DEE WILSON CONSULTING
The shifting landscape of 'child protection'
(Originally published June 2025)
In last month’s Sounding Board, I discussed a major shift in child welfare values since 2018 reflected in a large decline in foster care during an opioid epidemic, increased difficulties in caseworker recruitment and retention that has arguably resulted in the least experienced workforce of the past several decades, and without a marked increase in substance abuse and family support services in many states, including Washington. I argued that this sea change in values goes far beyond the periodic pendulum swings between a focus on child safety vs. family preservation of past years.
The intense concern with the trauma and developmental consequences of family separation has led to a reconsideration of key elements of the U. S. child protection system, i.e., mandatory reporting, investigations of allegations of child abuse and neglect, use of legal structure in the foster placement of children, timelines for permanent planning set forth in the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), the priority given adoption in ASFA, along with emotionally charged accusations of racism based, in part, on various dimensions of racial disproportionality in child welfare, from intake to termination of parental rights. Research that questions these views has been ignored or angrily dismissed by proponents of the Abolition movement.
There is more. The view that child protection and foster care systems do more harm than good has gained traction through stories published in various formats, e.g., in The Imprint and most recently in Claudia Rowe’s Wards of The State (2025), powerful stories of young people mistreated in foster care and residential care who ultimately ended up in the criminal justice system. Even the goals of child protection have implicitly been called into question, as indicated by apparent indifferent community response to child maltreatment fatalities in Washington (including two recent child torture deaths), and by the minimization and misrepresentation of the harms of child maltreatment, especially neglect, both in childhood and across the life span.
My purpose in this commentary is to consider how US child welfare systems (and other human service systems) might be reimagined, restructured and resourced to protect children in the light of fundamentally altered social values. How would a child protection system based on family support principles operate?
Child welfare systems that are products of law and administered by county or state governments must necessarily reflect widespread social values, which are rarely the subject of critical reflection. Even without changes in law, U.S. child welfare systems are being reshaped in a variety of ways, and not only by public child welfare agencies but also by judicial systems, by the priorities of child advocates and by MSW programs. However, these priorities and initiatives are piecemeal, rarely a part of a comprehensive rethinking of child welfare policy and practice. A visceral rejection of the current state of child welfare is not the same as a clear idea of what to do next; as I once asked in a Sounding Board commentary: “abolish child welfare, what next?”
What is child protection?
U.S. child protection systems mostly respond to allegations of child neglect, defined in state statutes as parents’ failure, fault, inability, or refusal to provide “proper”, “essential” or “necessary” care. This approach to defining neglect is useful only in extreme cases when agencies take legal action to protect children, not many more than one in twenty investigations. It often leads to absurdities in which children and youth suffering chronic food insecurity and/or homelessness may be ignored by public agencies, while other families alleged to have neglected their children in minor ways are investigated or “assessed”.
During the past few years, several states have passed laws to distinguish poverty from neglect, and to avoid CPS involvement with low income struggling families doing the best they can despite poverty, often severe poverty, on the grounds that poverty is not neglect. A better approach would be to define neglect in terms of children’s unmet basic needs, and to intervene in cases of the most severe need, regardless of parental fault. The goal of such interventions should be to strengthen parents’ capacity to meet their children’s needs, not to find fault, make “findings” of child maltreatment, much less place children in foster care.
Fierce critics of child welfare and some child welfare leaders want to do the opposite, i.e. to narrow CPS eligibility to a small percentage of families and children with overt safety threats that threaten immediate harm. For abolitionists, the idea that CPS agencies could bring much needed benefits and essential services to families seems highly unlikely, given their history of punitive surveillance of low-income populations and (allegedly) racist placement practices. These critics would prefer to depend on poorly defined community services delivered on a voluntary basis to assist families with unmet basic needs.
For at least three decades, prestigious groups of child welfare experts and scholars have advocated for the development of a parallel system of prevention/early intervention services to offer assistance to families before they become involved with CPS (see “A Nation’s Shame: Fatal Child Abuse in the U.S.,” 1995). These recommendations have been dead on arrival with federal and state policy makers who have viewed such proposals with disdain, to put it mildly. Why would legislatures that have underfunded and inadequately staffed their child welfare system for decades create a second agency to compensate for the deficiencies of the system that exists, thereby ensuring an ongoing conflict over limited resources?
