DEE WILSON CONSULTING
In-Home Dependencies: Are They Useful?
(Originally published August 2025)
In Washington State, it is possible for a child to be made legally dependent without being placed in foster care or in unlicensed kinship care. The standard for a finding of dependency in RCW 13.34 is: “dependent child means any child who:
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has been abandoned
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is abused or neglected as defined in chapter 26.44 by a person legally responsible for the care of a child
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has no parent, guardian or custodian capable of adequately caring for the child, such that the child is in circumstances which constitute a danger of substantial damage to the child’s psychological or physical development, or
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is receiving extended foster care services (past age 18) as authorized by RCW. 74.13. 03.”
The legal standard for involuntary removal of a child in the Keeping Families Together Act (KFTA) is “risk of imminent physical harm.” Many abused or neglected children, and children living in high-risk environments with parental substance abuse, chronic mental illness, domestic violence and other risk factors do not meet a point in time standard for imminent physical harm, and may even be assessed as “safe” in the DCYF safety framework, and have their case closed without services.
In past years, child welfare caseworkers and supervisors in Washington often disagreed among themselves regarding the usefulness of in-home dependencies, so this legal option was rarely utilized. Abused and neglected children were almost always either placed in foster care or unlicensed kinship care (usually with a dependency action, but occasionally through written voluntary agreement with the parents), or, along with their parents, were provided voluntary services; or the case was closed.
The large increase in critical incidents (CI), i.e., child maltreatment fatalities and near-fatalities, since the implementation of KFTA on July 1, 2023, including 92 child fatalities or near-fatalities during the first six months of 2025 on cases open within 12 months of the CI (10 more than in all of 2024), has led to a reconsideration of the use of in-home dependencies among some child advocates. The Office of the Family and Children’s Ombuds (OFCO) 2025 report on “Fatalities and Near Fatalities in Washington State” makes the following recommendation:
“DCYF should engage judicial officers, court administrators, and child welfare professionals to develop practice guidelines and training focused on the use of in-home dependencies as an option to provide ongoing services, support and protective supervision in situations where a child is not at risk of imminent physical harm, but circumstances pose a danger of substantial damage to the child’s psychological or physical development.”
The Ombuds report calls attention to child fatality reviews which comment on the lack of understanding among child welfare caseworkers that standards for child removal from the parents’ home and a finding of dependency are different. “Additionally, the guidelines should describe how to incorporate prior involvement with child welfare services when assessing child safety and risk and the need for court supervision.”
The report asserts that, “In practice, the Department generally files for dependency only when a child is removed from the home. State laws, however, allow for a court ordered dependency disposition that keeps children in their homes and in the custody of their parents while also providing court supervision and ongoing services …” The report notes that currently some children are removed from their home due to alleged risk of imminent harm but are returned to the parent(s) at the shelter care hearing or prior to the dependency hearing following the parents’ agreement to seek services and development of an in-home safety plan. In addition, the first phase of reunification in a dependency proceeding is labelled a “trial home visit” which, for purposes of federal AFCARS foster care statistics, is still counted as foster care. Possibly, it is this practice which explains use of the phrase “in-home foster care” to describe in-home dependencies by Patrick Dowd, Executive Director of OFCO, as quoted in a July 28 story published in the Seattle Times.
It is necessary to read between the lines of the OFCO report on child fatalities and near-fatalities to understand the rationale for the OFCO support of use of in-home dependencies. The OFCO report implicitly suggests that DCYF has shaped its safety standards and assessments to the KFTA standard for child removal and, in doing so, has minimized the significance of lengthy family
histories of child welfare involvement and often ignored the risk to children living in homes with parental substance abuse, chronic mental illness, domestic violence and often other risk factors as well. From this perspective (which I share), child safety has been unnecessarily and wrongly conflated with “risk of imminent physical harm” by DCYF caseworkers. The result has been an alarming increase since 2018 in child fatalities and near-fatalities. KFTA has acted as an accelerator to this trend through its effect on infant and toddler placements, but the root cause has been DCYF’s increasingly narrow view of child safety which predated passage and implementation of KFTA.
Ryan Murray, Director of Washington’s CASA program, also maintains that court involvement leads to improved child safety. In a recent personal communication, he states: “… we’ve (the court) have gotten better about child safety analysis. … there was only one fatality when the court was involved in 2024. More people involved with the family, more resources, and more people working on analysis and problem solving with the family. Safety is a technical problem; risk is adaptive… and assessing families in high-risk situations requires more than just one social worker.”
Likely pushback to support of increased use of in-home safety plans
It would be naïve to expect DCYF leadership to publicly acknowledge that its safety framework, including basic assumptions regarding child safety, is flawed. It is equally unlikely that child advocates who strongly supported passage of KFTA will admit that KFTA implementation has been followed by a child welfare emergency in which infants and toddlers with open CPS cases are demonstrably less safe than they were before the law’s passage.
However, there are other reasons why the OFCO recommendation to increase use of in-home dependencies is likely to meet strong resistance:
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In-home dependencies that include safety plans are a lot of work. Furthermore, when children become legally dependent, their case plans are subject to periodic case review. Caseworkers may be held accountable by the court for inadequate implementation of case plans. An understaffed child welfare agency is unlikely to take on a large additional workload without an increase in staffing levels.
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Many parent and child advocates who support KFTA want less use of legal structure, not more; and are likely to view a proposal to increase uses of in-home dependencies as a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. From this perspective, the social justice goal for narrowing the legal grounds for child removal is to limit child welfare involvement with low-income families, especially Black and American Indian families, to a minimum, or even eliminate involuntary intrusion in these families altogether. Increasing utilization of in-home dependencies would be an affront to this version of social justice, even if a legally dependent child remains in the parents’ custody, and even when the cost of reduced court involvement is a large increase in maltreatment related injuries and fatalities among children of all races/ ethnicities.
