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

Prof. Shanta Trivedi on a bill that “puts marginalized families on an equal footing with their more privileged counterparts.”

Witnesses testify in favor of the Maryland "Know Before They Knock" bill.
You can watch the entire video here.

If you don’t know your rights, you don’t have your rights. When impoverished families hear that pounding at the door in the middle of the night from a worker for child protective services, often they don’t know their rights.  

A lot of CPS agencies want to keep it that way.  But five states have passed what are commonly known as “family Miranda laws,” requiring the agency to tell families their rights – including their right to consult a lawyer.  In Maryland, a bill to do that, HB 223, is called “Know Before They Knock."  It was the subject of a hearing before the Maryland House of Representatives Judiciary Committee last week.  It’s well worth watching the hearing, available here. 

Below, I’ve reprinted the testimony of one of the many witnesses speaking in favor of the bill. 

Prof. Shanta Trivedi teaches and writes about the child welfare system at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She is the faculty director of the Meyerhoff Center for Families Children and the Courts. She has also represented parents who have had their children removed without knowing their rights. [Emphasis in original]: 

Imagine CPS knocks on your door in the middle of the night.  They say that they’re going to search your home. They will search your medicine cabinet, your bedroom.  They’ll ask questions about your romantic partners, about how many glasses of wine you have each week.  They’ll ask to speak to your children without you being present and to inspect their naked bodies. How would you respond? Welcome them in? I doubt that. I know that I would tell them come back with a warrant, and I would call a lawyer immediately, because I know my rights. You know your rights.  But, of course, not everyone does. 

This bill simply puts marginalized families on equal footing with their more privileged counterparts.   This bill would establish that constitutional protections apply in child welfare investigations and would allow parents to make informed decisions throughout the process. 

To date, Connecticut, Texas, Florida, Montana and Arizona have all passed these laws and New York and Delaware have introduced similar legislation.  The question is whether we want to join those states in respecting parental rights for ALL parents or just for the privileged few. 

Rather than making children less safe, states that have passed similar laws have found that they keep children safer because transparency from the agency encourages families to be more forthcoming.   Further, the law already provides for law enforcement and DSS to be able to enter in emergency situations.  This bill would not change this. 

I know that opponents do not want DSS to be perceived as a policing agency but unfortunately, many parents already feel this way because of the intrusive nature of investigations and the threat that their children can be taken. Regardless of what the perception is, the fact remains that removing one’s child directly impacts both the parent and child’s rights to family integrity and the parent’s right to care, custody and control of their children.  This is true regardless of whether the police do it or if DSS does it.  Whether or not we advise parents of how to protect those rights, they still exist.  

The goal of the child welfare system is to protect children, and research shows that most children do best with their families. Because I believe this bill is an important step toward protecting family integrity. I urge you to support HB223.

P.S. I just caught up with Sunday's edition of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. In the course of discussing immigration raids he said something that could apply to any government agency that pounds on people's doors in the middle of the night and demands entry:

Highlights from a special issue of Family Court Review

In addition to our regular news round-up, which will be posted later in the week, I want to highlight several excellent articles in a special issue of Family Court Review

● Vivek Sankaran and Christopher Church turn the current “master narrative” about securing “permanency” for children on its head.  That false narrative, pushed hardest by those who hate birth parents (and yes, that’s the right word) claims that only adoption guarantees a truly permanent home for a child removed from her or his parents. 

Sankaran and Church show that is false in every respect.  Partly that’s because adoptions sometimes fail.  As Sankaran and Church point out: 

any public reporting of the number of adopted children who once again enter foster care is likely an underestimate. Even with these limited data, a recent study found that more than 66,000 adopted children ended up back in foster care between 2008 to 2020, an average of 12 a day. 

Equally disturbing: 

[O]ne survey showed that only 41% of children over six adopted out of foster care expressed having a very warm and close relationship with their adoptive parent … Often, in the words of researcher Monique Mitchell, “they are grieving the loss of their identities and their role within their psychological family.” So they experience feelings of fear, anger, abandonment, shame, embarrassment, and low self-esteem. 

In contrast, a status known as guardianship does not require such a trade-off.  Guardianship, typically with a relative or close family friend, is as legally secure as adoption and just as stable.  But it doesn’t require children to sever all ties with parents and sometimes with siblings, extended family and community as well.  They also take less time to achieve than adoptions. So in many cases, they are a better and a faster route to “permanency.”  

And that gives away the game: Those who equate permanency with adoption only (and you’ll notice those advocates are disproportionately white and middle-class) aren’t really interested in permanency.  They’re interested in getting overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children into homes that most closely resemble their own, no matter what the cost. 

Also in Family Court Review: 

● In an essay called “Why abolition” Dorothy Roberts explains “not only how the family policing system harms children, but also why abolishing it is essential to keep children safe.”

● The tragedy of needless termination of parental rights, adoption failure and legal orphans – children who “age out” of foster care with no home at all -- all were worsened by the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  Shanta Trivedi explains why “The adoption and safe families act is not worth saving: The case for repeal.” 

● Even with ASFA in place, judges have a lot of discretion. Too often when the family police seek to tear a child from parents (or after they’ve already just gone ahead and done it) and when they seek to terminate children’s rights to their parents, judges wield rubber stamps instead of gavels.  Angela Olivia Burton and Joyce McMillan explain “How judges can use their discretion to combat Anti-Black racism in the United Statesfamily policing system.”   

● Five women, all affiliated with the parent-led, community-based organization Rise discuss their experiences: Still, we rise: Lessons learned from lived experiences in the family policing system

● And Daniel Hatcher exposes the seemingly endless ways that various government agencies have found to make poor families miserable. He calls it "Commodified inequality: Racialized harm to children and families in theinjustice enterprise."

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