Our member, Dr. Kelley Fong (University of California, Irvine, US), talks about her new book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services (Princeton University Press, 2023).
One in three U.S. children experiences a Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation at some point during childhood, and CPS is especially highly present in poor communities and communities of color. The cases that make news headlines – children brutally beaten and starved, for instance – are a tiny minority of what comes to CPS. Typically, the agency is responding to manifestations of family adversity and poverty, such as domestic violence, addiction, and homelessness.
Investigating Families examines the ramifications of responding to family adversity writ large through CPS. The book shows how turning so readily to an agency fundamentally oriented around parental, especially maternal, wrongdoing organizes assistance around surveilling, assessing, and correcting mothers. This affects how mothers experience the “help” on offer, undermining their sense of security and affecting how they marshal resources for their children. Through seemingly routine, low-level encounters, through often well-meaning people trying to help, governments perpetuate family marginality and reinforce existing inequalities.
Childhood scholars, family scholars, and just the public in general should be thinking much more about CPS, in my view, as it’s a critical institution in children’s lives. There is so much to learn about what the system is doing and how it affects families, especially using a qualitative approach. I am grateful to have learned from over 100 low-income and/or CPS-impacted mothers, who shared their perspectives with me in in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. And although researchers have rarely been able to embed with CPS, I had some wonderful research partners in Connecticut who enabled me to shadow CPS investigators.
I wrote Investigating Families to share some of what I learned and especially to bring readers into the experience of being investigated by CPS. Those who haven’t experienced it personally, including myself, might dismiss the agency’s intervention as no big deal, especially if the case is promptly closed. So it may seem like “no harm, no foul” to report a family to CPS, perhaps to get help for them. I wanted to show people what I saw: how the trauma of CPS extends well beyond its family separation practices and how processing family adversity through CPS can be counterproductive, distancing children from potential sources of support.
It began with a phone call.
After Jazmine Acosta’s housing case manager placed the call, there was no turning back. A few hours later, a state investigator showed up at Jazmine’s apartment, knocking on her door to question her and see her two-year-old son, Gabriel.
Jazmine, a Black and Puerto Rican woman with curly hair dyed blonde, had grown up going back and forth between relatives due to her mother’s addiction. Now twenty-three, she and Gabriel lived in New Haven, Connecticut, in an apartment subsidized by the nonprofit organization whose case manager made the call. (All the names of research participants in this book are pseudonyms.) When the investigator came, money was tight. After Jazmine totaled her car the month before, her boss had taken her off the schedule and given her work hours to someone else with a car. She was scrambling to find an affordable apartment before her housing subsidy ended in a couple months. But she’d been getting by and feeling hopeful. She reflected that, as Gabriel’s mother, “I have a motivation and I have somebody who loves me. I have somebody who depends on me.”
The investigator’s visit threatened to upend that. This stranger had the power to whisk Gabriel away in an instant, separating the toddler from his home and family. Jazmine wouldn’t have to agree to this; the investigator and his colleagues at Child Protective Services (CPS) could decide unilaterally and get a court to sign off later. So when the investigator arrived, telling her he’d received a report alleging that Jazmine hit Gabriel while they met with her housing case manager, Jazmine was terrified. She thought about not letting the investigator in but figured that would only give him more reason to take her son. She decided she would do whatever he asked. “Everything now is on the line,” she later said. During the visit, she recalled, “all I was thinking about was: Just answer this man’s questions. If I tell this man everything now, he can see that I’m being honest and that I just want him to get the hell out.”
In this spirit of openness, when the investigator sat on Jazmine’s couch to inquire about the stressors in her life and any substances she used, she shared that marijuana helped her cope with stress, anxiety, and depression—“so I don’t go to my dark place,” she said. The investigator listened, then gently asked, “What can we do to help you?” He started explaining his interest in identifying a therapeutic program that would work for her, when Jazmine interjected.
“This”—she drew circles in the air with her pointer finger—“is not gonna make it any better. Imma let you know right now. It’s not.” She began to cry.
The investigator explained to Jazmine that he wanted to help her manage her stress so things didn’t escalate to endanger Gabriel. She told me afterward that she appreciated his calm demeanor and respectful attitude. As the investigator wrapped up his questions that evening, he assured her he wouldn’t be taking Gabriel with him. No one thought the toddler was in imminent danger—not Jazmine, or her new investigator, or the housing case manager who placed the call.
And yet, the investigator’s visit amplified Jazmine’s sense of anxiety and vulnerability. “Nobody likes CPS,” she told me two days after that first meeting. “When somebody says that word, nobody says, ‘Oh, yay, CPS.’ No. Your stomach is dropping.” She compared the investigation to walking on a tightrope—a high-wire act with ruinous consequences for the tiniest misstep.
This tightrope walk happens every day, all over the country. Each year, state CPS agencies investigate the families of more than three million U.S. children following reports of suspected child abuse and neglect, defined broadly as things caregivers do (or don’t do) that place children at risk of harm. One out of every three children in the United States—and fully half of all Black children—can expect to have a CPS investigator come knocking at some point during childhood. Remarkably, U.S. families’ engagement with the child welfare system is comparable in scale and concentration to the high levels of criminal legal system intervention in poor communities of color. As such, CPS is essential to our understanding of contemporary families, parenthood, poverty, and racial inequality. In this single agency, we see some of our country’s deepest tensions: our inclination to treat structural problems as individual deficiencies, our ongoing racism and racial stratification despite purportedly “color-blind” policies, our failure to support mothers even as we valorize motherhood.
The rest of the introduction can be accessed on the publisher’s webpage here.