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.

In Maine “child welfare” it’s more like 1001 clowns – and there’s nothing funny about them

Tragic life imitating comic art illustrates why Maine – and every other state – needs a “balance of harms” law.

 Art … 

The movie has a happier ending. A case it echoes does not.

My earliest introduction to how child protective services works came all the way back in 1965 – at the movies. It was the film version of Herb Gardber’s play, A Thousand Clowns.  Wikipedia sums up the plot this way – including the ending, so there are MAJOR SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS: 

Unemployed television writer Murray Burns (Jason Robards) lives in a cluttered New York City studio apartment with his 12-year-old nephew, Nick (Barry Gordon). Murray has been unemployed for five months after quitting his previous job writing jokes for a children's television show called Chuckles the Chipmunk. Nick, the son of Murray's unwed sister, was left with Murray seven years earlier. When Nick writes a school essay on the benefits of unemployment insurance, his school requests that New York State [sic] send social workers to investigate his living conditions. 

In the end, Murray “is forced to conform to society to retain legal custody of his nephew.” By the end Murray is back in a business suit, carrying a briefcase, returning to the job he hated. That’s the price for Nick to be allowed to keep living with him.

 …And life

 A Thousand Clowns is a comedy – and a very good one.  But the real-life version playing out in Maine right now is deadly serious. The story is told in still another excellent story from Josh Keefe of the Maine Monitor.  It’s a long read – and worth every word. 

The real-life Murray is Mica Adler, a woman with a three-year-old son and a dream of living close to nature and off the grid, in a tiny house that some Amish neighbors helped her build. As the story explains: 

Her goal was to build a homestead there, where she could be self-sufficient. She had a well for water and solar panels for electricity, with plans to build a geothermal heating system for warmth. 

But that doesn’t mean she never drove to the supermarket. One day, 15 months ago, in a supermarket parking lot, the boy ran right out toward the path of an oncoming car. He turned around just as Mica was reaching for him, but she wanted to make sure he never did that again.  So she spanked him – on top of his snowsuit and another layer of clothing. 

But the driver of the car into whose path the boy almost ran claimed Mica punched the boy “in the back/butt” – something she said she could see through the side view mirror of her car. 

That was what brought the Maine family police – with their well-known hair trigger – into the family’s life. Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services tears apart families and holds children in foster care at one of the highest rates in the nation. 

And when DHHS caseworkers visited the home it became clear that what really upset them was less the spanking than Mica’s unorthodox lifestyle: minimal modern amenities, not bathing often enough to meet unwritten DHHS standards, often not wearing clothes around the house, and, the only thing in all of this that could be considered harm to the boy: tooth decay; due, Mica says, to a missed appointment because of car trouble. 

But that was enough for DHHS to take the child on the spot and not even ask a judge until afterward. And the parking lot incident led to criminal charges. The boy was moved to four different foster homes – and allegedly abused in one of them.  

At times the allegations bordered on paranoia – on the part of the workers – and may have said more about the mental health of the caseworkers than anyone else’s. From the story: 

At one point early in the case, a police report noted that a DHHS caseworker supervising the visits had concerns about the fact that Adler and her son had often been naked, and that he seemed familiar with anatomical terms for private body parts. (Adler said she taught her child these terms because sexual abuse prevention specialists recommend doing so.) 

The department referred the boy to a forensic interview, which are used to gather information about possible sexual abuse. There are no details about this interview in the DHHS files reviewed by The Monitor, and there were no formal allegations made. (Adler’s lawyer later said that had there been any findings, the department would have introduced them into the case.)[Emphasis added.] 

It took a jury only an hour to find Mica not guilty of the criminal charges.  DHHS ultimately dropped its child abuse case.  Even the “guardian ad litem” named to represent the child’s “best interests” (and who, in this case, happened to be a former Maine Attorney General) wrote in one report: 

“While I might have my own view of Ms. Adler’s lifestyle, she was the only parent to [the boy] for several years, to cut [the boy] off significantly from his mother would not be in his best interest.” 

Yet Mica still doesn’t have her son back. That’s because, after four foster home placements, DHHS placed the child with his father, with whom he had not lived before, and now there are ongoing acrimonious negotiations over custody. 

