by Zabrina Aleguire
This article is adapted from a keynote address delivered at Pact Family Camp 2024.
Scrolling TikTok, I saw a video of a fire sergeant getting a call that a healthy baby had been left at the station in a bassinet–a Safe Haven relinquishment that would by nature lead to a closed adoption. The firewoman and her colleague cried tears of joy at such a gift, one with no strings attached, a “fairytale in the making” for the lucky adoptive parents to be.
The truth about adoption, though, is far from that tidy. Parents whose children are adopted, whether through relinquishment or termination of their parental rights, grieve and mourn the loss of their child for the rest of their lives – it haunts them like a death and stays with them like an open wound. And for children, the trauma of that separation – no matter the circumstances – remains with them, consciously or not. For adoptive parents, the path to parenting may have also been laced with grief – from miscarriage, infertility, or just the pain of not having their own biological children. An adoptive father, Chester Jackson, once said to me, “adoption is a loss-driven experience.”
I am steeped in this loss, the human cost of rearranging family. For twenty years now, I have been an attorney for children and parents separated by Child Protective Services (CPS). I am “auntie” to several children who have been adopted – internationally, through domestic private adoption, and through foster care. What’s more, I was raised by CPS social workers (my dad and stepmom) who did their damnedest to do right by families within an inherently cruel and sometimes reckless system. This system, officially referred to as “the child welfare system,” has been more recently and better described as a family regulation and policing system, with roots in oppressive patterns of family separation that cannot be ignored. It is a system that is punishing, and deeply stigmatizing, while viewed by the mainstream public as a benevolent savior of children. Saving them from what? Bad parents, of course. But are there really millions of unredeemable “bad parents” who hold no value to their children? I’m here to tell you no, there are not.
The reality is that raising children in impoverished conditions is easily conflated with bad parenting, and the child welfare system is the worst offender in perpetuating this fallacy. It is incredibly hard to provide for children in our country if you are a working single parent or if you live below the poverty line. The response of our federal government for decades has been to gut the social safety net while pouring increasingly more generous funds into incentivizing adoption, particularly from foster care. Most parents would take good care of their kids if only they had the means. In fact, during the one-year increase of the Child Tax Credit in 2021, we saw that there was less “neglect” of children.[1] Instead of continuing this moderate tax credit, however, our government continues to spend billions of dollars monitoring low-income families through CPS calls and investigations. A staggering 1 out of every 3 children are the subject of a CPS investigation by the time they become an adult, and that number is higher for Black and Indigenous children – half of whom will experience CPS knocking on their family’s door.
The majority of children removed from home by CPS are not being abused; in 3 out of 4 cases, parents are accused only of “neglecting” their children by their own “failure” to provide them decent, safe, and stable housing and meet their needs. Once CPS takes these children from their homes, it has no obligation to improve the economic circumstances of these families – just to provide them “services” to facilitate reunification, as if therapy and parenting skills classes can fix a desperate lack of resources. It is no wonder that half of the children removed from their parents never reunify.
Families can be separated for living in their car following an eviction, rather than being provided emergency family shelter. I have represented parents whose children were taken because of “dirty home” allegations that included overdue repairs and vermin, when what they really needed was help holding neglectful landlords accountable. And once children are removed, parents may lose their publicly-funded housing because children no longer reside there – resulting in the Catch-22 that the Court won’t return their children until they somehow secure stable housing. Mothers who are victims of domestic violence may call CPS for help leaving a partner, only for their children to instead be removed from their care, making it harder for them to leave – which will be held against them when they seek return of their children. What’s more, the coercive nature of CPS intervention may exacerbate mental illness or addiction, making it harder for parents who are struggling with these issues to genuinely improve – when all they want, typically, is to be able to parent and parent well.
The stigma parents experience from system intervention is lifelong. It’s not just shame; it’s an official “black mark” on their record that can literally prevent them from ever working with children again, or from being approved as caregivers for their own relatives in the future. Upon investigating a family, CPS may put parents on a list of those suspected of child maltreatment, in the form of a federally-mandated state registry of offenders. In states like California, you remain on this registry until age 100. Being listed on a child maltreatment registry prevents people from getting jobs not only in childcare and schools, but also in health care and social service fields. So even if a parent rehabilitates and wants to pay it forward by serving families in the future, they are cut off from most opportunities to do so.
CPS intervention often leaves parents worse off in terms of their economic prospects than they were before the system got involved. Parents whose children are placed in foster care are all too often subjected to child support collections – to reimburse the government for funding their children being raised by others. If they fall behind in those payments, arrears compound, and if they are in default, their driver’s license may be suspended–preventing them from working to pay off the arrears, and they may be arrested if they miss a child support court date. Nationwide, low-income parents owe millions of dollars in child support arrears to the government. States typically spend more on enforcing these collections than they receive from payments, so all they are really doing is financially punishing impoverished parents.
