Has Child Protective Services Gone Too Far?

It seems like everyday we hear more and more about CPS taking away children for the simplest of crimes, like say, letting an 11 year old walk across the street to the park...ALONE! Heaven forbid. If we continue to allow this to happen, the future for parents and children alike is at best uncertain.

A debate sparked by the free-range parenting movement has drawn attention to the threats and intrusions poor, minority families have long endured.

On July 29, 2013, a Latina mother in Illinois named Natasha Felix sent her three sons, ages 11, 9, and 5, out to play with a visiting cousin, a young girl, in a fenced park right next to her apartment building. The oldest boy was charged with keeping an eye on his siblings, while Felix watched them all from the window. While they were outside, a local preschool teacher showed up at the park with her class. She saw the 9-year-old climb a tree. Felix’s youngest son fought with his cousin over a scooter and, at one point, ran with it into the street. Based on this, the teacher called the child-abuse hotline, and Felix received a visit from the Department of Children and Family Services.

According to legal filings in the case, the investigator, Nancy Rodriguez, found that Felix’s kids “were clothed appropriately, appeared clean [and] well groomed,” and that Felix “appeared to be a good mother.” Felix’s oldest son seemed like a “mature young boy” who “certainly could be allowed to go outside by himself to the park next door.”

However, when Rodriguez asked Felix if the boys had any special needs, Felix replied that the 11-year-old and the 9-year-old had been diagnosed with ADHD. On the advice of their doctor, they were off their medications for the summer. Rodriguez later wrote that “based on the mother not knowing that the kids were running into the street with the scooter, based on the children having ADHD,” she recommended that Felix be cited for “Inadequate Supervision” under the Illinois Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act. As a result, Felix was placed on the state’s child-abuse registry, which led to her losing her job as a home healthcare aide and ended her dreams of becoming a licensed practical nurse.

“She’s been devastated,” says Diane Redleaf, executive director of the Family Defense Center, who is representing Felix before a state appeals court. “I’ve been talking to her about how this impacted her, and it’s heartbreaking. She couldn’t send her son to take the garbage out—she was afraid to do that.”

Earlier this year, a Maryland couple, Alexander and Danielle Meitiv, made international news after two run-ins with Child Protective Services, sparked by their decision to let their children, ages 10 and 6, walk to neighborhood parks by themselves. As self-described “free-range parents,” the Meitivs are committed to giving their kids freedom from constant adult oversight. According to an interview with Danielle in Psychology Today, after the second incident, a social worker demanded that Alexander sign a “temporary safety plan” saying that his children would be supervised at all times until CPS could do a follow-up. When he balked, the social worker threatened to have the children taken away from him immediately and called the police. The couple were ultimately found “responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect,” which Danielle calls “an Orwellian judgment,” adding that their lawyer describes it as “‘legal purgatory,’ because it seems to be meaningless in plain English, yet it’s like a cloud hanging over our heads.”

The Meitiv case was highly unusual, but not because of the arbitrariness or overreaction of CPS. It was unusual because the Meitivs are white, affluent, and highly educated: He’s a theoretical physicist, and she’s a science writer and consultant. “I’ve worked in this field for 35 years, and I can’t remember when child-welfare cases like this have been in the news,” says Redleaf. “We’ve been trying and trying to get that to happen.”

Advocates for families caught up in the child-welfare system hope that the national debate sparked by the free-range parenting movement will draw attention to the threats and intrusions that poor and minority parents endure all the time. Child-neglect statutes, says Martin Guggenheim, a New York University law professor and codirector of the school’s Family Defense Clinic, tend to be extremely vague, giving enormous discretion to social workers. “The reason we’ve tolerated the level of impreciseness in these laws for decades,” he notes, “is that they tend to be employed almost exclusively in poor communities—communities that are already highly regulated and overseen by low-level bureaucrats like the police. For somebody like me, the ‘free-range’ cases that are hitting the paper today are a dream come true, because finally people who otherwise don’t care about this problem are now calling out and saying, ‘Aren’t we going too far here?’”