Balance of harms 

Legislation introduced in Maine would require courts to apply a balance-of-harms test; that is, to weigh the enormous inherent emotional trauma of removal against the harm to the child of remaining in her or his own home. And it would require DHHS to show it did everything it could to mitigate any alleged harm that might occur by keeping the family together (something the director of the agency recently effectively admitted it does not do). 

So let’s balance the harms in this case: 

● If the child remained at home he might suffer further tooth decay (unless, of course, DHHS mitigated that harm by doing something bold and creative like, uh, taking him to a dentist). 

● By removing the child he was subjected to the trauma of separation at an age when he could not possibly understand it. Indeed, he might process it as further punishment for running toward the path of that car.  He was subjected to an astounding number of traumatic interrogations.  (And, though one of the lifestyle concerns was too much nudity in the home, I wonder if total strangers from DHHS stripsearched the boy. Given the nature of the allegation it almost certainly happened at least once.)  Then he was allegedly abused in foster care. 

It doesn’t seem too hard to see where the balance of harms falls here. 

The real-life ending 

Mica’s son goes through far more than Murray’s had to endure in A Thousand Clowns.  Murray’s son was never taken from his uncle, and Murray didn’t have to conform to one “service plan” condition after another, almost none of them related to the actual allegations. 

But Mica and Murray have one thing in common: giving up their dreams. In the end, Mica learns the same lesson as Murray: Conform precisely to middle-class, white-picket-fence child-rearing norms or lose your child. 

As the story explains, Adler now has 

a more traditional living situation. She had moved into a modest ranch house with a roommate, who had just become a grandmother. The house was clean and organized, cavernous in comparison to the tiny home. ...

She explained that she has essentially abandoned her tiny home, and all it represented — at least for now. She has a job tutoring at the Academic Resource Center at Northern Maine Community College. In the fall, she will begin studying electrical construction and maintenance. It’s possible she’ll eventually get a job working on the grid she once tried to escape.

 She is afraid that bringing her son to the small piece of Maine she owns, where she dreamed of raising him, will only invite more trouble.

 “If I don’t bring [my son] there, then it’s just going to be easier to keep them out of my life,” she said. “Out of our lives.”

Oh, and one last question: What wasn’t getting done by caseworkers for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, what child in real danger was missed while so many people there spent some much time tearing apart and keeping apart this mother and child?

Child welfare in Tennessee: Here comes the new lawsuit, just like the old lawsuit.

That’s why the new one won’t fix child welfare either 

I have an idea for a great TV game show: Name That Lawsuit!  Here’s how it works: I post excerpts from lawsuits about Tennessee’s “child welfare” system, contestants guess which is from the lawsuit filed 25 years ago and which is from the lawsuit filed last month. 

Ready? You’ll find the answers at the end of this post. So now let’s Name. That. Lawsuit!

Excerpt A: 

Foster care is intended to be temporary, until children can either be reunited with their families or placed in another permanent home; however, children in Tennessee linger in foster care and are moved from place to place without the opportunity for a stable childhood.

Excerpt B: 

While in foster care, children routinely spend years, and often lose much of their childhoods and suffer additional deprivations, as they are moved from one inadequate placement to another without appropriate services, languishing in state custody. 

Excerpt C: 

Children are routinely placed in emergency shelters and other temporary holding facilities for upwards of six months at a time because the state has nowhere else to place them. 

Excerpt D: 

Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services (“DCS”) warehouses children in spaces which lack the basic necessities of life, including adequate food, bedding, soap, and potable water. Intended as temporary placements, DCS leaves children in these situations for months on end.

It’s not really a game, of course. Rather it illustrates the need to understand why that first lawsuit failed – it’s the same reason the second lawsuit almost certainly will fail: Neither suit addressed the problem at the root of all the others: Tennessee tears apart thousands of families needlessly, often when poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

Because the first suit was silent on that issue, and the litigators even thwarted the state’s own efforts to curb needless entries into care, it was doomed from the start. Indeed, it was like many other failed McLawsuits – almost identical in state after state. 

That’s not hindsight.  Consider the timeline: 

2001: We post the statement of principles for the original Tennessee settlement and compare them to a far more innovative settlement in Alabama. That settlement demanded that the system be rebuilt to emphasize keeping families together. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors was co-counsel for plaintiffs.) At the time we asked: 

If these principles can indeed become reality, which would be the better reality for vulnerable children? 

