Catch-22 in Kentucky: How “child welfare” conflates poverty with neglect: Maximum condescension, minimum understanding of its own role

I’ve often cited on this blog the excellent journalism of Steve Volk, a reporter for Resolve Philly; stories such as this one, and this one, and this one. Volk just finished teaching an online course for the Poynter Institute on how to cover child welfare. Some of the students have written essays for Poynter’s website about what they learned. 

Sarah Ladd of the States Newsroom site Kentucky Lantern wrote an essay that included a question she posed to advocates across the state.  It was a very good question. She got a very bad – but wonderfully revealing – answer: 

For a few weeks, I asked every child advocate I interviewed the same question: “Where is the line between true neglect — that is based in disregard or cruelty — and a family who loves each other, but lacks resources to fully care for their child?” 

All my sources said the same thing, nearly verbatim: The determining factor is if a family is reaching out to get support and resources necessary to fill gaps. 

This reflects exactly the patronizing attitude toward families that’s a key problem with the system: the notion that it’s on the parents to prove themselves worthy by reaching out to us!  Families must grovel! They must humble themselves! They must reach out to us so we can judge whether they are worthy of help or must have their children torn from their arms! 

This also puts the burden of proof in the wrong place – though it fits perfectly with the guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality that permeates family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies). Families should not be required to show that the fact that their children may not have enough food or adequate shelter is not due to “disregard or cruelty.”  The "child protective services" agency should be required to prove that it is. 

Aside from the condescension, there’s the practical problem: The child welfare system itself discourages families from reaching out for help. Families are afraid to share their problems with professionals and seek help precisely because those professionals usually are mandated reporters who might well turn them in to CPS. It’s an entirely rational response; in fact,

Those "child advocates" in Kentucky have set up the ultimate Catch-22: To satisfy us that it's poverty and not neglect you must reach out to us. But if you reach out to us, we might decide it's neglect anyway and take away your children!  That's exactly what happened to the family discussed  in this recent previous post to this blog.  

One book addresses this issue brilliantly: Investigating Families, by Prof. Kelley Fong.  She embedded with CPS agencies – she had the ultimate all-access pass. The result is a book that combines a scholar’s rigor with a journalist’s eye. Much of it deals with the daily balancing act every poor parent must perform – how much to reveal to “helpers” who might help, or might take their children.  Yet this is the litmus test all those advocates in Kentucky demand. 

There is a much more accurate, much simpler answer to Ms. Ladd’s question: If the solution is money, the problem is poverty. The burden of reaching out should be on the powerful, not the powerless; on the system, not the family. And the help needs to be what families really need, which is more likely to be cash, rent subsidies, or childcare vouchers than the “counseling” and “parent education” that primarily make the helpers feel good.  

We saw how well this worked during the COVID pandemic. While the child welfare establishment was fearmongering about a “pandemic of child abuse” that never happened, impoverished communities were mobilizing to help themselves, and government provided exactly the help those families needed: no-strings-attached cash. The result: child safety improved. 

In that system, families were unafraid to seek the help they needed. 

But apparently, the thought of replacing wagging fingers with helping hands is more than “child advocates” in Kentucky, or most of the rest of the country, can handle.