Confusing poverty with neglect, from coast to coast

Two stories in the news last week aptly illustrate that, no matter how deep in denial the child welfare establishment may be about it, they do indeed regularly confuse poverty with neglect. 

From Oregon … 

For decades, Oregon has torn apart families at a rate well above the national average. Things have improved, but as of 2025, it was still about 34% above that average when rates of family poverty are factored in. But that 34% figure is just a statewide average. Now, Investigate West reports that 

Since at least 2020, rural counties have consistently accounted for the highest rates of foster care involvement in Oregon, with some southeastern communities seeing rates three times higher than Multnomah County, the state’s most populous county. 

But that’s not because those rural counties are cesspools of depravity with triple the rate of child abuse. It’s for the obvious reason: Fewer services and more difficulty getting to them. From the story: 

KayCee Weeks … who oversees programs in rural Crook County, said many families she works with came to the attention of child welfare caseworkers because of parenting issues related to economic hardship. 

Some parents repeatedly missed their child’s health care appointments, because the provider was an hour away and they could not afford the cost of gas or repairs to a rundown vehicle, Weeks said. Others said they struggled to keep up with cleaning and maintaining their home, on top of everything else that is on their plate. 

Some of the responses in the story are disappointingly sanguine. They boil down to: We can’t do anything unless the state spends more. That’s not true. It would be nice if the state would spend more, but there’s no need to sit around waiting for that. While the data are old, Oregon probably already spends at a rate more than 80% above the national average, again, when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

So Oregon could accomplish a lot by shifting some of the money it wastes playing whack-a-mole with the state’s most vulnerable children. 

One other thing the story reveals, though it’s never mentioned: Oregon is engaging in a massive violation of federal law. That law requires that states make “reasonable efforts” to prevent children from being consigned to the chaos of foster care. 

Congress never defined that term. But common sense suggests that: “We don’t have anything except foster care so we’re throwing your kids into foster care” does not qualify. 

Unfortunately, in this respect, Oregon is not unusual. Across the country, ignoring “reasonable efforts” is far more the rule than the exception. 

… to Maryland 

In The Baltimore Banner, columnist Leslie Gray Streeter writes with rare insight and compassion about Kahliyah Gooding, a poor mother who was arrested after she left her children home alone. She quotes from the police report: 

“She leaves her children at home because daycare is too expensive and she has to work.” 

Yes, the usual crowd of affluent, censorious “professionals” can gleefully wag their fingers and say it wasn’t poverty “alone” because the house also was filthy. (Why, oh why didn’t she just hire a maid? Oh, wait…) 

Streeter knows better. So does Prof. Shanta Trivedi, associate professor of law and faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Family, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore. From the column: 

“… Most moms don’t want to leave their kids alone. I don’t think she left them because she thought it was a good idea,” Trivedi said. “She did what she had to do to put food in their mouths.” 

It’s possible Gooding’s children are now in foster care, though we don’t know. “The state will pay for other people to care for your children, but the same money could be used for daycare so that they could stay with their mom,” Trivedi said. “We put a lot toward foster care and adoption but very little on prevention.” … 

So why don’t parents in need avail themselves of the system? “Calling social services guarantees some sort of intervention, and you really run the risk of losing your kids anyway,” Trivedi said. 

This seems like a good place for a reminder that Maryland is planning to spend more than $1 billion over the next five years, just to buy 637 institutional beds to warehouse children.

Graphic by ChatGPT

Two new NCCPR op-eds

NCCPR in The Missouri Independent:

Fixing Missouri child welfare: Darrell Missey has it backwards 

In his masterful biography The Power Broker, Robert Caro describes how New York City’s “master builder” Robert Moses, became a master destroyer of communities because of a fundamental misunderstanding. 

Moses thought that if he just blasted enough highways through enough neighborhoods it would end the city’s chronic traffic congestion.  But each time he opened a new highway, in just a few years, traffic would be as bad – or worse. Moses didn’t understand that each new highway was luring more people into cars and out of mass transit. And all that highway spending caused alternatives to atrophy, compounding the problem and making the cycle ever worse. 

Today, the director of the Missouri Children’s Division, Darrell Missey, is making the same sort of mistake. … 

Read the full column in the Missouri Independent. 

And we joined Prof. Shanta Trivedi in this oped for the Baltimore Banner:

Inadequate housing for foster children is only part of the problem

Too many kids are removed from homes because of structural racism, and their families need more support.

The Baltimore Banner has been reporting on how, right now, in Maryland, children in the state’s care are living in hotel rooms and office buildings. We’re told the problem is a “shortfall of placement options” and the fact that group homes have closed. But this framing ignores the actual problem: Maryland doesn’t have too few foster homes, Maryland has too many foster children. We should be horrified not simply by where children are being housed, but also because they are being unnecessarily removed from their families in the first place. 

At a fundamental level, the overwhelming majority of cases are nothing like the horror stories in the news. In Maryland, over 62% of the children in the foster system are there due to neglect. However, in many cases, family poverty is confused with neglect. Nationwide, 30% of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had adequate housing. But the same Maryland governments that are willing to spend the money to house foster youth alone in hotels won’t house families who lack decent housing in hotels in order to keep them together. … 

Read the full column in the Baltimore Banner