The Paradox of Protecting Children

A child does not understand jurisdiction.

She does not understand reasonable cause, dependency petitions, safety plans, evidentiary standards or the benevolent intentions of the state. She understands arms. Smells. Voices. Her blanket. Her bed. Her dog. Her brother sleeping down the hall. The particular sound her mother makes when she says her name.

And then, suddenly, whether all of those things are still there.

For generations, America has built its child-welfare system around a premise so intuitively compelling that we rarely stop to examine it: When a child may be in danger, removing that child is the protective act.

Sometimes it is.

There are children living in circumstances so dangerous that hesitation can cost a life. Children are beaten. Starved. Sexually abused. Exposed to lethal drugs. Left with adults too impaired to keep them alive.

I have spent years researching America’s child-welfare system, and nothing I have learned has made me naïve about that reality. But it has forced me to confront another one. Removal is not the absence of trauma. Removal can be trauma.

And if we are going to call ourselves a society guided by science, compassion and the best interests of children, then we have to become mature enough to hold both truths at the same time.

That is the paradox of protecting children.

We know far more about the developing brain today than we did when much of America’s child-protection machinery was designed.

Researchers at Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child have explained how excessive or prolonged activation of a child’s stress-response systems can disrupt developing brain architecture and other biological systems. Just as importantly, responsive relationships with caring adults can buffer that stress.

Those relationships are not sentimental accessories to childhood. They are part of how a child’s brain develops.

A young child does not experience the removal of a parent as a legal proceeding. The child experiences disappearance. The nervous system does not read the court order. It experiences what happened. That distinction should change the way we think about child protection.

It should not prevent us from removing a child who is truly unsafe. It should require us to recognize that removal is an intervention with consequences of its own.

In medicine, we would find it strange to discuss the benefits of a treatment while refusing to consider its risks. We would never say that because surgery may save a patient’s life, the physical consequences of surgery don’t matter.

Yet child welfare has too often treated removal as though it were the end of the risk calculation rather than the beginning of another one. The consequences of getting that calculation wrong in either direction can be devastating.

Washington State is living that debate now.

In recent years, the state changed its child-welfare policies to make family separation more difficult. Courts generally must find a threat of imminent physical harm before approving removal and must consider the harm caused by separating a child from family.

Fewer children have been removed.

But critics point to children who died after their families had already come to the attention of child-welfare authorities.

One of them was Avril.

Avril’s grandmother was worried about her. Her mother was struggling with drug use. According to reporting on the case, the grandmother contacted child protective services and wanted the baby placed with her. Avril later died after fentanyl exposure. She was 13 months old.

There is no intellectually honest discussion of family preservation that gets to look away from Avril.

If our reforms make us so afraid of separating families that we leave a baby in an obviously lethal environment when a safe grandmother is standing there willing to take her, we have not created compassion. We have created another kind of institutional failure.

But Washington’s experience tells another story, too.

A mother identified publicly only as Mariah struggled with heroin addiction. She lost her first child. During another pregnancy, she entered treatment and began taking methadone. Her newborn nevertheless came to the attention of child welfare, and she was not permitted to take the baby home.

She described going home to the place she had prepared for him and finding it empty. Within a month, she relapsed. Years later, pregnant again and living under Washington’s changed approach, she sought treatment again. This time she brought her baby home.

Today, according to the reporting, she and her partner are sober, working and raising their youngest son.

Avril matters.

Mariah matters.

That is precisely the problem with slogans. “Keep families together” is inadequate. “Protect the children” is inadequate, too, if those words simply mean removing children whenever government perceives risk.

The real question is harder:

What action produces the least danger and the greatest chance for this particular child to thrive?

Sometimes the answer is immediate removal. Sometimes it is Grandma. Sometimes it is treatment. Sometimes it is food. Sometimes it is childcare, housing, transportation or mental-health care. Sometimes a family needs help, not destruction. And sometimes a child absolutely needs rescue.

Government should be sophisticated enough to know the difference.

That requires us to distinguish poverty from neglect, family dysfunction from imminent danger, an allegation from evidence, and a struggling parent from a dangerous one. It also requires resources. A law cannot exercise judgment. People do.