2005: Alabama’s success is on the front page of The New York Times. Yes, there’s been backsliding in Alabama, too – there always is when the monitoring stops.  But it’s nothing like the collapse in Tennessee.  

2009: Marcia Lowry, who brought the suit while leading the group known as “Children’s Rights,” doesn’t just ignore the problem of wrongful removal, she successfully sues to prevent the Tennessee Legislature from acting to curb it in the county where the problem was worst. And they used some interesting tactics to do it.  

2014: Lowry leaves Children’s Rights and forms another group to bring the same sort of litigation, A Better Childhood. 

2019: All court oversight of the Tennessee system ends. Though Lowry has left, Children’s Rights declares victory. But that year, Tennessee took away 22% more children than it did the year the lawsuit was filed.  

2023: Entries into care are down, but still just as high as they were back when the suit was filed – and that’s now 70% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

2025: By now, Children’s Rights has dramatically changed course, engaging in advocacy and litigation geared to the only approach that works to keep children safe: doing more to end the needless removal of children. They’ve publicly acknowledged they got some things wrong when Lowry was in charge. 

But over at A Better Childhood, Lowry brings her new Tennessee McLawsuit, which makes all the same mistakes as the old one. 

The new suit makes no mention of wrongful removal, no mention of confusing poverty with neglect, and no mention of the pervasive racial bias in the system – something one would hope would be of particular concern when suing a state where children can be taken from parents whose only crime is “driving while Black.”  

Tennessee’s children deserve a much better system, but that will require a much better lawsuit. It’s one thing to play a game of Name That Lawsuit. But there is no excuse for what A Better Childhood is doing now – playing games with children’s lives. 

Answers: B and C are from the old lawsuit, A and D are from the new one.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 17, 2025

● How many different ways can the family police harm children in the name of “protecting” them? USA Today has part of the answer in a remarkable series of stories about one family. 

● In this extraordinary story from the Maine Monitor about how Maine has become an extreme outlier in tearing apart families, the head of the Maine family police agency lists the reasons. You know what’s not on the list? Child abuse. Instead, she makes comments that amount to an admission that her agency regularly violates the federal law requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.

● Meanwhile in New Mexico, the number of children torn from their families shot up 40% in a single year. I have a column in the Albuquerque Journal about the harm this is doing to the state’s vulnerable children.

● What should be called the Charles Murray faction of the extreme right is offering up a collection of half-truths, straw men, and statistics abuse on the matter of child welfare. I have a blog post about how, when it comes to race, class and child welfare, the American Enterprise Institute is getting it all wrong again.

● One of the things the Charles Murray wing on the right (and, sadly some on the Left) hate is any proposal to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. (Their argument – and I’m not kidding about this – is: Sure, anonymous reports are almost always false, but other categories of reporters have a record that’s almost as bad!)  So the take-the-child-and-run crowd will probably be unhappy to read this story from The Imprint about how the New York State Legislature has passed a bill that would, in fact, replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. (We’ll have to see if Gov. Kathy Hochul is ready to stand up to the child welfare establishment fearmongering and sign it.) 

● Another characteristic of some in the Charles Murray wing is denigrating the lived experience of foster youth. But that’s not stopping those young people from speaking out, and it’s not stopping the rest of us from listening.  Last week’s roundup noted a comprehensive report issued by foster youth in Minnesota. Now, in Los Angeles, The Imprint reports, some current and former foster youth have produced a documentary about the harm done by the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medications. 

● When you’re accused of child abuse, or if your poverty is confused with neglect, you are guilty until proven innocent.  But in many states, even proving innocence isn’t necessarily enough to get you off a state’s blacklist of alleged child abusers.  Through the ordeal of one family. WKRG-TV in Mobile shows how it hurts children in Alabama. 

● In a testament to the tragic times in which we live, Vivek Sankaran and Betsy Fisher write in The Imprint about the steps child welfare agencies need to take - right now - to cushion the blow for children if their parents are deported. That includes making sure the separation itself, or the fact that the parents now live in a poorer country, isn't used to justify terminating their children's rights to them forever.

● Oregon Public Broadcasting profiles a young woman who suffered terribly when she was shipped out-of-state by the Oregon family police. Now she’s worried it will happen again if the legislature passes a bill, discussed in detail here, to make it easier to send young people away. She’s right to be worried. 