“She’s been devastated. She couldn’t send her son to take the garbage out—she was afraid to do that.” — Diane Redleaf on her client, Natasha Felix

Indeed, several recent incidents in which poor women of color have been arrested for their entirely rational parenting decisions have received national attention, though not as much as the Meitivs’ case. In July, Laura Browder of Houston was arrested for child abandonment after bringing her kids, ages 6 and 2, to a food court and leaving them there—never out of her line of sight—while she interviewed for a job 30 feet away. A year earlier, Debra Harrell of South Carolina was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play alone in a park while she worked her shift at McDonald’s.

“Certainly, prior to this, I don’t think most white people knew very much about the child-welfare system, or were afraid that someone was going to knock on their door and say, ‘Let me see your kids,’” says Dorothy Roberts, a University of Pennsylvania law professor and the author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. “Whereas in black neighborhoods, especially poor black neighborhoods, child-welfare-agency involvement is concentrated, so everybody is familiar with it.”

In a July article for Al Jazeera America, Peggy Cooper Davis, an NYU law professor and former Family Court judge, highlighted the devastating effects that arbitrary decisions by CPS and similar agencies can have on black families. “I think of a devoted father whose child was removed from his care because a $5 bag of marijuana was found in his room by staff of the shelter where father and child were living,” she wrote. “I think of mothers who lost custody of their children because the mothers themselves had been subjected to domestic abuse.”

Yet progressives have not, in general, seen CPS as worthy of the same suspicion as other forms of law enforcement. (“Child Protective Services” tends to be used as a catchall term for child-welfare agencies, though different states use different names.) “I don’t often hear people relate police arbitrariness and child-welfare-authority arbitrariness,” says Davis. “It would be useful to relate them, for they often have to do with similar kinds of biased presumptions having dreadful effects in stressful situations.”

This view, of course, is hardly universal among experts: there are still those who defend CPS as a progressive institution. Among them is Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law professor and faculty director of the school’s Child Advocacy Program. Although Roberts once worked as Bartholet’s research assistant, today they represent opposite poles in the debate. Bartholet, a white woman who formerly worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, calls her opponents “extreme family preservationists” who are “putting kids at risk by insisting that, at almost all costs, they stay at home” with abusive or neglectful parents. She maintains that anecdotes about outrageous CPS intrusions are outliers: “More people need to think about all these issues from the point of view of the child. Imagine an infant or a toddler growing up in a household where they’re being tortured, being beaten, being locked in a closet, left on the floor to scrounge around for whatever food they can find. That happens all the time. Kids are removed from those houses and put right back.”

These things do happen. At the same time, in the majority of cases in which kids are taken from their families, the grounds are neglect, not physical abuse (though, as Bartholet points out, sometimes physical abuse is sus- pected, but only neglect can be proved). Usually, drugs are involved. “Overwhelmingly, something like 70 to 90 percent of cases in the child-welfare caseload are characterized by parental substance abuse, drugs, and/or alcohol,” Bartholet says. To her, that’s not an indictment of the system, because she believes that people who use drugs, particularly during pregnancy, should not be allowed to parent. As she wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed last year, “Massachusetts should test all children to assess whether there is prenatal drug or alcohol exposure. It should require substance-abusing parents to engage in rehabilitative treatment if they want to keep their children. It should place at-risk children in homes where they can be adopted if the birth parents can not comply with the treatment regimen.”

For Roberts, who is black, Bartholet is far too cavalier about the costs of separating parents and children, in some cases permanently. “It is appalling to devalue the bonds that black children have with their families in the way that Bartholet does,” she says.

“More and more, I see the hashtag #abolish fostercare.” — Dorothy Roberts

Whatever you think of parents who use drugs, it’s clear that poor parents and parents of color are held to a very different standard than middle-class white parents. “My daughter broke her collarbone twice when she was a young child,” says Guggenheim. “I took her to the same hospital, and the second time I brought her they treated me with great dignity and respect. If I were in Bed-Stuy and a single parent, [CPS] might have come to my door, they might have found some joints on my nightstand and taken my child, and I would be lucky if, 12 months later, I got her back in my custody. That’s how I live my white privilege every day. And they would have found joints on my night table, let’s be clear about that.”

