When New York City’s child welfare agency removed Sharwline Nicholson’s children in 1999, the decision was in line with its unofficial policy: “when in doubt, pull them out.” During the 1990s, the city was regularly taking about 10,000 children into foster care every year.
But when Nicholson sued, the New York Court of Appeals decreed that any decision to remove a child from their family must be weighed against the psychological harm to the child that could be created by the removal itself. n
The city agency was forced to acknowledge the devastating impacts of a child welfare approach that refused to reckon with its capacity to harm. Today, about half as many children are removed from home as in 2004, when Nicholson was decided.
Now, New York City and states nationwide are similarly confronting new evidence that child protective investigations — even those that do not lead to removals — are used far too often and leave damaging effects.
Investigations by child protection agencies are one of the more serious and intrusive acts a state can take, yet they have grown distressingly common. Nationwide, one-third of all children — and more than half of Black children — will experience an investigation by age 18. In 2022, states responded to reports involving more than 3 million children, an increase from 2.6 million in 2004.
Reports involving untreated mental illness, persistent substance abuse and domestic violence can be serious. But national data shows that nearly 80% of investigations led to a determination that the concerns were unsubstantiated or, in a small number of cases, intentionally false.
Investigations can leave enduring negative impacts on the family. Research finds that, after an investigation, parents limit social networks and help-seeking to reduce the risk of another investigation. This social isolation places children at even greater risk, and children can suffer when parents fear discussing family needs with educators, doctors and other helping professionals who are required by law to report child safety concerns.
Clearly, to keep children safer, we must reserve an investigatory approach for children facing real danger. For children at low risk, we must develop methods to address family distress that inflict less harm.
For many Americans, this may seem out of sync with images of child welfare torn from headlines. While mistakes in child protective practice produce negative outcomes in both directions — traumatic unnecessary removals in one direction, and preventable abuse or even child deaths at the other — the vast majority of media coverage focuses on the extreme maltreatment cases that represent needles in a haystack of investigations. Thousands of families come under state scrutiny because of challenges that are far more mundane.
Frontline child welfare workers see the hand of poverty in nearly every case. Teachers, hospital staff, police and other professionals often call on child welfare to handle resource needs they are too burdened to respond to, as sociologist Dr. Kelley Fong documented in the 2023 book, “Investigating Families.” Embedded with the state of Connecticut for months, Fong witnessed frantic calls to unearth cribs, baby clothes, strollers and child care, and to help parents access public benefits, secure housing and find food pantries. Too often, calls to state hotlines are a catch-all referral not to address danger but to help parents get what they need for their children while navigating a bureaucratic safety net.
For parents, that knock on the door is their worst fear. Investigators may want to help but they hold the power to remove children on the spot, and they are required to use intrusive and alarming tactics, as a recent lawsuit documented. Investigators interrogate parents in front of their children and go through the cabinets. Talk to neighbors, doctors and teachers. Take children into private rooms to question them and check their bodies for abuse. For months, children and their parents are kept waiting, not knowing what will happen next.
Exacting a lasting emotional toll on families, and costing taxpayers billions annually, this is an expensive and counterproductive way to address family needs.
States as diverse as Texas, California, Montana and New York are beginning to take important corrective action. Texas passed laws to limit removals based on poverty and, along with Montana, to advise parents of their Fourth Amendment right not to allow investigators to enter the home without a court order. To curb malicious reporting, Texas and California also stopped allowing anonymous reports to child abuse hotlines.
In New York, where similar bills have not yet passed, the state and city agencies have begun retraining mandated reporters on the steps they can take to support rather than report families when children are not in danger. Much of this training has focused on schools, which report thousands of families for truancy and attendance issues that, in some states, are handled by the school system itself. A partnership with hospitals is ensuring that doctors can directly connect families to support services without an investigation. Catching up with 20 other states, the city also has begun routing lower-risk cases to a type of investigation that pairs a safety assessment with efforts to address basic needs. All of these efforts seek to more quickly and directly meet family needs, without stigma and threat.
However, the same fear — and fear-mongering — that greeted needed reforms two decades ago is now threatening to undo this important forward motion.
Rebuilding community capacity to directly care for families rather than call in investigators will be a significant undertaking. It also will require a deeper public understanding that investigatory overreach is a problem that cannot be ignored.
To many, it appears intuitive that investigating more families and removing more children would keep children safer. A recent poll commissioned by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that attitudes on foster care are beginning to match established child welfare practice but attitudes toward investigations do not.
Three-quarters of respondents said they are confident that “parents who have been neglectful can provide safe and nurturing care for their children when they receive needed supports.” However, four in five poll respondents wanted an investigation any time a baby is born substance-exposed, even though federal law requires only that health providers make “plans of safe care” with families unless a newborn appears at risk.
Twenty years ago, people working with families every day believed that high-intensity supports could replace most foster care, keeping children safe at home. Data bears that out. In New York City, foster care entries have fallen by almost 50 percent since the Nicholson decision in 2004. In that time, children’s deaths from maltreatment have also fallen, not increased.
Today, frontline workers similarly know that children and families would benefit if dedicated support staff in schools, hospitals and other family-serving organizations more often drew families close. Investigators in Connecticut saw too many senseless cases, telling Dr. Fong, “I don’t know why this was called in,” or, “This teacher could have handled this in some other way.”
As cities and states around the country continue to rebalance their responsibility for child welfare investigations while avoiding intrusive and hurtful overreach, we must keep an eye on the data. We also must keep in mind the court’s clear guidance: Any decision to intervene in a family must be weighed against the psychological harm that could be created by the intervention itself.
We will not keep children safer by ignoring the child welfare system’s own capacity to harm, but we can keep children safer by adjusting our understanding of how to most effectively meet families’ needs.
