The Hidden Challenges of Telling Separation-Into-Foster-Care Stories

I thought I knew a lot about how the child protection system puts families at risk. I have been a family defender for almost 35 years. I had, as a matter of fact, just written a book (They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families at Risk, ABC-Clio, November 2, 2018 release date). I thought, too, that I knew— intellectually if not from a first-hand lived experience—the many different ways a family can suffer long-lasting trauma from even a short separation. Of course, I was wrong.

When my book came out, I naturally wanted to celebrate with the families who had generously allowed me to tell their stories, in the course of relating my own experience as their lawyer. So as soon as a box of my book was delivered to my house, I invited the families to come to my home for a small celebration where they could get their own inscribed copies and meet each other.

The families who had participated with me in my book project had a lot in common, and some of them already knew the others. They each had a similar story of exoneration after a child abuse pediatrician claimed that they had abused their child (the six stories in the book all involve medical cases).  They had reunited and kept their families together against the odds. None of them was still fighting CPS; all of them had been happily raising their children after CPS finally left them alone. Still, a few of the families had to deal with medically fragile children whose conditions had been responsible for terrible misunderstandings by the health care system that had been quick to accuse them of abuse. A couple of the children still faced very real medical challenges, no thanks to the CPS system that got it wrong.

Some of the families were eager to meet the others, excited by the book’s release and happy to get together with the others who had similar lived through a similar misfortune. Moreover, they all knew me and Melissa Staas, whose own heroic legal work on the cases in the book is described in detail. Since Melissa was bringing her own family to the party, the families were especially eager to see her and her kids.  I invited everyone to bring their own kids to the party, thinking that would make it more fun for everyone. A few of the parents seemed to be happy that they didn’t have to get a babysitter. 

Moreover, I had long appreciated the importance of parents supporting other parents. I had often tried to introduce parents to others who had similar experiences with CPS. I realized, too, that parents should be able to socialize with other parents,  not just hold meetings. Sometimes the introductions I had made for parents going through a CPS investigation had led to very strong and enduring friendships between parents, helping to forge or strengthen a parent advocacy community.  Indeed, two of the parents whose stories are in my book are now on the board of the new Family Justice Resource Center, which was created in January 2018 to help support families with medically complex cases.

But when the responses to my invitation to the book release party came back, I suddenly realized that I truly hadn’t walked a mile in the parents’ shoes.  The harm of wrongful separation from misplaced investigations–the many ways even a short brush with child protection services can yield a lifelong dose of trauma—kept throwing out new unexpected curveballs. 

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“We haven’t told the kids,” the mother in one of the stories explained to me when I asked her to come to the party with her whole family.  Later that week, I heard similar concerns from two other parents—another of the parents in the book and a parent I had just met.  The question of whether and when to tell kids about their own family’s brush with child protective services posed a real dilemma for these parents whose children didn’t remember the experience of being separated.

That dilemma tells us something about the challenges we face if we are working as family defenders in trying to let the larger world know how the CPS system is hurting families.

The release of the parents’ own stories, albeit with sometimes changed names,  did not trouble the parents—they had gotten beyond that concern already. The mother who didn’t want to come to the party with her kids had read the book in preprints. Indeed, she and her husband had talked it through with me before I even started to write.  They had agreed I could use the records from their court case. I had kept them informed on the status of my publication contract and the planned release.  They had offered to help any way they could so that other families might not go through the same terrible experience. 

But they had never told their kids about what had happened to their family.  And the kids were too young to remember.  Now, when they got their own inscribed copy of the book, they weren’t even sure where they were going to hide it in the house.  

Their kids had been among the most  “fortunate” children the CPS system touches: their children had never been taken out of their home.  The parents had been the ones to leave, first under a safety plan for several weeks and then for over a month while the juvenile court reviewed whether there were grounds to keep custody with the State (while grandparents who had come from out of state served as temporary foster parents).  The parents had been allowed back home even before the court issued its final ruling and dismissed their case.  As juvenile court cases went, their experience was--viewed merely by duration, the extent of family separation, and that fact that petitions against them were dismissed within three months of the hotline call—one where many would say the “system got it right.”

And yet, now eight years later, my lack of awareness of what the costs of the separation included led me to make an insensitive assumption.  If she came to the party with her kids, the mother would have to tell them a story she wasn’t quite ready to tell.

Will she ever be ready?  I’m not sure.  I certainly wouldn’t presume to tell her when it was a good time to tell her kids that one night in 2009, a child protective services investigator came with police squad cars to try to take them to foster care.  I would no more presume to know what’s best to say than I would tell an adoptive parent when they should tell their child that they were adopted if the child didn’t yet know it.

