for poverty or homelessness. 

But back in Connecticut, the Hearst Connecticut Media story about very similar problems, discussed in the previous post to this Blog, notes that 

State law restricts the Department of Children and Families from determining that a child is neglected — and can then be removed from their family and put into foster care — because of poverty. 

But they’re doing it anyway, as they do in every state, whether it has such a law or not. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have such laws. Rather, it means the laws need to be tougher. They need to require states to show what they’ve done to, in the words of one activist group, “take our poverty, not our children,” and require courts to enforce it. 

An example is this good bill proposed in Maine. But it didn’t pass; instead they passed the vague, unenforceable type of law that many other states have. 

A tough law would be a good first step in Missouri – and it would have to apply explicitly to the Juvenile Office as well as the Children’s Division. At least that might curb the rate at which Sara Smith is sending the state careening full-speed backwards.

Two outstanding stories expose the vast scope of family destruction when family police tear apart families because of housing

In one of the richest states in America, lawmakers leave hundreds of children
trapped in foster care because their parents can't afford adequate housing.

Hearst Connecticut Media exposes the problem in that state, where it’s bad. The Nation exposes it in Missouri – where horrible leadership has set off a foster-care panic, making it even worse

First of two parts (Read Part Two here)

● Virginia Ortega didn’t have an air conditioner in her rental apartment in Missouri. She couldn’t afford one, and the landlord wouldn’t provide one. So the Missouri family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency), known as the Children’s Division, took away her 16-year-old autistic son. For months, she did not even know where he was. 

Now, as The Nation explains in this story 

To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account, she told me. But after Cesar was removed, she was fired—someone at work had spread a rumor that she’s a bad mother. Ortega suffers from leukemia, which makes it hard for her to find another job.

● Lauren and her nine-year-old son John were all set to move from Missouri to live with a cousin in a spacious house in Oklahoma. They were just waiting for a transfer of medical records for John, who has kidney disease. 

But that wasn’t good enough for the Children’s Division. They* tore John away from his mother – because they’d been living in an extended-stay motel. 

● In Connecticut, the children of Kelly Toutain and Zachery Lyons were taken for exactly the sort of reason foster care apologists love to cite when they say children aren’t taken because of poverty: They had mental health problems – but nothing that affluent families don’t handle routinely, because they have the money for good doctors and therapists.  

Now the mental health problems are under control. But, as a story from Hearst Connecticut Media explains, to allow their children to be placed with a relative, they had to move out of the apartment they had in the same house. So while mental health problems (and the lack of money to deal with them) may have triggered the removal, homelessness is what kept the family apart. 

Connecticut is bad; Missouri is worse 

The two in-depth stories shed new light on one of the prime examples of the confusion of poverty with neglect: children taken because their families lack adequate housing. (Or sometimes when they just lack housing not good enough to meet the arbitrary standards of the caseworker who showed up at the door that day.) 

In Part Two, available here, we take a close look at what The Nation found in Missouri. But first, Connecticut: 

In 2024, 391 Connecticut children were taken from their families for reasons including homelessness or lack of housing – and that’s just the number the state admits to when reporting entries to the federal government. 

And, the Hearst story reports, 

During the first six months of this year, the families of 452 children currently in foster care were on that [housing] waitlist, according to agency data. Another 635 children with open DCF cases but who remain with their parents who are at risk of homelessness or living in unsafe conditions are also waiting for housing. 

The wait list for housing is so long that some children lose the right to ever live with their families again for their entire childhoods. Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, states are required to seek termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. (In fact, there’s a lot of leeway, but “ASFA made me do it” is the family policing equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”) Said one Connecticut family defense attorney: 

“I have so many clients who are FaceTiming me from their campsite, or going into court unhoused,” Custody of their kids is terminated (permanently) before they even get a case manager.” 

But, hey, it’s not housing alone, right? (Except when it is.) It must be mentalhealthdrugabusedomesticviolence, the three excuses for taking away poor people’s children, chanted like a mantra as if a single word.  But that confuses cause and effect. Again, from the story:

Elizabeth Berman, a child-welfare attorney for three decades, said … addressing other issues that contribute to child removal is impossible until parents have stable housing … 

“They can't work toward reunification because they're living in a tent,” she said of one client. “Having to figure out, with no money, what little wooded area am I going to sleep in tonight, or what bridge am I going to be under? It's all consuming. So you can't really focus on mental health treatment or substance abuse treatment or education or anything else because your energy is tied up in fundamental basic survival needs.” 

And, as has been pointed out for decades, mental health issues, domestic violence and substance abuse all can be caused by poverty – and as affluent sufferers from those sorts of ailments, such as Betty Ford – taught us long ago, they often can be cured with money. 

Connecticut once understood this. Again from the story: 

DCF’s supportive housing program has landed national recognition for successfully connecting parents with long-term affordable housing and the services needed to safely reunify with their children. Research shows that those in the program were more likely to get their children back and were less likely to face new substantiated abuse or neglect allegations within five years. Research also found the short-term expense of the program to the agency was cost neutral. 

Even if it weren't cost-neutral, Connecticut sure as hell could afford it. Connecticut spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the country, a rate nearly triple the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.

The program still exists, but it provides nowhere near enough assistance to meet the demand. That may help explain why, while entries into foster care are going down in most states, they're going up in Connecticut.

But at least Connecticut still takes children at a rate slightly below the national average. And at least in Connecticut, the entire system, starting at the very top, doesn’t ooze contempt for impoverished families. For that, we must turn to Missouri. 

We do that on this blog in Part Two. 

*-The Children’s Division will tell you they can’t take away children themselves. For a detailed discussion of why this is disingenuous claptrap, see this post.