Mass. family police try an end-run around the State Legislature on child welfare and drug use

But don’t worry, the “cannamoms” will still be safe

The Massachusetts family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, recently solicited comment (presumably only because they had to) on a proposed change to regulations defining child abuse. The change is an attempt to get around a wise decision by the State Legislature.

Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the way DCF helped the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” try to sucker a special commission into recommending all sorts of expansion of mandatory reporting. The commission wasn’t fooled. 

Neither was the legislature. They actually passed a good change which, ever so slightly, narrows the long list of conditions mandatory reporters must report.  But DCF isn’t having that!  They’re trying an end-run by changing regulations. 

It all amounts to a great big DCF-U! to the State Legislature.  Let's see if the lawmakers tolerate it.

Here’s the comment I sent to DCF: 

[Your proposed change] contradicts best practice, contradicts the evidence base concerning substance use and child welfare – and flouts the intent of the Legislature. 

The Legislature recently changed state law so mandated reporters no longer must automatically report any instance of “prenatal substance exposure.” They remain free to report it when, in their professional judgment, they believe such a report is necessary to protect a child. This is a clear recognition that this knee-jerk response of automatically reporting every such instance did nothing to improve child safety. On the contrary, it compromised safety by driving pregnant women away from prenatal care and hospital delivery. 

Rather than respect best evidence-based practice and the intent of lawmakers, you now propose to change regulations defining what constitutes “physical injury” – which of course is something mandated reporters have to report. 

Right now, that definition includes “addiction to drug at birth.” That’s bad enough. But your proposal would change the definition so that physical injury includes “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use.” What does that mean? Presumably whatever you want it to mean. (I’m guessing the groups you have in mind are those against whom DCF always comes down hardest: Poor people, especially poor people of color.  I doubt that it means you’ll be going after the “harmful patterns of substance use” displayed by the celebrated Cannamoms of Massachusetts’ affluent suburbs.) 

Here’s what this would mean for mandated reporters: Under state law mandated reporters don’t have to report “prenatal substance exposure.” But under the new proposed regulation, they would have to report “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use” – which, presumably would include “prenatal substance exposure.” 

In short, DCF seeks to overrule the Massachusetts Legislature. It is a classic example of the arrogance that leads Massachusetts to tear apart families at a rate 60%above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. And there certainly is no evidence that Massachusetts children are 60% safer than the national average. 

It is in keeping with the decades-long habit of DCF, and before that DSS, and before that DPW of failing to balance the potential harm of parental substance use (or any other alleged parental failing) against the known severe harm of tearing children from everyone they know and love – and the known risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find far higher rates of abuse than your agency acknowledges in official figures. 

For all of these reasons, and most importantly, for the safety of the children DCF claims it wants to protect, this proposed change should be rescinded.

The “druggie mom” in my neighborhood

Betty Ford was addicted to booze and pills, and had
mental health problems. But no one took away her children.

Richard Blodgett admits he was using fentanyl illegally.  The single father told the Associated Press he had to in order to control pain enough to support his 9-year-old diabetic son, Jakob. 

“I wasn’t getting high. I wasn’t abusing them. I was using them to be able to work and provide for my son,” Blodgett said. “Unfortunately, they are illegal. I can’t get around that. But they were stronger than my meds, and they were working.” 

Arizona authorities arrested Blodgett for drug possession, and the state’s family police agency threw his son into foster care.  Just two weeks later the boy was dead.  

From the AP story: 

A medical examiner listed Jakob’s death in late December as natural with complications from diabetes, a condition he was diagnosed with as a toddler. Specifically, Type 1 diabetes, which means his body was unable to produce enough insulin to survive. 

Blodgett said he suspects the Arizona Department of Child Safety failed in its duty to protect his son, either by not monitoring his blood sugar levels or not ensuring that Jakob had enough insulin to prevent a serious, life-threatening complication known as ketoacidosis. 

“They couldn’t keep him alive for two weeks, two weeks,” the father told the Associated Press … 

The story reminded me of another parent with a similar history of addiction. 

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, long before my family moved to Alexandria, Virginia, this addict raised her children in our neighborhood. 

It happened to her as it does to so many others.  It started with prescription opioid painkillers.  She got hooked. Unlike Blodgett, this addict got hooked on booze, too.  "I liked alcohol, it made me feel warm,” she would later say. “And I loved pills. They took away my tension and my pain."  On top of that, this addict had serious mental health issues. 

