My Experience: The Child Protective Services Debate

I served as a Child Advocate in two states over the course of about 18 years. I worked with a total of 23 children in this capacity. What this program does is appoint an advocate to a child or sibling group who is in the custody of the state. We visit the child, interview all involved with their cases, draft court reports on our recommendation for the best interests, and testify in court. 

Child Protective Services has a bad reputation. As the years went on, I also developed a negative opinion on them. However, the negative opinions of CPS take two extremes. Some who dislike them claim that they don’t do enough, and some who dislike them claim that they do too much. They either fail to help a child in a truly abusive situation and the child “falls through the cracks”, or they are too eager to remove a child from a home for “every little thing.” It’s a popular opinion in the “they do too much” camp that families are penalized just for being poor. (It’s “illegal” to remove a child due to poverty, but all they have to do is call it neglect.)

I sort of felt like when I started this blog, readers would expect me to have either one of those stances or the other. The truth is that I take both stances, and I want to get that out of the way before I start writing about my specific situations with the kids I served (while changing their names and details of course). 

CPS fails in both ways. I have worked with kids (as a child advocate and also in other roles) who should have been helped much more by the state and were not. I’ve also seen kids that were simply just taken away for minor things or for simply being poor. Both extremes do happen. Most of the time, it is the result of the caseworker/judge combo that that particular child and their family ends up with. Each individual judge or caseworker might be particularly “pro- family preservation” or “pro separation”, and if you get two of them in one camp, and certain situations with the specific kids, it can definitely lead to one of the extremes or the other. 

I am also not always against CPS. I understand that they often do what’s right, and I’ll touch on that as well. They’re a house of cards, and in which ways they fail or don’t fail depends highly on what individuals are involved.