The Day the System Comes
The Harms of Child Separation and the Urgent Need for Restraint
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“Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?”
Throughout my life I’ve often been asked about what it felt like to be taken from my family and placed in the foster care system. I struggled to come up with the words. But one day, while reading The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I stumbled upon the above quote that I believe captures the shock of being sent into the foster care system.
Now I want to be clear: Solzhenitsyn was writing about being arrested in the USSR, and ultimately being sent to a Gulag. I am in no way comparing the modern US foster care system to the Soviet-style, all-encompassing system of repression. But for a 9-year old, being separated from your mother, brothers, and everything you ever knew is certainly an “unassimilable spiritual earthquake.”
After years of hearing about Child Protective Services, after years of seeing neighbors lose their children, and after years thinking that at any moment, CPS will come barging through the front door, it is indeed a “bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you” when you finally find yourself in the clutches of the dreaded System.
Ask any former foster child — of any age — and they’ll tell you that they may forget a lot, but one of the things they’ll never forget is the day the System came. That is indubitably the case for me.
I recall — with laser-like precision — every detail of that day. The way the oil-stained driveway felt beneath my feet, the sun on my cheeks, the sight of my mother in the back of the cop car, and the tears in my eyes. I remember the waiting room in that county office, and I remember being told that my older brothers would be sent elsewhere. I remember meeting my first foster mother, and I remember being driven to a stranger’s home a few cities away. I remember the potent mix of confusion, sorrow and shock as it dawned on me that something had changed in my life, irrevocably. It has been two decades and I still occasionally have dreams of that day.
There has been substantial research conducted on the impact of child removal, and the vast majority of this research leads to one obvious conclusion: it is very harmful. Here’s an excerpt from just one academic paper that highlights some of the consequences of removing a child from their family:
“The events of the day of placement constitute a crisis for children because everything in their lives changes and the children are overwhelmed with feelings of abandonment, rejection, worthlessness, guilt, and helplessness. Moreover, the children’s old ways of perceiving the world and of coping with challenges no longer work.”
This is something that 368,530 children experienced in 2022, and that over 2 million children have experienced since 2018. In addition, each year an average of approximately 17,000 children are taken from their families and placed in foster care, only to be reunited within ten days, suggesting that their removal may have been unnecessary.
Several psychological theories underlie the feelings described in the excerpt above, such as attachment theory, ambiguous loss, and complex trauma, among other concepts. Given how central these concepts are to the child protection system in the United States, I’ll talk briefly about each of these, with the same caveat as last week’s newsletter: I am not a psychologist, so bear with me as I describe these concepts.
Attachment theory posits that disrupting a parent-child relationship can cause significant emotional distress, and such distress can cause a host of issues later in life. Children with attachment disorders can develop anger and depression, and when they experience unstable and unpredictable relationships, they soon internalize that they cannot rely on others to care for them, particularly during periods when caring is precisely what they require. They might struggle to form relationships with their peers, and in other cases might be desperate to develop relationships with their current caregivers in a way that is demanding and unhealthy. This difficulty in establishing an emotional connection with others means they are less likely to seek comfort when they’re feeling distressed, a phenomenon called Reactive Attachment Disorder.
Ambiguous loss is another consequence of removal into the foster care system. It has been described as a “a situation of unclear loss that remains unverified and thus without resolution.” It is a feeling of grieving someone that is not dead but that is somewhere out there. Such a feeling can induce “anxiety, confusion, despair, and other negative mental health experiences.” You exist in a state of suspended animation, where you know you have people that love you somewhere but they are no longer with you, perhaps permanently. It has been suggested that the foster care system is ill-prepared to address this feeling, and that such a failure can cause further emotional distress for children in the system.
Foster youth are also disproportionately likely to struggle from complex trauma, which “is a term used to describe both a constellation of causal risk factors involving repeated interpersonal trauma by caregivers early in life; and the resulting dysregulation that occurs across a range of areas including emotional, behavioral, interpersonal, physiological, and cognitive functioning.” It is the unresolved nature of these traumatic events that impact a child’s well-being. This trauma accumulates, especially since children are still likely to experience additional traumatic events while in the foster care system (abuse, setbacks in their reunification process, placement disruptions, and more).
These are just a few of the issues associated with taking a child away from their family; I can cite hundreds of research papers that have been written on this subject over the last half century. But what should be clear by now is that removing a child from their family is an intervention that exacts a considerable toll on the child being removed (never mind the family as a whole). This collection of issues is perhaps why foster youth experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at twice the rate of US combat veterans and why they are likely to struggle with a lifetime of mental and emotional challenges, such as modified social phobias, panic disorders, alcohol and drug dependence, and generalized anxiety disorders, at rates that far outstrip those seen in the general public.