She was what the tabloids would have called a “druggie mom” – if she were poor, and especially if she were poor and nonwhite.  

Yet during all this time, no one took away her children.  She was never even investigated.  And in 1974, when her husband suddenly got a new job and they had to move to D.C., no one from a family police agency ever knocked at the door of the family’s new address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  

On the contrary: Betty Ford was hailed as a hero, and deservedly so, when she publicly disclosed her addictions and got treatment. She even established a celebrity rehab center.  Gallup polls found she was one of America’s ten most admired women every year through 1991 – the year she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  And the house where this “druggie mom” raised her kids is now a National Historic Landmark. 

Ah, defenders of this double standard might say, there was no evidence Betty Ford’s addiction impaired her ability to raise her children.  Of course it didn’t.  Because she had money.  She could get all the childrearing help she may have needed and, eventually, the best drug treatment money could buy. 

There’s no evidence Richard Blodgett’s drug use impaired his ability to raise his child, either, even without all that help.  In fact, the available evidence suggests that the biggest dangers to Jakob Blodgett were the police who arrested his father and the family police who forced the boy into foster care. 

The fact is, the world is full of Betty Fords – people who, for all sorts of reasons, use drugs without endangering their children.  And where there really is a danger, the solution is giving those other parents a small fraction of the resources Betty Ford had.  

We need to apply the Betty Ford standard to all parents with substance abuse issues. If only someone in Arizona had thought of that, Jakob Blodgett might be alive today.

Another bill takes a swing at drug using parents – if it passes, guess who’s going to get hit

            The story on the online news site North Carolina Health News is headlined “Foster care bill could allow faster termination of parental rights.”  Written by the site’s founder, Rose Hoban, it is a far better take than most on issues involving child welfare and drug use, showing rare care and sensitivity.

It’s not unusual to see stories about the effects of opioid use on children in which reporters consider parents too subhuman even to talk to (Case in point: The Washington Post.) In contrast Hoban’s story begins with such a parent, brings out her humanity, and shows her successful reunification with her child.  Although I’ll spend much of this post citing parts of the story with which I disagree, Hoban goes to unusual lengths to present all sides.

            But (paragraphs like the one above are almost always followed by “but…”) I do disagree with one central premise of the story.  Hoban writes:

At issue is the tussle between the rights of children who have troubled parents to live less chaotic lives, in foster care, or with perhaps adoptive parents, and the rights of birth parents to take the time to get their lives in order, to win back their rights to raise those children.

            That is the standard framing of the issue.  But the problem with bills like the one in North Carolina, known as House Bill 918, is not that they hurt parents – the problem is that they hurt children.

Lessons from the last “Worst Drug Plague Ever”

            That is a lesson we all should have learned from the last “Worst Drug Plague Ever,” crack cocaine.

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. 

Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems. According to the Times:

[A] growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother.  Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care.

 “Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies.

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

Indeed, as I discuss in this column for the trade journal Youth Today, child welfare’s entire approach to substance abuse exists at the intersection of ignorance and arrogance.

The chaos of foster care

That Florida study is only one example of why House Bill 918 would hurt children. 

The story says that part of the issue is the right of children to have “less chaotic lives, in foster care or with perhaps adoptive parents...” Sometimes that’s what happens; often it isn’t.  Foster care is enormously chaotic.  That’s one reason why study after study after study has found what that Florida study found: in typical cases children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children in foster care.

That’s true even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are.  But another series of studies finds abuse in at least one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

Yes, I know. The story quotes proponents as suggesting families are lining up to adopt these children.  But that’s also what they said when they fooled Congress into passing the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.  (I say fooled because some of those making the case at the time knew that wasn’t true.)  In any event, it didn’t work. Instead, terminations far outran adoptions, and the number of children “aging out” of foster care with no home increased. 

Attacking kinship care

The bill also seeks to undermine the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, in which children are placed with relatives instead of strangers.

            The story also quotes a lawyer for a county social services agency whining about how hard it is to find relatives.  That simply gives away the fact that a lot of the impetus behind this bill isn’t what’s best for children, it’s what’s easiest for agencies. 

In Allegheny County, Pa. to cite just one example, 56 percent of foster children are placed in kinship foster care.  It’s not impossible; it just takes more effort, and a true dedication to putting the interests of children first – because (yes, it’s that pesky research again) study after study has shown that kinship foster care is better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”

There also are the usual trendy claims about brain science, bonding and trauma.  It’s not that those issues aren’t real, but those favoring a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare have been cherry-picking from the research.  For example, one of the worst “Adverse Childhood Experiences” a child can endure is removal from a parent. Yet those who cherry-pick from the research propose what amounts to trying to fight trauma with trauma.

