“We don’t have enough money to stop being racist!” Well, no, county family police agencies in Minnesota (where counties run these systems) didn’t say it in those words.  But in this excellent story from Minnesota Public Radio that’s essentially the argument put forth by county family policing agencies opposing a new version of the Minnesota African American Family Preservation Act.  That is just more b.s.  Just as Minnesota takes away children at a rate nearly double the national average, Minnesota spends on child welfare at a rate even more than double the national average. And ..read more

● CNN reports on how some hospitals finally are moving to put the needs of children first. They’re no longer as willing to automatically turn in to the family police anyone who’s pregnant but is using drugs – because doing that is the perfect way to scare new mothers away from prenatal care and giving birth in a hospital.  ● But the bad news continues in Maine, where demagoguery by a former public official and a current child welfare “ombudsman” continues to fuel foster-care panic.  Now, the Maine Monitor reports, children are trapped in foster care even longer before even getting a ..read more

As soon as Sen. Jon Ossoff released his report on massive failures at the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, DFCS fired back, accusing Ossoff of “political gamesmanship.”  Actually, it’s worse. There is every indication that Ossoff is sincere and genuinely wants to help vulnerable children. But that will only make it harder to persuade him that, because of a critical error in his analysis, his report may trigger a response that makes everything even worse. ... Read the full commentary in the Georgia Recorder ..read more

● Last week, in a column for The Imprint, I wrote about how, though the journalism of child welfare is improving, some places are still promoting the big lie of American child welfare.  They scapegoat family preservation for child abuse deaths and encourage foster-care panic. I cited the Minneapolis Star Tribune as a prime example.  They’re doing it for the second time in a decade – but this time state legislators don’t seem to be buying it.  More evidence that lawmakers are not being suckered came at a dramatic public hearing on a new, expanded version of the Min ..read more

Faced with one revelation after another about tragedies involving children previously known to the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, that agency has come up with a knee-jerk response that is simple, obvious and wrong: a worst-in-the-nation mad rush to tear far more children away from their families.  As a result, in 2022, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, while almost everywhere else in America recognized the enormous harm of needlessly sundering families and reduced entries into foster care, in Louisiana, they skyrocketed 23% over the prev ..read more

UPDATE, 2024: given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, expect the usual op-eds to have token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system even bigger and more powerful.  Indeed, this year, the leading group of one time "health terrorists" (that's their own term!) Prevent Child Abuse America will be proclaiming its supposed interest in racial justice while campaigning to expand the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.  This horrible federal law laid the founda ..read more

● Any family caught up in the politics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Massachusetts “Child Advocate” Maria Mossaides is in for hell.  Neither was directly involved in a case in the news this week, but both did a lot to create the climate of fear that prolonged a five-year-old boy’s anguish.  The New York Times did a superb job telling the story.  I have a blog post about the lessons it teaches, with a link to the Times account.  ● Speaking of multi-state failure, Honolulu Civil Beat reports it turns out it took incompetence – or worse – in two states for Geanna Bradley to ..read more

All of the love, compassion and common decency in this case came from people not employed by family police agencies. Massachusetts "Child Advocate" Maria Mossaides was not involved in this case. Had she been asked, she probably would have made the right call. But, though it wasn't her intent, she's fomented a climate of fear that helped prolong this child's agony.  The New York Times published a deeply reported, deeply moving story Sunday about one immigrant mother’s desperate quest to find and reunite with her five-year-old son.  It is almost a miracle that she ultimately s ..read more

It’s stories like this, from ProPublica, that make me glad someone invented the word “gobsmacked.”  If you drop everything and read it right now, you’ll thank me. No one excerpt does it justice, but here’s one that gives at least a hint:  Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. A ..read more

● Last week, we noted a fascinating study by the NYC Family Policy Project revealing that New York State’s child abuse hotline screens out far fewer cases than the national average, inundating the localities that investigate the screened-in calls with false allegations, trivial cases and poverty-confused-with-neglect cases.  The Imprint has a good story on the report.  So does the New York Daily News  And I have a blog post on the pathetic response from Jess Dannhauser, commissioner of New York City's Administration for Children's Services. (Be sure to see the response from the ..read more