While I have never been officially diagnosed with any of the above, I know I was permanently impacted by what occurred all those years ago. I also retroactively recognize how some of the subjects discussed above manifested themselves in the behavior of my foster siblings. I recall one sibling in particular— a boy that was a few years older than me, on the cusp of being a teenager — who developed such an unhealthy dependency on our foster mother that he would jealously guard access to her, even from her own husband. He was clingy, rarely leaving her side, and when he observed her being affectionate with someone else, he’d fly off the handle, a textbook example of attachment trauma. I’ve also known children as young as ten run away from their foster homes to be with their families. And the behavioral and emotional challenges that foster youth experience can, at least in part, be linked back to that fateful day in which they lost their world and were thrust into a new, alien one.
It seems that in many circumstances, then, the practice of removing a child from a potentially unsafe environment is in some ways more harmful than the environment itself. In the name of protecting children, we are damaging them in the process, and we aren’t doing enough as a society to pause and ask whether there’s a better approach to keeping kids safe.
Don’t just take my word for it, or the words of other foster children (though including the voices of those with lived-experience should always be a priority). Some scholars have argued that removing a child might be a “cure worse than the disease.” Others have pointed to studies and court cases that argue that removing a child from their families “may be ‘more damaging to the child than doing nothing at all.’”
To include one more perspective on the matter, Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, has stated (in the context of the family separation that was occurring at the US-Mexico border) that the consequences of removing a child from their family can be “catastrophic,” and that “there’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”
Foster youth experience post-traumatic stress disorder at twice the rate of US combat veterans
I should emphasize two points. First, the harms described above are likely to occur even in the case of a child being removed from neglectful and abusive parents. One article states that according to attachment theory, “separation of the child from his or her caregivers is severely threatening to the child, irrespective of the quality of the child’s experience with the parent. Even neglectful and abusive parents are likely to be treated by children as protective figures.”
I know this to be true. Despite the fact that we lived in some of the most adverse conditions imaginable and that my mother was struggling with addiction and mental health challenges, she was still my mother and thus superior to any stranger that the system stuck me with, especially considering several of my foster parents showed me not an ounce of love or affection. And anecdotally, I know many other former foster youth feel the same, especially those who were placed in group homes or in abusive situations.
Second, there are of course many circumstances which warrant a child to be removed from a home. Abuse and severe willful neglect put a child’s life and well-being in danger, and if there is no way to rectify the situation swiftly, then measures must be taken to protect that child. In such circumstances, the harms of remaining in that unsafe environment outweigh the harms of removal. I don’t think any reasonable person would argue that we should never remove children from their families, only that we must exercise extreme caution when doing so.
The moral of the story is that the current approach to child protection — removing a child first and asking questions later, especially in the case of short stays — should only be done in the rarest of circumstances.
Others have pointed to studies and court cases that argue that removing a child from their families “may be ‘more damaging to the child than doing nothing at all.’”
Tragically, such restraint is not a feature of our system, for many reasons. First, there isn’t a robust architecture in place to support at-risk and struggling families. For families experiencing material deprivations in particular, the child protection system is simply not designed to support them in a way that would actually address the underlying challenges they face.
States are limited in the interventions they can utilize to keep families together. Much of the time, they can only rely on “therapeutic services,” such as substance abuse or mental health counseling. But for families struggling with housing or keeping the heat on in the winter, there is considerably less support that can be directly offered by the child protection system.
Second, many frontline personnel tasked with making emergency removal decisions generally lack understanding on how traumatizing family separation can be. In several states and localities, police officers are the ones that make these decisions, and according to Judge John J. Romero Jr, they make these decisions not out of malice, but rather “they think it’s erring on the side of caution.” Officials who are acting out of an altruistic desire to keep a kid safe may end up causing more harm than good.
This leads to the third reason: there is a low-tolerance for risk in the system. I’ll be writing about this in a future newsletter, but so much of child protection boils down to people — from policymakers down to street-level bureaucrats — not wanting to be the one responsible for something terrible happening. Many of you may have read countless stories that go like this: a child that was “known to the system” — meaning a caseworker investigated an allegation of maltreatment and determined the child can remain safely with their family — either suffers horrific abuse or dies, and questions start flying as to why nothing was done to protect that child.
