NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 25, 2025

● Maine lawmakers are considering a bill that would impose a “balance of harms” test in child welfare cases. Judges would have to balance the alleged harm of leaving a child at home with the inherent trauma of tearing the child from her or his family. And the state family police agency would have to show it “exhausted the options” to mitigate the risk of harm and avoid removal. It would be hard to find a better example of the need for such a law than the case examined in this story from The Maine Monitor. I have a blog post about some lessons from the story. 

● ProPublica has a good story on the New York State bill, which, if signed by the Governor, will replace anonymous child abuse reporting with confidential reporting. 

● The New York City Family Policy Project has a new data brief showing what progress the city has made so far in curbing needless reports and the trauma such reports inflict on children and families. 

● Also from the New York City Family Project: An interview with Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark study Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services.  Prof. Fong discusses what she found when she embedded with child protective services agencies in two states – including the perceptions of the investigators themselves: 

For investigators, one of the things that came through was their belief that many of the cases that come their way don’t necessarily need a child protection intervention. And by that I mean an intervention that is, essentially, focused on identifying candidates for foster care—identifying families whose children may need to be removed for extreme safety reasons. 

Oftentimes, they would get reports and say, “I don’t know why this was called in. This was clearly a misunderstanding.” Or, “This teacher could have handled this in some other way.” Instead, they had to go out and do a full surveillance treatment, asking a ton of questions about all aspects of families’ lives and calling teachers and doctors and others. They have to do a quite intensive intervention even when that initial call might have just been a teacher making a judgment about a family or misunderstanding what CPS might be able to do. 

● “Last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal for a kid to walk to the store,” said Georgia mother Brittany Patterson – as she was being arrested for letting her kid walk to the store.  Well, it’s not illegal now. The Imprint reports on Georgia’s new “Reasonable Childhood Independence” law.  From the story: 

While Georgia parents seeking freedom to parent as they choose drove the legislation, it has implications for those more typically ensnared by neglect allegations in the child welfare system — low-income families with little voice or resources. For those parents, leaving kids unsupervised can be the only option. 

“If you’re a single mom and you’re working two jobs to keep the electricity on, you’re going to let your kid come home with a latchkey,” said Lenore Skenazy, president of the national nonprofit Let Grow. “To me, that’s not neglect. We’re talking about regular life.” 

● Remember how Donald Trump said he’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. He couldn’t do it. But when it comes to cruelty, even Trump is no match for America’s history of family policing. Because, as The Imprint reports, when America did something far worse to Native American children – tearing them from their homes and imprisoning them in hideous “boarding schools” – they made the tribes pay for it.  (And of course, many modern family police agencies still make parents pay what amounts to ransom to get their children back from foster care.) Now, a class action lawsuit brought by several tribes demands that the federal government literally, as the story says, “show its receipts.” 

● We don’t hear very much about Asian children in foster care, but as Documented explains in this story, they can go through their own kind of hell. Asian children may lose not only the right to live with their parents but, ultimately the ability to speak to them – literally.  Among the examples in the story: A father whose daughter 

now 17, cannot communicate with him directly, because she has lost her Chinese language after she was placed in a non-Asian foster family. And she is no longer his daughter by legal means. And his wife, fighting to get their daughter back from New York City’s foster care system, died in the middle of the long battle from cancer. … 

“I had never thought that one day my daughter and us won’t be able to directly communicate,” said [the father] … 

And finally ...  

● Another example of how, when it comes to doing things that invoke Orwell, child welfare always seems to get there first: THE CITY reports that 

Two members of Congress were refused entry to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention areas inside 26 Federal Plaza Wednesday morning, despite rules laid out by Congress allowing members to conduct unannounced visits for oversight purposes. 

ICE’s explanation: Those staying at the facility, some for nights at a time, are “in transit” and not actually in federal detention. 

Oh, ICE, you’re so late to the game! In Kansas for decades, the state family police agency has been holding children in foster care while saying: Oh, no! They’re not in foster care, they’re in “police protective custody”!  And that’s on top of hundreds of thousands of children trapped every day, all over America, in hidden foster care using a series of euphemisms that would make Orwell’s Big Brother proud – and ICE envious.