As for bonding, that too is real, and really important.  But look at what those Florida infants are trying to tell us, and what we’re learning about how to treat newborns with opioids in their system: Don’t break the bond these children were born with.   More generally, bonding is a lot more complicated and nuanced than simply running a stopwatch and declaring that the child is bonded with, and only with, whoever had her or him the longest.

Indeed, one should be especially wary when child welfare agencies play the bonding card – they tend to deal it from the bottom of the deck.  In fact, the Trump Administration is using it to try to justify keeping apart some of the children torn from their parents at the Mexican border.

Racial and class bias

I was surprised that there was nothing in the story about the two factors that are at the root of almost everything in child welfare: Race and class.  The biggest single problem in child welfare is the confusion of poverty with neglect, compounded by the racial bias that permeates the system.

The North Carolina bill would add even more power to a system riven by racial and class bias. What this bill, and others like it, really would do is turn the child welfare system into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.

News and commentary round-up, week ending August 20, 2019

Once again, there’s been a lot of news:

● Can anyone think of a field other than child welfare in which so-called professionals go around urging their colleagues to think LESS before taking action that could hurt people?  That’s not some kind of inference. As this op-ed in The Hill explains, they’re literally telling their colleagues to think less!

● The Herald, in Everett, Washington decided to take an approach to the Snohomish County CASA scandal that is unusual for Washington State media: They covered it – and the story is excellent. Up to now, only KING-TV has reported on it.  I’ve updated the latest NCCPR Blog Post about the scandal.

● The New York Times Upshot column has a story with profound implications as Congress prepares to reauthorize the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.  As I’ve written before, the CAPTA approach is all about coercing parents – turning them in to child protective services, supposedly for “help,” but the CPS agency gets to decide that, and we all know what that means.  But the Times reports on a new study, confirming earlier research, that this only drives pregnant women away from prenatal care.  The researchers even quantify the harm to children’s health:

They found that policies that defined alcohol use during pregnancy as child abuse or neglect were associated with an increase of more than 12,000 preterm births. The cost of these were more than $580 million in the first year of life. Policies mandating warning signs where alcohol was sold were associated with an increase of more than 7,000 babies born at low birth weight, at a cost of more than $150 million.

● You’re killing kids! No, YOU’RE killing kids!  That’s how low the debate about child welfare has sunk in Los Angeles County.  I have a blog post about it.

● The New York Daily News has a good editorial about why Gov. Andrew Cuomo should sign the Preserving Family Bonds Act.

● Newsday has a good story about how Nassau and Suffolk Counties, on New York’s Long Island, have significantly reduced the number of children in foster care. Nassau’s approach includes reducing racial bias through Blind Removal Meetings.

● Indianz.com has a good analysis of a good court decision – the one upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act.  The story includes a guide, from the Native American Journalists Association, for reporting on ICWA.

● Suppose, hypothetically, the straight teenage daughter of gay parents embraced conservative Catholicism, causing a lot of stress within a family.  The daughter’s school compounds the stress, and then calls the Child Protective Services agency – which takes the youth away and places her in foster care with one of her gym coaches.  Anyone who is appalled by that should be equally appalled by the reverse – as in this actual case from Connecticut.

● It shouldn’t be necessary for the federal government to have to issue an entire information memorandum to explain to child welfare systems why “family and youth voice are critical to a well-functioning child welfare system…”  But remember, this is the field in which professionals are urging less thinking (see first item above.)  And the memo isn’t just a general exhortation. It offers specific examples of ways to do this, including investing in high-quality legal counsel for youth and families.

Jerry Milner, head of the Children’s Bureau at the federal Administration for Children and Families, writes about the importance of listening to youth and families – and acting on what one hears – in this column for the Rethinking Foster Care blog.

● And in Washington State, the King County Department of Public Defense has created a short video to help guide parents through the first crucial days after a child has been removed.  State laws vary, so many of the specifics may apply only to Washington State, but some parts may be useful elsewhere as well.

Child welfare and substance use: The Orange County Register’s exercise in statistics abuse

Photo by Gage Skidmore

The Orange County Register uses horror stories about child abuse deaths in exactly the way Donald Trump uses horror stories about crimes committed by immigrants.