When we recognize the racial history of family policing and forced separation in the US, we can understand why government intervention into families is inherently problematic. To exert control over enslaved people and exact their obedience and submission, slave owners regularly threatened to separate families, as US law permitted them to sell enslaved children away from parents without any recourse.[2] Starting with the Indian Civilization Act Fund of 1817, the government funded removal of Indian children en masse from reservations into “boarding schools” that stripped children of their language and culture and all too frequently subjected them to abuse.[3] During that same period, religious charity organizations in the Northeast put a quarter of a million poor and mostly white children from urban areas onto “orphan trains” so they could live and work on farms, where they were often subject to child labor and abuse.[4] The trains didn’t stop until the 1920s, when the U.S. Children’s Bureau was created to help alleviate child and family poverty. This was followed by the Social Security Act in 1935 as part of the New Deal, which provided some financial support to poor families–although notably most African American workers were excluded, because domestic and agricultural workers did not initially qualify for these benefits.[5]
In the 1960’s and 70’s, there were efforts to promote a universal basic income and negative income tax for low-income Americans which ultimately failed. The child welfare system became heavily funded instead. The first major federal child welfare legislation, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) of 1974, promoted “mandated reporting” for professionals who worked with children. CAPTA created the funding and infrastructure for government hotlines in every state to receive and investigate reports of child maltreatment. This set into motion a system that has become consumed with reporting and investigating families, to the exclusion of meaningfully addressing family poverty.
Increased funding for foster care and for adoption followed. The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 created financial incentives to encourage the adoption of children from foster care. Subsequently the number of children taken into foster care annually doubled from 262,000 children in 1982 to nearly 570,000 children in 1999.[6] During this period, a staggering number of Black children were removed from their homes, fueled by punishing War on Drugs policies.[7] In response to the disproportionate number of children of color staying in foster care indefinitely, the 1994 Multiethnic Placement Act removed race as a factor in placement decisions to facilitate cross-racial placements and adoptions.
In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act solidified our current child welfare system’s design. This federal law required faster termination of parental rights, increased the adoption subsidy, and even provided a financial bonus to states for arranging adoptions from foster care. By contrast, welfare rates for families struggling financially became frozen after the Clinton-era welfare reform law of 1996, which placed time limits on welfare assistance, instituted poorly conceived work requirements, and placed stricter conditions on receipt of food stamps. This federal funding scheme has resulted in states like North Carolina spending more than 13 times as much on foster care and adoption as on preventing family separation.[8] It’s worth noting that only 30% of separated families reunify in North Carolina. Annually, our federal government spends over six billion dollars more on the family regulation system than on welfare to poor families.
These numbers have a real impact on the humans involved. In preparation for my keynote at Pact Family Camp, I conducted a series of interviews with parents affected by adoption, to find a path forward amidst all this injustice. I asked Michael Williams, an adoptive father and Policy Director of California’s Child Abuse Prevention Center, how to make sense of this allocation of resources. He answered, “I have no answer to why… we don’t have just the minimum supports for families to begin with.” He continued, “Prevention is about community and about family self-reliance and about child welfare not being involved.”
What makes the least sense to Michael is that “we pull kids out of their families and we pay someone else to care for them.” He pinpoints how mandated reporting leads to so many low-income families being subjected to CPS investigations, giving the example of a teacher: “When you have a kid in distress, that’s the only thing you can think of to do, is to call CPS…. And so all these neglect calls go to CPS and then they are in families’ lives, and [maybe] it doesn’t get substantiated, but you already have this disruption. The fact that we just allow families to be disrupted and then are okay paying a higher price for having done that [is where we have gone wrong.]”
I posed a similar question to Chester Jackson, the adoptive father (and late-discovery adoptee himself) I mentioned earlier who has spent his career supporting adoptions for older foster youth. He responded, “The money part, we can fix this! If we really decided to. But we’d have to let go of some biases and some preconceived notions and some bigotry and all kinds of things that make it okay. One of the lessons for me, that came out of this whole George Floyd era that we are in now, is we are allowing ourselves to consider not just the big Black-White issue but all kinds of injustices.” He observed, “That kind of stuff is at the core of what we do. If I can dehumanize you enough, then I can do anything I want to you. And that’s where we are now. There’s a certain member of the population, there’s a certain group of people that… it doesn’t matter what we do to their children or their families, especially if we fix it all on the back side. And if we fix it, hey, we got them a better family! Implicit in all that is that there are some families somewhere that have no trauma, no stress, none of that stuff. And that’s a lie.”
