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.