Were there a hotline to which one could report “statistics abuse,” the reporters who wrote the Orange County Register series “Born on Drugs” would have their rights to the calculator apps on their phones terminated.

The Register’s misleading use of data, combined with the resurrection of long-discredited claims about drug use and child welfare, amount to “crack baby journalism” – a revival of the sorts of hype and hysteria that reappear whenever the nation is hit with a new “Worst Drug Plague Ever.”

As it happens, The New York Times published an outstanding eight-part series of carefully reported editorials debunking such myths – at almost exactly the moment the Register published its attempt to revive them – something I discuss in detail on the Southern California online news site WitnessLA.

But the Register also has trouble coping with numbers.  The statistics it cites come without links, so sources can’t be checked and context can’t be verified.  Even the descriptions of sources often are vague, crucial terms are not defined and time spans covered can be unclear.

Most of the statistics revolve around child abuse fatalities. Each is the worst form of tragedy and the only acceptable goal for such fatalities is zero. But hyping the numbers only takes us farther from that goal. Similarly, the goals of the Register journalists were noble.

But by encouraging a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, the Register’s journalism increases the likelihood that there will be more such horrors.  That’s because the real reason for the horrors almost always is an overloaded system and a rush to remove more children needlessly only overloads it more. 

Those of us who are truly committed to child safety know that the real numbers are bad enough, but real solutions often are counterintuitive.

The Big Lie of American child welfare

The Register takes almost every number out of context, and almost every assertion about those numbers is wrong.  It’s all done in the service of the Big Lie of American child welfare: the claim that leaving children in their own homes, or returning them there, is inherently risky while foster care, for all its other problems, at least is safe.

So the Register claims:

A parent’s right to rear children without state involvement is in constant play with a child’s right to be free from maltreatment. The … conflicting mandates have been debated by those inside the system for decades.

None of that is true.

In fact:

● Family preservation is almost always the better option because it is in the best interests of children; it is not a matter of “parents’ rights.”

● The “mandates” do not “conflict.”  There is no conflict with child safety, because in typical cases family preservation is the safer option – as can be seen by multiple studies and by California data the Register ignored.

So let’s go through the Register stories, statistic by statistic

Misleading statements about what happens

The Register tells us:

More than 2,200 children have suffered fatal and near-fatal incidents in California since 2009. 

Can you find the needles?

Why use a figure that covers at least nine years? Because it sounds worse than saying: In a state with 11 million children, an average of 244, or 0.002 percent suffer fatal and near fatal incidents each year.  Putting it that way also tells us that the number of children who suffer such “incidents” – a term the Register never defines – are both 244 too many and also needles in a gigantic haystack. So figuring out which 244 children are in that sort of danger is not nearly as simple as the Register stories imply.

Notice also that the Register has moved, without explanation, from discussing deaths allegedly linked to parental substance abuse to all forms of fatal and near fatal “incidents” – leaving readers to assume that all these incidents were caused by drug using parents.

(Later, when the Register offers an estimate of the number of children under 5 who are said to have died due to “drug exposure” it averages out to about than nine per year – in a state with at least 2.4  million children under age 5. That’s 0.0004 percent.)

Misleading statements about where it happens

The Register continues:

The overwhelming majority of these tragedies — more than 90 percent, according to a Southern California News Group analysis of data from California Department of Social Services — occurred while the children were in the care of their own parents and legal guardians.

Wow, sounds like a child’s own home must be the most dangerous place in the world, doesn’t it?

But what the Register doesn’t tell us is that at least 95 percent of California children live with at least one parent or a legal guardian.  So this statistic really tells us that, when it comes to children who suffer “fatal and near fatal incidents” they are probably safer in their own homes than elsewhere.

And in fact, this is confirmed by the mass of research showing that foster care itself has a terrible track record for safety, with study after study finding abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The record of group homes and institutions is even worse.

The Register offers up its misleading statistics about safety right after telling us something else:

While the number of kids in California’s child protection system plunged almost 50 percent between 2000 and 2018, the number of infants — younger than one year — shot up more than 9 percent.

Thus, readers are left to conclude: Aha! Foster care plummeted and now all these children are dying.

Except: At no point does the Register offer data indicating that the rate of deaths and near deaths was lower back when California had so many more children in foster care.

