NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 12, 2026

Before the news, a word about a big event next week: 

● Every November, on “Adoption Saturday,” we re-post our blog about the obscenity of those mass adoption ceremonies at courthouses all over the country. On May 22 at Noon ET, join Nrrowing The Front Door for a webinar on the topic: 

How Adoption Celebrations Ignore the Destruction of Black and Brown Families 

This webinar highlights how adoption celebrations mask the trauma and pain of family separation. Centering the voices of people with lived experience, panelists will explore how these narratives overlook harm while uplifting adoption as a positive outcome. 

Drawing on organizing and policy expertise, panelists will examine how race, power, and dominant narratives shape who is seen as a 'fit’ family and who is denied family autonomy.

You can register here

Now the news: 

● Darn those pesky peer-reviewed studies – they keep getting in the way of the child welfare establishment’s dogma about poverty and neglect. Here’s another one, from JAMA Pediatrics, showing that the RX Kids cash assistance program is effective in reducing child abuse investigations. As the University of Michigan notes: 

Following the launch of Rx Kids in January 2024, maltreatment investigations among Flint infants in their first six months of life declined from 21.7% to 15.5%. During this same time period, there was an increase in allegations in 21 similar comparison cities. Rx Kids led to a seven-percentage-point decline (a 32% relative reduction) in maltreatment investigations in Flint. 

And from a story about the study from Michigan Advance: 

"These findings, now published in JAMA Pediatrics, underscore the powerful role that economic stability plays in protecting children," said Dr. Mona Hanna, Rx Kids director and associate dean of public health at Michigan State University. 

"By trusting families and investing in them during the earliest, most vulnerable period of life, we are not only improving health outcomes, we are preventing trauma before it starts," she said. 

● The Imprint reports on a lawsuit accusing Washington State of, in effect, abandoning immigrant foster youth to the tender mercies of the Trump Administration. From the story: 

Washington state’s child welfare system is flouting its duty to protect the best interests of immigrant children in their custody, a newly filed lawsuit alleges. And by failing to address immigration-related needs — such as helping youth apply for needed legal protections — the state leaves them at risk of deportation and blocks their ability to receive public benefits, the suit contends. … 

[A]ccording to court filings, Washington doesn’t screen its foster youth for immigration issues or provide information on how to become documented or work toward citizenship, including the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) program. 

● The problems in family policing often begin at state child abuse “hotlines.” The lessons from this excellent new report from the New York City Family Policy Project don’t just apply to New York. 

● The Community Insite podcast talks to family defender and activist Angela Burton. As the title explains: She almost led NYC's Biggest Child Welfare Agency. Instead, she's reimagining it from the outside. 

● Since 1980, family police agencies have been legally required to make “reasonable efforts” to prevent foster care placement and “reasonable efforts” to reunify families. Judges were supposed to enforce the requirement. But if the judge doesn’t check the box claiming reasonable efforts were made, the state or county can’t get federal reimbursement for part of the costs of foster care in that case. So judges put away their gavels, haul out the rubber-stamps and claim that reasonable efforts were made even when they don’t believe it themselves. In a 2005 study, judges admitted to routinely lying and checking the box on the form when they didn’t think it was true. Well, not always, of course. But it sure can come close:

 Another study of reasonable efforts, examining 348 cases, was published in 2024. For that one, the researchers were supposed to answer this question: 

How are hearing quality, information provided to the court before the initial hearing, and case characteristics related to judges’ findings of reasonable efforts to prevent removal? 

But they couldn’t – because no judge ever said no! Not one judge. Not one case. 

The study noted one other interesting pattern: Homelessness was a greater barrier to reunification than physical abuse. 

● Occasionally, an agency’s failure to make reasonable efforts is so egregious that a judge can’t ignore it. As in this case, reported by Fox17 in Tennessee: 

A 6-year-old with autism from Cannon County was removed from his family by the Department of Children’s Services and placed in foster care. What happened next, a juvenile judge would later call a “comprehensive failure of the system.” 

Matthew Floyd was moved 22 times in just 100 days. … “All he wanted was to come home,” his mother said. “He wanted Mom and Daddy. He was scared. They wouldn’t bring him back.” … 

The judge found DCS had a continuing duty to make reasonable efforts to make it possible for Matthew to return home. “Such efforts were not met as it relates to Matthew,” the judge wrote. 

● Thirteen states have passed "reasonable childhood independence" laws, in an effort to stop family police agencies from harassing families and traumatizing children because parents did things like let their children play outside or walk to the store by themselves. Now a bill has been introduced at the federal level. And while it's not an endorsement of any particular legislation, the movement got a boost on the comics pages this week.

● There’s an adage in journalism: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Oregon’s family police agency illustrates a corollary: “If a ‘child welfare’ agency gives you data, check it twice!” Oregon is a case in point, but it’s not unique. On the NCCPR Blog: The Oregon family police agency fudges the figures at children’s expense 

● There’s an adage in law: Hard cases make bad law. There should be a corollary: Horror stories make horrible laws. A horror story prompted Connecticut legislators to pass a bill that would bar anyone listed on the state’s child abuse registry from ever homeschooling their children. But in Connecticut, as in most states, one can be blacklisted this way if a caseworker simply checks a box on a form stating her or his “reasonable cause to believe” there was abuse, or far more often, “neglect” – which often means poverty. In the Hartford Courant, James Mason, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, explains why Gov. Ned Lamont should veto the bill, and the opposition to it is bipartisan. 

● She reportedly “fell in love” with her foster baby – but only until she found out the state wouldn’t pay for childcare. I have a blog post about the story profiling this saintly foster mom, and the double standards it reveals. 

● Foster care apologists sometimes claim poverty can’t be confused with neglect because some nations with stronger social safety nets also take away a lot of children. As I discussed in this column for Youth Today, that’s misleading for many reasons, including the fact that another factor in needless removal, racism, knows no borders. The Guardian reports on a case in point, from Denmark, in which a court found that the Danish equivalent of a “psych eval” was biased. From the story: 

Keira Alexandra Kronvold’s daughter Zammi was taken away from her when she was two hours old and placed in foster care in November 2024 after Kronvold was subjected to so-called FKU (parental competence) psychometric tests. At the time she was told that the test was to see if she was “civilised enough.” 

She still doesn’t have her child back, though. The Danish familie politi simply administered a different test to get the conclusion they wanted. 

Of course, the U.S. child welfare establishment has been saying “FKU” to families for decades.