But the story also has the same glaring failings of virtually every OPB story: It serves as de-facto flackery for Oregon’s Senator Soundbite, Sara Gelser Bloun, whose own policy failures and demagoguery did a lot to worsen the problems in the first place, and it ignores the main reason Oregon ships kids out of state every few years, and puts them in other terrible places: taking away so many kids needlessly in the first place.

NCCPR in the Albuquerque Journal: It's wrong to assume removing children from homes is always in their best interest

When the federal government finally released long-awaited data this month concerning how many children every state put into foster care in 2023, New Mexico had a distinction as ugly as it was predictable. While most states showed modest declines in the number of children they tore from their homes and a few showed modest increases, New Mexico was the extreme outlier. 

New Mexico tore 40% more children from their families in 2023 than in 2022. That’s a full-blown foster-care panic, a sharp surge in removals of children that sometimes follows high-profile child abuse tragedies. …

Read the full column in The Albuquerque Journal

Race, class and child welfare: AEI gets it wrong again

The Charles Murray faction of the extreme right offers up a remarkable collection of half-truths, straw men, and statistics abuse. 

"So you see," says the child welfare establishment, 
"of course we'll accept your approach. All you have to do is clear the bar!"

The American Enterprise Institute is the right-wing think tank that is the longtime home of Charles Murray, author of the notorious exercise in what the Southern Policy Law Center aptly calls “racist pseudo-science” known as The Bell Curve. So it makes sense that AEI has become the center of what should be called child welfare’s “Caucus of Denial” – those who argue that child welfare is magically immune from the racism that permeates every other aspect of American life. They also deny that poverty is confused with neglect. 

While other conservatives, those who recognize the danger of abuse of government power, are among the leaders in bipartisan efforts to reform the system, (and conversely, I’m sorry to say, plenty of my fellow liberals are in denial as well) AEI is trapped in a Charles Murray mentality.  

AEI’s efforts to promote fallacies about race, poverty and child welfare are led by Naomi Schaefer Riley, who writes screeds with titles like “Wokeness Has Come for Child Protective Services” and who proudly analogizes her book attacking family preservation to another of Murray’s books. 

Riley’s book was given to the world by a publisher whose other titles include American Bolsheviks: The Persecution of Donald Trump, The Case To Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, The Myth Of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault On Clean Elections, Crime Inc.: How Democrats Employ Mafia And Gangster Tactics To Gain And Hold Power and Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting Covid Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again. 

So it’s not surprising that a charter member of the Caucus of Denial, Brett Drake, got AEI to publish a summary of the caucus’ major claims. In Drake’s Bizarro World, facts are myths and myths are facts. 

He squeezes a remarkable number of half-truths, straw men, statistics abuse, and distortion of what anyone who dares to disagree with him has to say into two pages. Let’s set the record straight: 

● Drake’s claim: He says the idea that there is widespread racial bias in child welfare is rooted in a single study, the third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), but that study was flawed and the findings were not replicated in NIS-4. 

That’s a classic half-truth. NIS-3 was flawed and NIS-4 did not replicate its findings. But the case that child welfare is permeated with racism is not based entirely or even mostly on NIS-3.  There are a wealth of other, rigorous studies, controlling carefully for other variables that show racial bias in child welfare decision-making. Some of them are summarized, with citations, in this NCCPR Issue Paper.  

I found out about many of these studies when I read Shattered Bonds, the first book on this topic by Prof. Dorothy Roberts (a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors). So Drake’s implication that Roberts relied mostly on NIS-3 also is incorrect. And, Drake does not mention the additional research cited in Prof. Roberts’ second book on this topic, Torn Apart. 

Instead, Drake repeatedly cites one study – his own – purporting to show no racial bias. I analyze the many failings of that study in detail here.

● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that most neglect cases investigated by child protective services (CPS) agencies are “just poverty.” 

This is simply a regurgitation of the puerile debate over whether a case is “poverty alone.” First of all, plenty of cases are poverty alone. Three separate studies found that 30% of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families simply had adequate housing. 

But whether poverty is “alone” or not ignores the central question: Do you need to tear apart a family to fix whatever might there along with the poverty? The answer is a resounding no.  The way to tell if a case is a poverty case actually is pretty simple: If the solution is money, the problem is poverty.  Study after study finds that in a great many cases, the solution is money.