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For experienced child welfare staff, the resistance to in-home dependencies may be less ideological than pragmatic. In past decades (well before the passage of KFTA), juvenile court judges and commissioners in Washington were often unwilling to order removal of a child from parents due solely to lack of compliance with a service plan, regardless of their power to do so. The OFCO report comments: “The Court may remove a child from a parent’s care based on the parents’ noncompliance with the case plan or failure to participate in available services or treatment for themselves and the child.”
It’s unlikely DCYF caseworkers would assume that judicial officers in Washington would exercise this authority in a social milieu shaped by values that led to passage of KFTA, unless the law was amended to explicitly authorize child removal under well-defined circumstances that include more than non-compliance with a court ordered treatment plan, e.g., evidence that the child has continued to be abused or neglected. In past years, resistance to use of in-home dependencies among child welfare staff was based in large part on the belief that parents could refuse, or fail to conscientiously participate in court ordered services without consequence. If so, what was the point of making a child legally dependent without out-of-home placement?
Possible uses of in-home dependencies
DCYF and other public child welfare agencies investigate/assess large numbers of chronically referring families in which children have been chronically neglected, or experienced chronic multitype maltreatment, but whose parent(s) repeatedly refuse services, or agree to services but do not follow through on a service plan. Some of these families have received extensive services, with little or no effect on their parenting behavior.
Both parents and children in these families typically have extensive unmet service needs. Cumulative harm to children’s development results in developmental delays and behavior problems which lead to family conflict and difficulty in school and the community. By the time children growing up with chronic maltreatment are school age, their behavior problems make them poor candidates for foster care.
In-home dependencies can be used to mandate service plans for both parents and children in lieu of therapeutic foster care or kinship care. Even when parents are resistant to court ordered services for themselves, behavioral health services and medical and dental services can still be provided for children in child care settings or schools. However, implementing court ordered services in these circumstances can be frustrating when parents are uncooperative with caseworkers and other professionals. Child welfare agencies unconcerned with chronic neglect and chronic multitype maltreatment until a caseworker encounters “risk of imminent physical harm” will not be interested in this use of in-home dependencies.
There are cases of emotional abuse of a child that include a parent’s use of extreme isolation, or rejection and scapegoating, corrupting, exploiting or terrorizing a child. In extreme situations, caregivers’ dehumanizing treatment of a despised child can border on torture. The KFTA child removal standard, “risk of imminent physical harm” is of no use in some of these situations, and does not recognize the potential devastating consequences of extreme emotional abuse and neglect. In-home dependencies may be necessary in Washington to effectively intervene in these circumstances. In addition, KFTA should be amended to recognize emotional abuse and neglect that can severely damage a child’s well- being and have lifelong effects on physical and mental health.
The use of in-home dependencies to mandate services for chronically neglected school age children and for severely emotionally abused and neglected children would address serious deficiencies in Washington’s approach to child protection but would not much reduce child maltreatment fatalities and near fatalities, the great majority of which occur among children 0-3. To achieve this goal, CPS caseworkers would need to file dependency actions, absent child removal, on infants and other preschool children with disabilities, serious physical or mental health conditions when parents have histories of refusing treatment or failing to complete substance abuse and mental health programs; or when a parent’s actions indicate an inability to engage in harm reduction behaviors during binges or mental health crises.
No effective child protection system waits to intervene until infants or toddlers highly vulnerable due to a disability and/or serious health condition are at risk of imminent harm. To do so is to invite child fatalities and near-fatalities. Currently, the best option for protecting the health and safety of this group of vulnerable young children at risk due to a parent’s substance misuse or chronic mental illness is an in-home dependency, per the recommendation of OFCO, that involves multiple public partners in protection of the child.
Voluntary services vs. use of in-home dependencies
Many parents, even ones engaged in substance misuse or who have serious mental health challenges, are willing to participate in voluntary services and cooperate with in-home safety plans. There should not be a public policy preference for seeking legal structure vs. voluntary services unless:
a) parents refuse services, or have a history of failing to follow through on an agreed services or safety plan;
b) unless, prior to a CPS report, a parent engaged in substance misuse has a history of failed treatment episodes, or of refusing treatment or other assistance, or
c) a parent or caregiver has been unreliable in adherence to a plan of rehabilitative services and/or medical or psychosocial treatment for a disabled or chronically ill child whose health and welfare have been compromised as a result, or
d) a child has been systematically and severely emotionally abused and/ or neglected as discussed above, and requires the intervention of multiple public systems to protect the child from further harm.
According to the most recent DCYF report on KFTA implementation, there has been a sevenfold increase in the number of children placed out- of- the home but returned to the parent(s) prior to the dependency fact finding hearing (213 during the first six months of 2025 vs. 30 during the same months in 2023). Given this increase, it is possible to use administrative data to compare process measures and outcomes between three groups of children:
1) children removed from the home and still in foster care or unlicensed kinship care at the fact-finding hearing;
2) children removed from the home but returned to the parent(s) pre-fact finding;
3) children assessed at high risk opened for family voluntary services.
It is possible to ground policy and practice decisions regarding use of in- home dependencies in data that sheds light on results of two types of legal structure vs. use of voluntary services with high-risk families.
References
Goldstein- Street, J. “Deaths and critical injuries spike in Washington’s child welfare system, “ Seattle Times, July 28, 2025.
KFTA Quarterly Data Update, July 2025, available on line.
“Report on Child Fatalities and Near Fatalities in Washington State, Washington State Office of Family and Children’s Ombuds, Tukwila, Washington.
See past Sounding Board commentaries
©Dee Wilson