The best that can be hoped for is that a newly enlightened federal government would provide seed funding for family support centers such as Tacoma, Washington’s Multicultural Center and Spokane, Washington’s Vanessa Behan center, both of which largely depend on philanthropic support. These extraordinary family support centers show what can be accomplished in local communities with exceptional leadership and strong commitment to families in need. Child welfare reform can begin at the local level even when state governments and the federal government turn a blind eye to the most vulnerable children’s needs.
A family support agenda
Comprehensive family support services that strengthen families and protect children from family separation to the extent possible cannot limit their concern to immediate child safety, or focus solely on preventing child maltreatment. They must also be committed to developmental repair, as child maltreatment and its correlates have potentially devastating effects on physical and mental health across the lifespan. Public agencies must be concerned with child safety and child well-being, and develop services accordingly.
The first and most important step in fleshing out this mission is to mandate the provision of poverty-related services as needed to meet the basic needs of families during CPS interventions, either by connecting families to community, state or federally funded resources, or by funding essential services when there is no other source of assistance. This one change in law, if adequately funded and implemented conscientiously, would dramatically alter the reputation of CPS among low-income families and their advocates within a few years.
Washington’s Department of Children, Youth and Family Services (DCYF) has already adopted a version of this policy and greatly increased expenditures on concrete services. Obviously, child welfare systems would have to grapple with how to implement this mandate, i.e., spending limits, eligibility rules, approval processes, etc., but the objection that the policy would be cost prohibitive is nonsense. Adoption support that begins in in early childhood and continues to age 18 is widely accepted regardless of costs because adoption has strong public support in the U.S. The same will be true of major investments in poverty-related services when there is a commitment to creating child welfare systems that have major benefits for families.
Of course, it’s true that concrete services such as food, clothing, housing supports, medical and dental care are often not sufficient to protect children from severe or chronic child maltreatment; much more is needed. Child welfare agencies committed to protecting infants while minimizing use of foster care should steadily increase access to Pregnant and Parenting Women (PPW) residential treatment programs for mothers and their babies and for ongoing support to families with substance abuse challenges through programs such as Washington’s Parent Child Assistance Program (PCAP). Currently, to my knowledge there are only three PPW programs currently in operation in Washington when there could be 15-20 such programs if savings accrued from the large decline in foster care since 2018 had been reinvested in safety-oriented family support services. Nevertheless, it is still possible to develop strategies to protect many infants and toddlers whose safety is threatened by substance misuse without separating them from their mothers and also reduce the length of time young children are placed in foster care.
Investments in therapeutic child care and in respite care for parents of children growing up with sporadic or chronic child maltreatment are urgently needed. Child maltreatment has cumulative effects on child development which, when ignored, often lead to early onset mental health conditions, learning difficulties and problems in relationships with peers. Effective developmental repair requires early intervention before oppositional behavior shapes social identity through evidence- based parenting programs, timely mental health treatment and early childhood education.
Child welfare agencies should become actively involved in providing housing supports, per recent developments in Washington State where a state investment in case management services has provided access to more than $60 million dollars of housing vouchers. Whether federal housing support programs will be sustained during the next few years is doubtful given the priorities of the Trump Administration; nevertheless, child welfare agencies should take a more active role in providing housing support services at the earliest opportunity.
Gradually and steadily developing improved family supports will make it possible to reduce dependence on foster care to protect children in extreme circumstances, but will not help all families or eliminate the need for a foster care system. The strategic planning goal should be to flip the child welfare paradigm of the past fifty years, i.e. lots of investigations and other coercive practices combined with weak family support services to well-developed family support systems that retain the legal authority to intervene coercively in a reduced percentage of cases.
Furthermore, for behaviorally troubled school age children, foster care should become a professional service that is a voluntary way of working with parents per child welfare practices in Northern Europe, countries that rarely utilize adoption for school age youth.