The treatment of parents in the child-welfare system used to have greater salience among civil libertarians, but it was overshadowed by the very real imperative to protect children from abuse in their own homes. Guggenheim was a staff lawyer at the ACLU from 1976 to 1980, doing work to challenge “the vagueness of neglect and termination-of-parental-rights laws.” But toward the end of his time there, he says, the organization began to shift from protecting the rights of parents to their children to protecting children from their parents. The children’s-rights advocate Marcia Robinson Lowry came aboard in 1979. For a few months, she and Guggenheim worked together, but “her agenda was to support state intervention,” he says, “and mine was to limit it.” So he resigned. (In 1995, Lowry left to form a separate organization called Children’s Rights; after her departure, the issues surrounding family law largely fell off the ACLU’s agenda.)

Meanwhile, the right of parents to raise their kids free of government intrusion has become a cause célèbre for conservatives. Christian fundamentalists regularly demonize Child Protective Services; homeschooling activist ­Michael Farris even wrote a thriller, Anonymous Tip, about CPS’s evil child-snatching machinations. And Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah recently added a “free-range kids” provision to the reauthorization of the Every Child Achieves Act, a federal law funding elementary education. Lee’s amendment says that parents cannot be subject to civil or criminal charges for letting their kids walk or bike to school at whatever age they deem appropriate.

Yet at a time when the left is increasingly attuned to state-sponsored surveillance and the abuse of people of color, the progressive case for parents’ rights is worth taking seriously. “More and more, I see the hashtag #abolish fostercare,” says Roberts. “Not as much as #abolishprison, but I think there’s a growing awareness about these connections. I certainly try in my own writing and advocacy to emphasize the connections between prison, foster care, and the welfare system. They’re all very much connected historically in terms of who is in these systems and who is punished—the myths about people in these systems.”

Emma Ketteringham, managing director of the family defense practice at New York’s Bronx Defenders, which represents low-income people in both criminal and civil cases, lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn—the “mecca of parenting,” as she calls it. In her neighborhood, she sees a wide range of parenting styles and philosophies, from free-range to helicopter. “In that community, differences in parenting style get the raise of an eyebrow or a disapproving look from a neighbor or a classmate’s parent—for some of the exact same things I see my clients being brought to Child Protective Services for,” she says.

Part of the issue lies in mandatory reporting. Almost all states have laws on the books requiring professionals who come into contact with children—teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, and the like—to report suspected cases of abuse. As of 2013, 18 states and Puerto Rico require anyone who suspects child abuse to report it. In most states, there are criminal penalties for those who have reason to believe abuse is taking place but say nothing—and those who make abuse claims that turn out to be unfounded generally have immunity.

On the one hand, there’s broad agreement that people who witness a child being hurt should report it. But when it comes to who is being reported, and for what, both race and class are inescapable pieces of the equation. “Doctors are more likely to think and suspect child abuse in the case of black parents,” says Roberts. She cites a Journal of the American Medical Association study which found that “minority children…with accidental injuries were more than 3 times more likely than their white counterparts to be reported for suspected abuse.”

“I was so scared she was going to remove them, I completely changed the way I parented.” — Seattle mother Jessica Carter

Determining neglect is even more subjective. “These are situations in which, in many respects, it’s driven by community norms: What do people believe is appropriate child-rearing?” says Fred Wulczyn, a senior research fellow at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall and director of the Center for State Foster Care and Adoption Data. “Which is what makes this such a dicey issue.”

According to Jessica Carter, for example, CPS visited her in 2008, while she was living in a suburban Seattle apartment complex. A white woman married to a Puerto Rican man, Carter was a mother of two at the time. An anonymous caller had accused her of leaving her infant son at home while she went out and about the building. She suspects a busybody neighbor reported her after seeing her run downstairs to collect her mail while her son napped in his crib.

Carter’s son was asleep when the CPS worker arrived, and his bedroom door was closed. This, the worker warned Carter, was unacceptable. The worker “told me that CPS’s stance is that I should have eyes on the child at all times,” Carter says. When she objected, saying that this would be impossible, the CPS worker accused her of failing to take matters seriously. “I was terrified I was going to lose my children,” Carter recalls. “I was so scared she was going to come back and remove them, I completely changed the way I parented for a really long time.”

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