There are dozens or maybe hundreds of books, however, that might advise adoptive parents about how to let children know they are adopted.  There are different answers and plenty of knowledgeable therapists willing to help.  But who could I tell this parent to talk to for counsel about how to tell your kids about CPS’s involvement in her family? How many books are there for the parent who has been through the terrible ordeal of having their children taken from them by CPS?   Not many at all.

As my own experience in writing a book that tried to be sensitive to the trauma of separation at the hands of the state, my book cannot do justice to the parent’s experience.  The story in my book is the story from my eyes, not theirs.  Of course, I knew that telling the stories would be painful for the parents. I just didn’t fully appreciate all the ways the pain keeps reverberating years later in new ways.   

 After the mother’s polite notice to me that bringing the kids would be too challenging, I realized for myself that telling a child about a false abuse allegation that had once led to the family’s separation could be terribly upsetting, even destabilizing. Such news could shatter a child’s belief in the safety of their home that children need and deserve.  If my own kids had ever been taken from me, I, too, would have wanted to shield them from the terrible knowledge that the State had tried to take them away one night. Parents try to calm children’s nightmares, not fuel them.  Parents naturally would try to keep this sort of secret in the dark as long as they could, assuming the children didn’t remember the trauma themselves.

Psychologists teach, in child development books, and in parenting classics, that babies and young children need attachments to parents in order to grow.  In order to explore their world, they need to feel safe and secure in that primary attachment.  Wouldn’t knowing that that safety had been shattered once, even for a short time, change a child’s trust in the stability of her home life, her community, and her world? Even if they never had to leave their home, wouldn’t knowing that their stability in their home with their parents had been assaulted by the state—for reasons that were bogus and had nothing to do with the child’s own perceived relationship with the parent—change their sense of security and trust in the world? It’s easy to see how upsetting this information would be to a school-age child—or even a grown child or young adult.

We also know that removing a child from her parents causes both the child and the parent excruciating pain.  We know it can manifest itself in myriad ways that disrupt children’s growth and development.  But do we know how being accused of child abuse, even when the allegations were false, is deeply traumatic? Do we know the lasting ways families are hurt even by brief removals when it seems that their lives went back to “normal” fairly quickly?  Has there been any longitudinal study of CPS exonerees?  Do we fully understand how that trauma can keep resurfacing in new traumatic ways, for parents and children alike?

If we want to help parents tell their stories,  we have to reckon with what it means to have to have to tell that same story to one’s children.

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We face a real dilemma as advocates for a better, fairer child welfare system for families.  A fundamental problem is that the system overly intervenes in families, in myriad ways, starting with the hotline and going all the way through to termination of parental rights. The system operates most often on the belief, enshrined in policies and practices, that the harm of non-intervention significantly outweighs the harm from intervening by investigating a family and then acting to restrict rights along the way.  But how do we change policies if we minimize, ignore and discount all the harms that flow from misplaced intervention?

We have not been able to catalog and well-explain, either qualitatively or quantitively,  through empirical studies and clinical ones, the many harms of over-intervention, both hidden and obvious.   Articles like Vivek Sankaran’s and Christopher Church’s “Easy Come, Easy Go: The Plight of Children Who Spend Less than Thirty Days in Care” 19 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Social Change 207 (2016) are an excellent start.  Richard Wexler has been cataloging the harms of foster care placement for years, too, along with doing more than anyone to shine a light on how children can suffer from a child abuse investigation.  Rise Magazine has been telling powerful parents’ stories for over a decade. National and state family defender conferences include panels on changing the narrative about families.  Still, there is very little social science or psychological literature on what it means to be on the receiving end of a child abuse investigation. If a psychologist has written a book for parents on coping with the aftermath of a child abuse investigation, I want to read that book as soon as possible and give it to my clients.

Not being able to talk to one’s children about what CPS did to their family before they could remember is just one of hundreds of unacknowledged harms to children and families during investigations.  It’s a potential dark secret that informal separations under safety plans, juvenile court proceedings, and reunification, and post-reunification.  Each step carries its own sets of traumatic impacts.  Each one is worth documenting.

Until the harm of over-intervention is understood and accepted as real and important, however, that harm will continue. In order to create a system that properly balances the harm of over-intervention against the risk of under-invention (i.e. missing a case of real abuse), we need to talk more about the harm that starts with the hotline call that seeks to label a child abused or neglected and the parent a “perpetrator.”

Showing how children and families are traumatized in ways large and small by even the act of opening their home to a CPS worker during a quickly-closed investigation can help us start to make the case for changing the narrative about the CPS system altogether. To me, that’s part of Rethinking Foster Care.