In fact, it is almost impossible to reliably measure trends using child welfare fatality data. One reason is one for which we should all be grateful: Even in a state the size of California, the number of such horrible tragedies is low enough that is hard to draw conclusions.  Also:  Determining whether a death is due to abuse, neglect or accident is surprisingly subjective.  (But, just for the record, the only data I could find suggest that the figure fluctuates from year to year with no discernable relationship to the aggressiveness of child protective services.)

As foster care declines in California, child safety improves

But here’s what we do know: A far more reliable measure of safety is the rate of alleged recurrence of maltreatment.  That is, of all the cases in which workers declare an allegation of abuse or neglect “substantiated” in what percentage is there another “substantiated” allegation within 12 months.  During those same years in which foster care “plummeted” that measure improved in California by 28 percent.  So as foster care declined, California children got safer.

That is not as counterintuitive as it may sound. The more that workers are overloaded with false allegations, trivial cases, cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect and all the other cases that don’t belong in the system, the less time they have to find those needles in the haystack.  So again, it’s advocates of family preservation who are the true supporters of child safety.  In contrast, the hype and hysteria offered up by the Register is likely to make all children less safe.

As for the claim that from 2000 to 2018 “the number of infants — younger than one year — shot up more than 9 percent,” that’s an increase of about one-half-of-one-percent per year – a pretty weird definition of “shot up.”

False claims about reunification

Over and over, the Register stories suggest some kind of fanatical devotion on the part of the system to family preservation at children’s expense.

So a social worker tells the Register “California is a reunification state,” adding:

“That was embedded in me through my education process. They’re always going to work towards reuniting families, because there’s this belief that that’s better for the child overall. I don’t always agree with that.”

But it’s not just a belief; it’s a fact, documented in study after study showing that in typical cases, including cases involving substance use, children typically fare better in their own homes than in foster care.

But the social worker can stop worrying. The data belie the rhetoric. California is not “a reunification state.”

A record that is resolutely average

For starters, even with the “plummeting” rate of foster care placement since 2000, California’s record is resolutely average.  As of 2017, the most recent year for which comparative figures are available, the rate at which children were trapped in foster care in California was indeed below the national average – by all of five percent, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  And California’s rate of placement was more than 30 percent higher than New York, another large, relatively progressive state where individual counties run child welfare.

So in fact, it’s back when California had proportionately far more children in foster care, the time the Register seems to view as the good old days, that California was an outlier -- and children were less safe.

As for reunification: In federal fiscal year 2017, again the most recent year for which comparative data are available, nationwide 49 percent of the children who left foster care were reunified.  In California it was 51 percent – hardly suggestive of a fanatical dedication to reunification.  And again, California’s results have come with improvements in child safety.

The Register goes on to offer up a toxic mix of extreme horror stories and stats that have almost nothing to do with the horrors.

So after describing in detail the suffering of an infant “born on drugs,” the Register goes on to tell us that “Nearly 50,000 drug-exposed infants have been born in California since 2000, a parade of human suffering that has touched families, communities and taxpayers.”  They put the figure for 2017 at 5,050.  Again, they leave out context.  The figure is under two percent of all births in California that year.

And, of course, “drug exposed” is not defined.  We are meant to assume the worst, of course. But it actually can mean anything from giving birth in the middle of a home meth lab to smoking marijuana to ease the pain of labor. It also can include cases in which the mothers are prescribed legal drugs such as methadone and buprenorphine as part of a program to treat addiction to opioids.

But the clincher, the one journalists who seek to fan the flames of take-the-child-and-run hysteria love most, begins in the Register series with the subhead “Deadly benefit of the doubt?” and continues:

It’s unclear how often the push to keep families together ends badly.

Actually that’s not true.

As noted earlier, as California has done more to keep families together, the rate at which children “known to the system” are abused or neglected again has declined, indicating that whatever push there may be to keep families together actually has made children safer.

The most misleading statistic in child welfare

But the Register reporters ignore all that, and all those studies on how children in typical cases typically fare better in their own homes. Instead they rely on the single most misleading statistic in all of child welfare – the one about the proportion of horror stories involving children “known to the system.”  So the Register tells us:

[S]ome three-quarters of child deaths due to abuse and neglect tracked by the state of California – and some 60 percent of serious injuries – happened in families that had previous contact with the child welfare system. Examples of the system backfiring can be horrific.

Indeed they can. Examples of undocumented workers committing terrible crimes also can be horrific. That’s why Donald Trump uses them at every opportunity to draw broad, sweeping - and false - conclusions.