When the problem is poverty alone the solution is money. But, as this article from 23 leading scholars explains, often when the problem is poverty plus something else the solution still is money – which makes sense since the “something else” often is caused by or exacerbated by poverty. I discuss the whole “just poverty” debate in detail in this presentation at a Kempe Center conference. 

● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that neglect is less serious than abuse – and we know this because 76.4% of fatalities are due to neglect. 

But that tells us nothing about neglect allegations in general. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, family police agencies “substantiated” neglect allegations concerning 377,742 children. There were 1,252 fatalities attributed to neglect.  The fact that 33/100ths of one percent of “substantiated” neglect allegations involved fatalities tells you nothing about the other 99 and 66/100ths percent - yet this is the entire basis for Drake’s claim. 

Drake’s whole argument about neglect and fatalities is based on statistics abuse, but teasing out the facts gets a bit wonky. If there  happen to be any child welfare wonks out there who want to go into the weeds on this, I have a detailed explanation in this column for The Imprint. 

Drake sets up a straw man when he implies those who challenge the approach he champions, and which has dominated child welfare for more than half a century think neglect is “trivial or something that can be ignored.” 

On the contrary, we think it is urgent to address what agencies call neglect – by addressing the poverty that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is confused with neglect or caused by neglect; as opposed to tearing children from their homes at least 179,000 times per year and putting many more families under oppressive, traumatizing surveillance. 

● Drake’s claim: He says it’s a myth that anonymous reports are “unnecessary at best and are often simply harassment.” 

OK, now things are getting weird: Anonymous reports are among those least likely to be substantiated. In New York City, for example, 22.7% of all reports are “substantiated” – which means only that a worker checked a box on a form. For anonymous reports, it’s 6.7%.  To which Drake replies: Yes, but other categories of reporters have substantiation rates almost as bad! 

So, does that prove the need for anonymous reports, or does it prove the need to also replace mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, so workers are not deluged with false reports from all sorts of sources, stealing time from finding children in real danger? 

But wait, it gets weirder: Drake makes the case for anonymous reports by saying: 

Surprisingly, reports from “unclassified” sources (including anonymous, “other,” and “unknown or missing” sources) are actually slightly more likely to result in re-reports in multivariate models than are reports from professional sources. 

But that’s not surprising at all – if you understand that anonymous reports are, in fact, often simply harassment.  Of course someone engaged in harassment will “re-report”! 

By the way, those data from New York City come from this column in The Imprint calling for replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The column was not written by lawyers who represent parents; it was written by lawyers who lead an agency that represents children. They’re on the frontlines. They see the harm such reports do to children every day. Maybe lawmakers – and “scholars” like Drake -- should listen to them. 

And then comes a claim that’s weirder still … 

● Drake’s claim: “It’s a myth that CPS spends most of its resources investigating unnecessary calls.”  

This is a myth, Drake claims, because CPS spends even more of its money on things like holding children in foster care (and, though he doesn’t mention it, warehousing children in institutions that can cost well over $100,000 per year per child). 

Well, sure, Brett, we’re glad to second any claim that CPS is spending vast amounts of money on foster care! But of course, he’s missing the point. What we actually say is that of the resources – not just money but caseworker time and effort – expended on investigations, most of that is devoted to unnecessary calls. This is demonstrated by the huge number of investigations where workers themselves find that the allegation was false. And that steals worker time from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

● Drake’s claim: It’s a myth that foster care is toxic to children. The basis for his claim: 

“The limited research we have is mixed, but the majority of well-controlled studies do not find that foster care is harmful to children, and it is sometimes found to be protective …” 

OK, let’s parse this one. 

“The limited research we have is mixed …” 

Let’s stop right there. There are multiple rigorous studies that find that foster care is indeed harmful; not for every child, but in typical cases children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

And consider what a low bar the system is setting for itself. These studies find foster care is worse even than leaving children in their own homes with little or no help to their families at all. Consider how much better still the outcomes would be compared to foster care if systems actually took some of that vast amount of money Drake rightly notes is spent on foster care and spent it on helping families instead. 

Now consider the implications of tearing nearly 200,000 children from their families every year  based, at best, on research that is “mixed.” 

No one denies that removal from the home is inherently traumatic – at least I hope not. No one denies that much of foster care is dismal.  