Safety planning infrastructure
In past commentaries, I have occasionally referred to safety planning as the “Achilles heel” of U.S. child protection systems. This metaphor is a considerable understatement: it would be more accurate to describe safety planning as full body vulnerability to bad outcomes. Possibly, the most distressing feature of the more than one-third reduction of foster care since 2018 is that this decline occurred without much discussion, or investment, in in-home safety planning, either in state systems, among child advocates or in child welfare research.
Safety planning remains one of the least researched subjects in child protection during recent years. Consequently, there is not a body of research-based guidelines for caseworkers to depend on, and some available practice wisdom is dubious at best. DCYF child fatality reviews have frequently found safety plans in case records that have not been followed by participants in the plan, including relatives and caseworkers. Absent consistent check-ins with safety monitors, safety plans are likely to become defunct in a short period of time. Many children in Washington, including infants, have been left in hazardous circumstances without protections, i.e. either services or safety plans since the implementation of the Keeping Families Together Act (KFTA), according to DCYF’s reports on KFTA implementation. This must change.
Child protection systems that operate on family support principles must be invested in finding effective ways of protecting maltreated children in the home. Crisis oriented family preservation programs are not effective with chronically referring families. Assuming that a parent’s entry into a service program affords immediate protection from serious harm is dangerously naïve. Therapeutic progress in the treatment of chronically relapsing conditions (including mood disorders) takes time and is a rocky road, vulnerable to relapse and other setbacks. Caseworkers must not lose contact with families during this process.
Concretely, child welfare agencies need to develop an infrastructure (either internally or through private agencies) for implementation of safety plans, and engage with academic researchers to identify effective practices. Caseworkers are usually too overwhelmed to visit families 2-3 times per week for an extended period of time. They need the assistance of case aides or private agency staff to follow up with safety monitoring of children assessed as endangered. Safety plan implementation, when done conscientiously, is labor intensive and must be a priority rather than a token gesture used in documentation to create the appearance of child safety. Child welfare agencies that require monthly home visits when safety plans are in effect are clueless regarding the meaning of “risk of imminent harm.”
Currently, there is no effective in-home safety strategy to protect infants and toddlers from drug overdoses and co-sleeping roll-over deaths when parents have long histories of substance misuse. States need to be investing in PPW programs, crisis nurseries and other means of providing respite care to protect infants when substance abusing parents demonstrate a compromised ability to engage in harm reduction practices with young children who remain in the home.
The influence of caseworkers
Child welfare caseworkers do more than assess risk and safety, develop case plans and connect families to services. Their interactions with families model the use of authority in situations of highly unequal power, a modelling that potentially can influence parenting practices, as well as beliefs about the world that affect relationships with other community agencies and professionals.
When asked what behaviors and character traits of caseworkers are important, parents often refer to ‘honesty’, ‘fairness’ and ‘trustworthiness’, i.e. keeping promises and being ready to offer help when needed. Parents also mention the importance of warmth and empathy in how caseworkers relate to them. (Schreiber, et al, 2013) Caseworkers whose goal is to strengthen families should be looking for and rewarding (with praise and concrete support) indicators of
caregivers’ nurturance of children, personal agency, and commitment to recovery. The importance of curiosity in caseworker interactions with parents cannot be overstated. Caseworkers must also be able to confront a parent’s deficient care without aggression or moral condemnation. Supporting families in child protection cannot mean turning a blind eye to a parent’s negative behavior or denying its significance.
Caseworkers whose interactions with parents occur over weeks, months or years can have a profound therapeutic effect on families, even when outcomes are not what parents desire. The challenge of child welfare casework is to see families and family members as they are, warts and all, while supporting family members in every way possible consistent with the safety and well-being of children.
References
“A Nation’s Shame: Fatal Child Abuse and Neglect in the U.S., A Report of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect,” Executive Summary (1995), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Washington, D.C.
Rowe, C., Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care (2025), Abrams Press, New York City, NY.
Schneider, J., Fuller, T. & Paceley, M., “Engagement in child protective services: Parents’ perceptions of worker skills,” (2013), Children, Youth and Services Review, 35 (41).
Wilson, D. & Thomas, B., “Trustworthiness and Skills in Child Protection,” Sounding Board, November 2013, available at deewilsoncon.com.
See past Sounding Board commentaries
©Dee Wilson