The Register does exactly the same thing.  As is discussed in the column for WitnessLA, the requisite horror stories are followed immediately by:

The wisdom of California’s goal – keep families together even when parents struggle with addiction – is called into stark relief by such tragedies.

No, it’s not.  No more than the wisdom of say “sanctuary cities” is “called into stark relief” by Trump’s horror stories.

In fact, the wisdom of California’s goal, assuming there is such a goal, is proven by the fact that overall, children are safer and more children are spared the horrors of foster care itself.

If every effort to keep families together is “called into question” by horror stories then no child ever should be kept in her or his own home – because no system can avoid every horror story.  And even that won’t work, because then you still have all the horrors of foster care.  In fact, if any approach that leads to a horror story is off the table, then there can’t be any foster care either – because sometimes children die in foster care.

But of course that whole 77 percent figure is meant to leave an impression of massive failure – almost as if 77 percent of the time reunification leads to death or near death.

That’s because this figure leaves out another crucial number.

In a typical year nearly 500,000 California children are “involved with the child protection system” as, at a minimum, subjects of investigations. That's the blue in the pie chart above.  Of that number, roughly 188 died or nearly died.  That’s 0.04 percent. That's the red portion of the pie chart.

If it's hard to spot on a pie chart, imagine what it's like for caseworkers.

What does “involved” with the system mean?

The Register also offers up a misleading description of families “involved” with the system, describing them as families “officials knew were problematic.”  On the contrary, many of these children were the subject of false allegations that were screened out at child abuse hotlines.  Not only did agencies not know the families were supposedly “problematic,” they didn’t know them at all. 

Most of the rest were determined to be unfounded.  (And before anyone dredges up that old canard about how “Well, unfounded doesn’t mean it was false, maybe the worker just can’t prove it” look again at the data: The only study I know of to second-guess these decisions found that, nationwide, workers are two to six times more likely to wrongly “substantiate” an allegation than to wrongly label it unfounded.  Oh, and workers don’t need proof to “substantiate” an allegation, their own guess usually is enough.)

When a system is deluged with false reports, whether by malicious spouses or neighbors, “mandated reporters” terrified of not reporting cases they know are absurd, or simply well-meaning people who confuse a family’s poverty with neglect or otherwise are mistaken, it is the system that’s problematic, not all those families.

Yet, among this huge number of allegations, The Register thinks that there’s a vast family preservation conspiracy because an average of 188 per year - four one hundredths of one percent - died.

Yes, some of those cases had files with more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. Most do not.  Many are indistinguishable from many of the other 499,812 children who come to the attention of the system in some way every year. 

So what, exactly, does the Register propose to do with the other 499,812 children? Take them all away – instead of just the 28,000 or so California takes in a typical year?  And where, exactly would the Register propose to put them all?

What the figure actually shows is that parents almost never kill or nearly kill their children.  Those who do are those needles in a haystack.  You are not going to find those needles by trying to vacuum up the haystack with more reporting, more investigation more foster care and assuming that every mother with a substance use problem is a likely killer.

Toward real solutions

So what can be done?

Nine years ago, a liberal think tank in Texas – and yes, there really is such a thing -- tried to answer that question.

Here’s what they found does not work:

● The rate at which people report child abuse does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state screens in reports for investigation does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

What actually does contribute to child abuse deaths?

● High rates of poverty

● High rates of teen pregnancy

● Low rates of services to prevent child maltreatment.

And when the issue is substance abuse, what works? Exactly what The New York Times suggested in those groundbreaking editorials: Drug treatment, including medication-assisted treatment, and help that is neither judgmental nor patronizing.  One more thing that would help: Not assuming that every parent who uses a substance, legal or illegal, is incapable of being a good parent.

One of the editorial writers who worked on the Times series Jeneen Interlandi, summed it up perfectly in a series of tweets.  She began with this:

 A mother or a pregnant woman takes hard drugs, and we immediately sharpen the knives. Hang her, shoot her, lock her up. At the very least, take her kids away. Because what kind of mother does that?

Eight tweets later she concludes:

What if the answer to the question, "What kind of mother does that?" is, "A mother who is just like you, except that she has substance use disorder."

It looks as though the reporters at the Orange County Register were too busy on their own righteous indignation high to consider that possibility.  They should be careful. That kind of high can be addictive.