Just read what current and former foster youth themselves have to say about what foster care is really like. In this report, and this one, and this one. Yes, some foster youth believe, almost certainly correctly, that they needed to be taken away anyway. But that’s no excuse for ignoring so much lived experience to the contrary. And that is not the same thing as claiming that the system does not do harm. 

As for the inherent trauma of removal itself, just listen to the cries of children torn from their parents at the Mexican border during the first Trump Administration. No, seriously, Prof. Drake: Listen to them. Right here. Right now: 

Of course, unlike Trump’s Border Patrol, CPS workers almost always mean well, but the overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children torn from their families by those workers, yes, often when their poverty is confused with neglect, cry out the same way for the same reason.  Yet Drake defends doing this to children based on the claim that the research concerning whether they also will be, for example, more likely to be unemployed, become pregnant as teenagers or wind up in jail is mixed?

Now, back to Drake:

 … the majority of well-controlled studies…

 Note the hyphenated weasel-word there. Drake offers no definition of “well-controlled;” so it may just mean “the studies that reach the conclusion I want.”  But more important is the rest of that sentence: 

… do not find that foster care is harmful to children. 

Here again, what an astoundingly low bar the child welfare establishment sets for itself, particularly when compared to the enormously high bar set for any program that works to keep families together. We should keep on doing what so many current and former foster youth say traumatized them because there are some studies out there that find that foster care didn’t do harm? 

As for the studies supposedly showing it’s sometimes “protective,” at least one of those studies found that the improvement occurred after reunification. So it wasn’t the foster care, it was being back with their families. 

And Drake never even mentions all the studies showing stunningly high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

Drake begins this section of his screed by declaring “There is near-universal agreement that keeping children in their families is best so long as the child is safe.” 

But if you really believe foster care is harmless and maybe even beneficial, why is keeping children in their families “best so long as the child is safe”?  After all, if it’s actually beneficial wouldn’t it be good for children who are safe but are simply being denied the “benefits” of being around white middle-class people? So I have to wonder how much confidence Drake really has in his own claims about the benefits, or at least the lack of harm, of foster care. 

In fact, foster care is toxic to children. Yes, on rare occasions it may be less toxic than the home from which the children were taken – particularly if you don’t actually do anything to make things better in the home. And even when it doesn’t result in foster care, investigations themselves can be enormously traumatic for children.  Because they are so toxic, they need to be used rarely and in very small doses. 

Instead, we have created a massive child welfare surveillance state that will force one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children to endure the trauma of investigation before they turn 18 – according to a study co-authored by Brett Drake. 

As for safety, consider what one of the architects of the current system, one of the many having second thoughts, has to say. 

Responding to a commentary co-authored by another member of the Caucus of Denial defending the current system, Dr. Richard Krugman wrote that he agreed with the commentary authors that …

“… just ablating CPS agencies is the wrong approach. BUT we now have 40 years of experience with this approach and have made no progress in reducing the mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1500-2500 children dying annually). … Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn't seem (or can't be shown) to be working was someone's definition of insanity. [Emphasis in original; full quote here].

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 10, 2025

● In Missouri: more good journalism about a bad system. This time, The Journal reports on a foundation-funded effort to curb the confusion of poverty with neglect. But the most interesting part of the story is the lengths to which the state’s family police agency is going to sabotage the project by fear-bombing the reforms. I have a blog post about it, with a link to the full story. 

● It’s a long, slow process but, The Marshall Project reports, states are beginning to consider laws to curb secret non-consensual drug testing of pregnant women. From the story: 

“We know when there’s secret drug testing, families are often torn apart,” said New York state Rep. Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, who noted cases of women who were reported to child welfare over positive tests caused by poppy seeds and prescribed medications. “This is not some theoretical discussion we’re having here. This is really something that occurs.” 

● Following up on a superb series of stories in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Billy Penn reports on efforts by two members of the City Council to take action. One of them, Councilmember Cindy Bass, wants to refocus on the report of the Council’s Special Committee on Child Separations, which issued what I refer to as a comprehensive “Blueprint for Child Safety.” (NCCPR was represented on the committee.)  As the story explains: 

Grounded in interviews with families who experienced foster care, the committee’s first report determined that the city often defines conditions of poverty as “neglect” and needlessly separates families, who then receive insufficient support. 

