After separating from his children’s mother, Churmell Mitchell retained sole custody of his two young children. He knew being a single parent would not be easy. But what he was not prepared to face were false allegations called into the Department of Human Resources (DHR) in Alabama.
Churmell is a loving, caring young father, but when he came into contact with DHR, his 6-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter were wrought with anxiety and confusion and Churmell was left wondering what he had done wrong.
Upon entering Churmell’s home, the caseworker treated him with suspicion and rudeness. When he asked for additional help and support for his family, such as clothing, food or peer group support for dads, he was told DHR would have no further involvement once his case was closed.
Several months later, his daughter was inappropriately touched by another student at school, which was also reported to DHR. The department arranged some counseling for his daughter, but Churmell was once again left without guidance when he sought affordable legal advice. This is because his income falls just above the legal threshold to qualify for free or low-cost legal services.
His story epitomizes the basic problem with our child welfare system today. While its intent is to ensure basic security and safety for our nation’s children, the system’s actions are too often centered on one decision point: to remove a child from their home, or not.
As a result, too many families in need of help — but whose circumstances do not warrant removal — bounce off the system. Unfortunately, this reality not only prolongs unnecessary suffering and hardship, but also increases the odds that, at some point, families that could have otherwise turned the corner descend into crisis.
Roughly 37 percent of all U.S. children, and more than half of Black children, experience one or more child protective services investigations by age 18, according to recent federal data. For many families already experiencing instability — whether from cumulative lack of resources, insufficient income or other life challenges — the existing system’s response is adequate at best. But, at worst, new research actually suggests that contact with child protective services may be associated with worse mental health and developmental outcomes in youth.
This leaves the 2 million families annually screened out by the child protection system at an unacceptably high risk of descending into a vicious cycle. Initial contact with the system is repeated through ongoing referrals followed by intensive and intrusive interventions. Yet even when child protective services is engaged, proactive help is rarely forthcoming. Despite the good intentions of system administrators and caseworkers, the cumulative result is too many families — and millions of children — dangling on the fringes of security and stability.
This story is not destiny. The key is to modify the child welfare paradigm from one of reaction to one of prevention. We can do this by changing the basic question animating the entire modern child welfare system from “Is this child safe?” to “What do families need to thrive?”
What would this prevention-oriented system look like?
First, the system must be designed to recognize and respond to the kind of basic privation afflicting families like the Mitchells. For example, last fall Washington, D.C., launched a citywide 211 call center to address material needs that did not warrant further investigation of abuse. This “warmline” (rather than a “hotline”) will help families access and navigate an array of services, ranging from health to housing to education.
Second, the child welfare system should provide a range of services beyond removal and foster care. Ideally, the system would include coordination and investment from public agencies, but rely more heavily on community-provided services to reach families in need. As part of a community response pilot in Kentucky, the Brighton Center, a private community provider, has been offering families supports like food and clothing alongside parenting support and child care assistance.
Third, the system must provide at-risk families with material supports that respond to their actual challenges. While poverty and abuse are correlated, they require different solutions. There are many families being referred to child protective services who simply need help getting food, accessing housing or addressing substance disorders.
For these families, a coercive and adversarial investigation is the wrong response. For one family in Oregon, a self-sufficiency program helped them access food boxes when money was running short, then worked with the mother to get her driver’s license back and find a job.
The Doris Duke Foundation this week announced Opt-in for Families, a three-year, $33 million initiative in Kentucky, Oregon, South Carolina and Washington, D.C., to demonstrate the potential of a prevention-oriented approach to child welfare. Now is the time for states and jurisdictions around the country to begin to experiment in ways that can realize this more expansive and humane vision for our child welfare system. The Family First Prevention Services Act — passed in 2018 — made available for the first time unrestricted federal funding for preventative services in child welfare. But this historic policy shift has not yet sparked a revolution in how we respond to the needs of vulnerable children and families.
The problem is that our imaginations remain trapped in a paradigm too narrowly focused on abuse or neglect, often with punishing interventions for families that have done no harm. This is a myopic view of child safety and security, one in which the strong hammer of child welfare sees every family struggle as a nail. Whatever its original intentions, this approach leads to millions of baseless calls to child services and subjects a disproportionate number of poor families — overwhelmingly families of color — to a stigmatizing system that is ill-equipped to support them in the first place.
The child welfare system is born of a just and humane impulse that says we should protect kids from negative outcomes for which they are not responsible. Let’s enlarge our imaginations and build a system worthy of that ideal — one that can reach families like the Mitchells in the right way, at the right time.