NCCPR in WitnessLA on a California newspaper's shameful revival of "crack baby journalism"

As 2018 turned to 2019, The New York Times published two stunning editorials with profound implications for child welfare – and for journalism. Unfortunately, at almost the same moment, the Orange County Register was making the same mistakes The New York Times was warning against.

Read the full column at WitnessLA

And there will be more about the failures of the Register stories on this blog on Tuesday.

NCCPR in Youth Today: New York Times editorial series shows how decades after media and child welfare got “crack babies” wrong, the damage lives on

Editorial writers rarely do their own reporting. Most of the time they comment on what reporters for their publications have found, or what they’ve read elsewhere.

But when editorial writers have done their own reporting, they’ve produced some of the nation’s best journalism about child welfare.  The year 2018 ended with an outstanding example: An eight-part series of editorials in The New York Times.

The primary theme of the series is the erosion of the rights of children as a result of fetal personhood laws – or related government interventions even when there is no law.  The examples cited include cases in which pregnant women have been criminally prosecuted for falling down stairs or having a miscarriage and other examples that sound like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

But two of the eight parts zero in on how the child welfare system has made everything worse, for the mothers and their children. Indeed, those two parts make the case that hysteria over so-called “crack babies” in the 1980s and 1990s, – a hysteria driven as much by the political left as by the right - and the resulting demonization of poor black mothers, gave enormous fuel to the fetal rights movement.  

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR statement on new foster care data

The federal government released new data today about children in foster care. (New means the data are "only" about one year old - covering Federal Fiscal Year 2017).  They show a small increase in the number of children trapped in foster care on the last day of that year, Sept. 30 compared to the same day a year earlier. They also show a small decrease in the number of children taken from their homes over the course of a year compared to the previous year.

NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler released this statement concerning the data.

The ongoing increase in the number of children in foster care on any given day is not due to the opioid epidemic. Rather, it’s due to child welfare’s typical failed knee-jerk take-the-child-and-run response to the opioid epidemic.  It is a response that lives at the intersectionof ignorance and arrogance.

The research is clear – even when substance abuse is the issue, in the typical cases seen by child protective services workers children do better when left in their own homes even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.  That’s why the first response should be drug treatment for the parents, not foster care for the children – not for the sake of the parents, but for the sake of the children.

The small decline in the number of children entering foster care gives hope that child welfare finally might be learning that lesson.

NCCPR in Youth Today on the little law that couldn’t

The law is the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatmente Act (CAPTA).  It codifies everything wrong with how we “fight” child abuse.

The idea of using CAPTA as the organizing framework for coping with child abuse, or even thinking about it, is absurd. And the notion that somehow a more powerful CAPTA with more money and more enforcement would somehow help children is profoundly dangerous.

Read the full column in Youth Today here.

Demonized in absentia: What The Nation got wrong about child welfare and opioids

UPDATE, JULY 26, 2018: Further evidence that the solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism: Everything that was left out of the story discussed below is included in this excellent story, also from The Nation.

There is a lot that is good in The Nation’s cover story “Lessons from the Opioid Epidemic: How public schools have become the safety net of last resort for traumatized children.”  The story, by Associate Washington Editor Zoë Carpenter, makes clear that the “root causes” of everything that has gone wrong are poverty and unemployment.  The story decries, albeit briefly, the lack of drug treatment.  The story even acknowledges some of the failings of previous journalism on similar issues.

Unfortunately, they learned the wrong lessons

But, in many ways, a publication that ought to know better has perpetuated stigma and stereotype,

and contributed to the dominant false narrative in American child welfare: that increases in foster care are inevitable because of opioids.

In fact, foster care is not increasing because of opioids. Foster care is increasing because of child welfare’s typical, knee-jerk, take-the-child-and-run response to opioids.

The story describes the effects of opioid abuse on children in one of the states where the problem is worst: West Virginia.  In particular, as the subtitle suggests, it focuses on the daily work of teachers in poor rural communities who try to help children affected by parental drug use.

The story makes the now-obligatory nod to the excesses of “crack baby” coverage in the 1980s and how that stigmatized both the children and their parents. But while the story goes to great lengths to avoid similarly stigmatizing children, it does almost nothing to counteract similar demonization of their parents.  

The parents are silenced

That’s because the voices of those parents are silenced.  In more than 5,000 words, we hear from children, from teachers, from counselors, from grandparents stepping in to provide kinship foster care, from law enforcement from emergency room doctors and on and on.  Not one of those 5,000+ words comes from a parent. That leaves everyone else to paint a picture of them. So they are demonized in absentia.