●The Inquirer reports that another member of the Council, Nina Ahmad, held a hearing focusing largely on the private agencies that oversee most foster care in the city. But, unlike the Special Committee, this hearing apparently did not focus on the problem at the root of all the others, Philadelphia’s ongoing high rate of tearing apart families. 

The head of Philadelphia’s family police agency, Kimberly Ali, correctly noted that there has been real progress in reducing entries into care. But as of 2024, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Philadelphia still was taking away children at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities. Meanwhile, the private agencies that oversee foster care in Philadelphia and have been the subject of repeated exposés for tolerating rampant abuse have a solution of their own: Make it harder for their victims to sue them! To her credit, Ali has rejected this idea. 

Now, three dispatches from the frontlines: 

● In Minnesota, The Imprint reports, Foster Advocates released a report 

… spearheaded and produced by former foster youth. It takes glaring aim at the “promise” the state makes when it removes a child from its parents and home — on the premise that the system can provide better care. 

“It is a promise the state struggles and, too often, fails to keep,” states the report. … 

Also from the story: 

Dez was taken from her birth mother at age 1 along with her sister, and spent four years in foster care before they were both adopted into a home, where she said they were physically and emotionally abused. … 

A woman identified as Deddtrease … entered foster care at the age of 14 and stayed until she aged out of the system. The 26-year-old single mom said the report highlights the “mistreatment and underlying problems that nobody sees that we have to live with for the rest of our lives.” 

In her case, “I wish they would have left me with my mother,” she said. “They exposed me to more trauma than what I was going through at home.” 

This excerpt from the report summarizes its many recommendations. 

● Also in The Imprint, a former Child Protective Services worker writes about gaining new insight about substance abuse – when it happened in her family. She writes: 

I am grateful that I was divorced and that my children lived with me, avoiding the immediate threat of child protective services (CPS) intervention. I shudder imagining the potential intrusion and added trauma of having to prove the ability to keep our children safe while grappling with the chaos of addiction. And as someone who was once a CPS worker and intervened in the lives of other families, I now ponder how CPS involvement compounded the stress level of families in need and destabilized them in an already overwhelming time. Many families I worked with had been affected by substance dependence and resulted in family upset and child removal. 

● And there’s this from The Observer, in Sacramento: 

Given how it has historically shown up in the African American community, the child welfare system has earned its critics. They point to a history of systemic racism and inequality that leads to a disproportionate number of Black children being removed from their homes and spending more time in foster care than children of other ethnicities. Some of the most outspoken detractors are former social workers, legal experts and adults who have been scarred by their experiences in the system. … 

Among those profiled: Malachi Chaney-McClain of California Youth Connection. From the story: 

When they did have a legit apartment, Chaney-McClain purposefully took the bed near a window. 

“If CPS came, I wanted to be able to jump out the window,” he recounts. “It was on the second floor and there were bushes. I wanted to be able to catch my sisters and to just not be taken anymore.” 

● The headline from this story in Reason sums up the breathtaking cruelty of authorities in this North Carolina case “A Car Hit and Killed Their 7-Year-Old Son. Now They're Being Charged for Letting Him Walk to the Store.” 

And finally, two items seemingly unrelated to child welfare – except that they are: 

● Immigration raids are, of course, a great way to spread misery by separating children from their families. CNN reports that when the Trump Administration staged its immigration raids in Los Angeles, once again tagging along was – Dr. Phil. You know what else separates children? Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Though the volunteers almost always mean well, massive studies show that CASA prolongs foster care, reduces the chances of reunification and makes it more likely that foster youth will “age out” with no home at all. So it’s somehow appropriate that a longtime celebrity spokesperson for CASA is – Dr. Phil. 

 ● Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal – in which the data of millions was harvested from Facebook and then weaponized without their consent, was interviewed last week by John Stewart on The Daily Show. She painted a truly frightening picture of what happens when government agencies are allowed to take all the data they have in separate databases, put it all together and use it any way they damn well please. Yeah, we all know it’s scary when Elon Musk does it. But the reason this item is here is because when it comes to this kind of massive, dangerous invasion of privacy the trendsetter is – child welfare. Yet initially, at least, most journalists not only weren’t alarmed by it, they applauded it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns of a "toxic combination of secrecy and bias."  You can read more about all about that here.