Truth be told, every parent could be just one bad accident away from a CPS investigation, if they aren’t shielded by race and class privilege. I have family members and friends who have lived through the terror of CPS knocking on their door. Those who are white tell me afterwards how much they could tell that their privilege helped them resolve concerns quickly and respectfully. Those who are not white did not fare so well.
And that leads us to the injustice of certain families being policed all the time. Chester posed:
“Just imagine that somebody was watching your family the way that these families are watched. And that’s where we are with child welfare. We accept that there is going to be this underclass of people, and they are guilty because the system came to see them.…They are guilty by that association alone. So whatever happens, it’s ‘Well, they have a history, they were on this or that.’ Even if we just concentrate on the neglect, [we could get somewhere]. We are always gonna have those extreme cases where we need to [intervene]. But if we can start with the mom who is working three jobs, if we can help her figure out a way to not have to work three jobs, to have daycare… There are things we can do to support families if we truly believed family was the most important thing. We don’t. It’s some families who are the most important; other families aren’t.”
Venita Veal is a mother who has been finishing her college degree while holding the immense grief caused by the termination of her parental rights to her three children. She shared with me, “During my darkest point, I [asked myself], ‘Do I want to truly be what they depicted me to be, which I was never in the first place?’ No.’” Her voice grew stronger as she shared, “I’m doing things for myself now, so that when [my children] do find me, I’m in a very good position for them.” Debunking the fiction that her bonds with her children could ever be severed, Venita stated, “I may not be their parent but I am always going to be their mother and I love them.” When I asked her what she had to say to adoptive parents, she wanted to encourage them to reach out to their children’s biological families. “Don’t be afraid of that. It’s okay.” She pointed out what tremendous capacity children have to love all of their family, and how those family connections build a child’s sense of identity and self-worth. “It does take a village, so don’t limit your village. You don’t know where your village is coming from. At the end of the day all of us want the same thing: for them to grow up to be [whole], firm, solid human beings.”
Steph VanDyken, a white adoptive mother who works in education, shared her experience navigating family connections for her Black son. “What I have learned is that it is so important to honor the birth parents of the child. …when you honor the birth parents, you honor your child, because they are a part of them, right?” She described the conversations she had with her son to make sure that his parents were never labeled as “bad people.” “If people look at his parents a certain way, they look at him that way. As a little child that’s how he was processing it. Always we said ‘your parents were wonderful people … these are the great things about your parents, and yes, they weren’t well enough to raise you, but that had nothing to do with how much they loved you.’” Reflecting on her son’s ongoing connections to his family of origin, Steph told me, “You never know… if you open your heart to it, these things happen. And if you’re afraid of that, you miss out on all this beauty.”
It is in proximity to each other that genuinely supportive communities can develop. The host of my favorite podcast of 2024, The Proximity Process,[9] always says “the change we want to see, it starts with us.” Curbing the harms of the child welfare system starts with our own personal transformation. We don’t have to be complicit in a culture of alienation, labeling, and superiority over people we have “othered.” We can stay curious, be gentle and kind, and do the work of supporting each other when the government won’t. When someone we know is investigated by CPS, we can offer to attend the required meetings with them, vouch for them, and help them keep calm. When we see requests for direct cash assistance from parents in a crisis, we can provide the safety net families need. We can also support (financially and otherwise) emerging coalitions of families who have been harmed by family policing and are creating networks of mutual aid and advocacy to change the system fundamentally.[10] It’s time for us to protect each other, in more ways than one.
Zabrina Aleguire (she/her) is an attorney for families impacted by child protective services (CPS). She manages the court-appointed attorney program at the Bar Association of San Francisco for children and parents, and previously represented parents and foster youth across New York City. Aleguire is co-author of “Doing Right by Families: Presenting Dynamic Performance Metrics for Legal Excellence in Child Welfare Law,” (Juvenile and Family Court Journal). She is godmother to 10 children and is their parents’ biggest fan.
[1] https://imprintnews.org/youth-services-insider/child-tax-credits-led-to-decreased-abuse-and-neglect-new-study-shows/238554
[2] https://www.gatheringforjustice.org/familyseparation
[3] https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20913408/us-stole-thousands-of-native-american-children
[4] https://www.history.com/news/orphan-trains-childrens-aid-society
[5] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/100697/african_american_economic_security_and_the_role_of_social_security.pdf
[6] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4243611/
[7] https://uprootingthedrugwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/uprooting_report_PDF_childwelfare_02.04.21.pdf
[8] https://www.childtrends.org/publications/child-welfare-financing-survey-sfy2020