● The story is filled with anecdotes about the trauma inflicted on children by their parents’ drug use. The anecdotes are not hype. There are times when drug use inflicts exactly this kind of trauma on a child. But while the story does not overtly condemn the parents for it, it is still implied that all children whose parents use drugs inherently suffer this kind of trauma.  And that is not true.

● That false impression is reinforced by that total absence of  parents’ voices.  There are no voices from parents such as this one. We don’t even hear from former foster children such as the young woman, now a social worker herself, who wrote in Teen Vogue about how she never should have been taken from her parents; parents who were heroin addicts.  These perspectives contrast sharply with the “master narrative” of most coverage of child welfare and substance abuse, a narrative largely accepted in The Nation’s story.

So a grandmother raising her grandchildren says “We do our best to give them the best. But no matter what we give them, we can’t give them what a mom and dad who truly loved them could have given them.”

Do these children’s mom and dad not love them? We don’t know. We never hear from them.  But that kind of characterization certainly fits the dominant media stereotype of parents who “choose drugs over their children” (which, if one believes addiction is a disease, is like saying parents “choose cancer over their children).

And, indeed, according to the story, “Several [teachers] spoke resentfully about adults who, they felt, chose drugs over their kids’ well-being.” The closest thing to a dissent was from a teacher, whose own son has a serious drug problem, who said: “after a while, it’s not a choice,” [emphasis added].

Even the section decrying the lack of treatment options implies that few of these parents would take advantage of treatment anyway.  The story quotes an ER doctor who says: “It’s really sad.  We get a few that actually, legitimately want help …” [emphasis added].

● The trauma anecdotes are reinforced by a long, detailed discussion of Adverse Childhood Experiences – the various traumas that can scar a child for life.  There is much about the trauma inflicted by lives of uncertainly for children still living with their own parents.  There is much about how even seemingly small traumas can have big consequences. But one of the biggest traumas of all, the trauma of being removed from parents, is viewed as harmful – but inevitable.

Taking questionable numbers at face value

So, citing a local television news story as documentation, The Nation tells us:

There are 6,300 children in the foster-care system in West Virginia; nearly half were separated from their parents because of substance misuse.

That’s wrong for several reasons.

● The figure really means only that for about 3,150 children a caseworker checked a box on a form alleging substance misuse – often the easiest way to get a judge to rubber-stamp removal.

● Substance misuse can mean anything from parents overdosing in front of their children to a mother smoking marijuana to ease the pain of labor.  And, in the case of opioids, children often are taken from parents using medication, such as methadone or buprenorphine that is prescribed as part of their treatment plan.

● Most important, The Nation is accepting the conventional wisdom that the only answer to substance misuse by a parent is taking away the child.  There is no mention of states, such as Connecticut, where the child welfare agency does not view removal as inevitable, and is pioneering better alternatives.

With enough therapists ...

So The Nation focuses on the need for help to ease the trauma of separation after the fact, instead of questioning why all this separation is happening in the first place.  The story leaves the impression that if we just send in enough therapists the wounds inflicted on the children by the separation from their parents will all be healed. Surely what’s happening at the Mexican border should have debunked that myth once and for all.

● Similarly, the story is filled with references to children in foster care because a parent is in jail.  Yet   (The only reference to the possible misuse of incarceration is a throwaway line suggesting, correctly, that this is a problem in predominantly African-American inner-city neighborhoods. The possibility that it also could be a problem for poor whites in rural West Virginia goes unexplored.)

the story never asks if these parents should be in jail.

In short, there’s almost nothing wrong with what’s in the story – the problem is all that is left out.

So the story concludes that, in the community at its heart, “they need access to doctors and treatment centers, to jobs that don’t leave them with broken bodies. They need funding for teachers, for classroom supplies, for counselors.”

At no point does the story actually say foster care is the solution.  But the story gives no hint that foster care is part of the problem, either.

The Nation could have learned a lot from the far better reporting done by a small newspaper in Montana, The Missoulian, and a team of remarkably talented journalism students.  For one thing, they decided that parents with substance use problems actually were worth talking to.

The Nation story notes the common claim that this drug plague is being treated with more sympathy because it has a whiter face.  But while that may be true in some quarters, there is little evidence to support that claim in child welfare.  On the contrary, child welfare systems are jerking their knees in response to opioids the same way they did in response to crack – by rushing to tear apart families.

And The Nation doesn't seem to have a problem with this.