No one wants to see their names in the headlines for this, or get dragged in front of lawmakers, or appear in documentaries as the caseworker who could’ve saved a child. With this Sword of Damocles potentially hanging over their head, CPS caseworkers are often incentivized to investigate more families and to remove more children, out of an abundance of caution. Such a disposition ensures that more children will be removed from their families, more will struggle with the sorrow and confusion associated with removal, and more will deal with lifetime challenges that could’ve been avoided.
We must reorient child protection and child welfare. The tool of child removal should be holstered, only to be used when all other options have been deployed. While there is a legal mandate that agencies must make “reasonable efforts” to preserve families, such efforts are difficult to make when agencies operate without the necessary resources. As I mentioned earlier, these efforts often manifest themselves in mental health counseling or parenting classes, and while these services might be helpful, they do nothing to put food on the table or a roof over a child’s head. So let’s give some teeth to “reasonable efforts” by giving the states and localities the tools they need to truly help families.
For a child that requires an out-of-home placement, we must never forget that everything has changed for that child. Even though some localities may remove dozens of kids a week, for each child, it is an intensely personal experience of a world being upended. We should thus dedicate extensive resources to alleviating whatever suffering they’re experiencing.
But in short, given the tragic costs of taking children from their families, we must make a whole-of-society effort to ensure that we only do it when absolutely necessary.
Thank you so much for reading. If you feel so inclined, please share this with your friends, family, and colleagues!
See you in a few weeks!
Current Read(s):
I just started reading Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks. I’ve always considered myself a very cautious techno-futurist, meaning that I while I think technology can help solve so many grand challenges humanity faces, I am also cognizant of the severe downsides of deploying technology without careful (very careful) consideration. This book underscores exactly why being careful is so essential. When algorithms are utilized to punish people, to boot them off public assistance, or to surveil them, then that technology isn’t serving people. In the age of ChatGPT, we need to think of ways in which we can deploy some of the most transformative technologies of our time to help folks while not causing harm in the process. A tall task, but one I think we are up for.
What’s going on in the world of child welfare?:
‘Yo Soy La Mamá’: A Migrant Mother’s Struggle to Get Back Her Son (NYT) — An article that highlights the devastating ways in which the immigration system intersects with child welfare system, and how anti-immigrant sentiment swiftly undermines families and hurts children.
NY Law Would Scale Back Practice of Billing Parents for Foster Care (The Imprint) — Pending legislation in New York would make “collecting child support from parents with kids in foster care would be far less frequent.”
Woman Helps Latina Navigate California’s Foster Care System (Fox KTVU) — This article talks about how Nancy Correa and her organization “Remarkably Us” aims to empower Latinas who are currently in or used to be in foster care. Latinas comprise the largest group of foster children in the state of California.
Federal Report: Foster Care Total Dropped Again in 2022 (The Imprint) — Great news! The number of children in foster care continues to decline, with 16% fewer foster youth in the system today than in 2018.
An Expert Who Has Testified in Foster Care Cases Across Colorado Admits Her Evaluations Are Unscientific (ProPublica) — One of the most important — and devastating — articles I read recently, where a woman’s ‘method’ of evaluating a child’s connection with their foster parents almost invariably led to preventing a child from reunifying with their biological parents.
Washington Lawmakers Want Young Adults in Foster Care to Receive More Help with Fewer Strings Attached (The Imprint) —Pending legislation in Washington would expand access to cash stipends and housing supports.
Opinion: How to Prevent Black Kids From Becoming Stuck in Foster Care (Los Angeles Times) — Racial disproportionately has long been a tragic feature of the foster care system, and this article argues that one way to help Black foster youth is to make it easier for Black families to foster or adopt.
No One’s Children (The Atlantic) — A long article that explores the phenomena of “adoption secrecy,” where children who were adopted (and others) were barred from seeing vital records pertaining to their adoption, such as birth certificates and the like.
Opinion: Newsom Reneges on His Promise to California’s Foster Youth (San Jose Mercury) — Yet another article that shows how foster youth are bearing the brunt of California’s budget deficit in so many ways, such as a reduction of the Supervised Independent Living Program (SILP) stipend, which is used to pay for rent for older foster youth.
Opinion: The Real Reason Women Are Having Fewer Kids (Washington Post) — A fantastic article that examines one reason underlying the ‘baby bust’ in America and highlights the necessity of policies that allow women to preserve their hard fought economic progress while still allowing them to start a family, if they so choose.
The Problem With ‘Affordable’ Child Care (The Atlantic) — Child care in the United States is ridiculously expensive, and this article argues that the effort to make it “affordable” distracts from the ultimate goal of making it free.