Overworked and undertrained caseworkers carrying impossible caseloads cannot reliably perform the nuanced risk assessment we claim to expect from them. Neither can courts make wise decisions if the only practical choices placed before them are “leave everything alone” or “take the child.”

There should be space between abandonment and family destruction. Before foster care, ask whether there is a safe father, grandmother, aunt, uncle or adult sibling. Before treating poverty as parental failure, ask whether groceries, electricity, stable housing or daycare would solve the immediate problem.

When addiction creates genuine danger, make treatment and concrete safety planning part of the intervention.

When a child must be removed, protect sibling relationships and safe family attachments whenever possible.

And when the government receives an allegation, investigate it vigorously, but remember what an allegation is. It is a reason to investigate. It is not a verdict.

Americans recently received an unusual lesson in how quickly that distinction can disappear.

A false child-abuse allegation involving former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg triggered an investigation in which he was temporarily separated from his four-year-old twins while they were interviewed. Authorities ultimately determined that the allegation was unfounded.

His politics are irrelevant. In fact, that is exactly why the episode matters. Strip away the famous name, the political tribe and whatever feelings one has about Pete Buttigieg.

Imagine your children. Imagine someone makes a monstrous accusation against you. Imagine strangers arrive. Imagine being told that, until those strangers decide whether the accusation is true, you cannot be with your four-year-olds. Now imagine that you are not Pete Buttigieg.

You do not have his resources. You do not have national visibility. You cannot make one telephone call and find sophisticated counsel. Nobody in the press will ever know your name.

The power remains exactly as enormous. That is why due process in child welfare is not some annoying legal obstacle standing between government and child safety. Due process is what we invented because human beings can be mistaken.

Caseworkers can be mistaken. Doctors can be mistaken. Parents can lie. Children can be harmed. Accusers can lie. Judges can be mistaken. And government, however noble its purpose, is still operated by human beings.

There is another inconsistency in our national conversation that has troubled me for years.

Americans understand the trauma of family separation when we encounter it in certain political contexts. We have watched children separated from parents at the border and instinctively understood the anguish involved. We have watched wars separate families and understood it. We understand the devastation when a parent dies.

We know attachment matters.

Why would a child’s nervous system suddenly experience attachment differently because the person separating her from her parent carries a government identification badge and believes the separation is necessary?

Intent matters morally. It does not erase experience biologically. This is where the science should humble all of us.

The developing brain is shaped by experience. Stable, responsive relationships help buffer children against adversity. Prolonged, unbuffered stress can affect development.

That means the goal cannot merely be to remove children from bad things. The goal must be to surround children with enough good things that they can develop. Safety. Attachment. Food. Stability. Belonging. Predictability. People who love them and keep showing up. Sometimes the state must interrupt a family to provide those things. But government should never destroy them casually in the name of providing them.

I am a mother. Maybe that is why, after all the statutes, studies, cases and courtrooms, I keep coming back to the same simple thought.

Children belong to the future.

Everything we do in child welfare should therefore be judged not merely by whether we closed a case or complied with a procedure, but by what kind of adult our intervention helped create.

Did we make this child safer? Did we preserve what was healthy? Did we repair what was broken? Did we unnecessarily break something that wasn’t? And when the child eventually grows up and asks the question children eventually ask, Why did this happen to me?, will we have an answer worthy of the power we exercised?

There will never be a child-protection system that gets every decision right. The stakes are too high, families are too complicated, addiction is too cruel and human judgment is too imperfect.

But perfection is not the standard. Wisdom should be. Humility should be. And the child’s entire humanity, not merely the contents of a case file, should be.

Some children desperately need to be taken from their parents. Some desperately need help that allows them to remain with them. The moral test of child welfare is not how aggressively the state intervenes or how rarely it does. It is whether we have built a system wise enough to know the difference.

Because protecting a child’s body while unnecessarily shattering her sense of safety is not enough. Neither is preserving a family while leaving a child in danger.

Children deserve better than our ideological absolutes.

They deserve adults courageous enough to protect them from every source of preventable harm, even when one of those adults is the state itself.