“Nobody wants to take your kids away.”

This is a common sentiment.  Most often I hear it from those whose underlying meaning is, “Quit being so ridiculous; there’s nothing to worry about with Child Protective Services, because everybody involved has the ultimate goal of helping your family to be safe, healthy, and together.”  Unfortunately, the statement is simply untrue.

It is true that most social workers are reasonable people, and prefer to see families stay together.  However, to assume that is true of all, because it is true of the majority is foolish.  There are several significant reasons we have legitimate cause for concern when social services is involved.

Many social workers are biased against conservatives.

An example of this principle at work is Home School Legal Defense Association’s (HSLDA) repeated experience with exceptional targeting of homeschoolers.  Reports of supposed truancy are often met with unnecessary lengthy investigations, even after evidence of educational compliance is provided, demonstrating an inherent bias against homeschooling families.

A few of these anti-conservative social workers may be purely spiteful.

Most probably honestly believe our children are in better hands when the government is calling the shots. (This is absolutely not the case, as I’ll show a bit later.)

Although Lawrence Krauss is — thankfully — not a social worker, this video demonstrates the indisputable fact that there are people who truly believe raising our children with a traditional Judeo-Christian worldview is child abuse.

Many social workers are simply inexperienced.

There are many social workers “out there” with plenty of idealistic theory learned in a college classroom, but little or no experience raising children, leaving them without a solid grasp of reality.  These are the people who believe that any harm — or potential for harm — that ever comes to a child is absolutely preventable and clearly somebody’s fault.  They don’t understand that even with the best of intentions, with the best of parenting, sometimes things just happen, because we are not God, omnipotent and omnipresent.

I was in a conversation once with a social worker online — not in any official capacity, just a conversation — and she actually said that for an infant to ever be out of a parent’s view, even for a moment, is child neglect.  Lest you think she was talking about the sort of abandonment the average parent would consider neglect, let me give you some context: this was in reply to a comment about putting a baby in his crib to sleep.

Are you following me here?  According to her verbalized message, if you put a baby to bed in his own room — in a crib designed for the very purpose of keeping babies safe while they sleep — and then walk out of the room, you’re neglecting your child.  Heaven forbid you should ever sleep, since it’s highly probable you can’t keep your child in your line of sight while your eyes are, presumably, closed for sleeping!

There are people like this tasked with determining whether perfectly average, normal parents are “good parents” or not.  Is there any question that they will find most, if not all, of the parents they assess/investigate “wanting”?

No, this does not equate to all social workers — and thank God for that!  But it is foolish to pretend this is a non-issue simply because it’s only a percentage.  If it’s the social worker dealing with your family and determining your child is abused or neglected — based on an invalid standard — it really doesn’t matter what the percentage is.  Your family is still being harmed.

This is Massively Important

The importance of this cannot be underestimated!  There is a tendency to operate from a perspective of “better safe than sorry,” but this is a (very!) faulty perspective.  Apart from the fact that removal is, itself, traumatic, the system is not “safe.”

The rates of abuse and neglect within the system are considerably higher than outside of it.  Although the numbers vary by area and study criteria, children in foster care have been reported to suffer abuse at the rate of 4-10 times that of children in the general public.  Nearly a quarter of children in group homes have been reported to suffer sexual abuse.  The children themselves report even higher rates of abuse, with almost a third of children in foster care, in some studies, reporting abuse, and over half in other studies reporting “maltreatment.” (Sources are all over the map, but see, for example here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  I’m having difficulty getting access to most of the original papers.  Not surprisingly, the departments themselves claim much lower numbers than any of the independent investigations.)

Although the numbers are clearly difficult to nail down, it is equally as clear that state custody cannot be considered a “safe” option.  There is, obviously, a time and place when removal is warranted, but it is the height of foolishness to remove a child from a safe environment a department or departmental worker simply doesn’t like and put him into a potentially dangerous one. (I would even go so far as to say that a not-fabulous-but-not-awful environment is probably still better kept intact, when all factors are considered.  Take a look at Molly McGrath Tierney’s TED Talk about the ineffectiveness of foster care.)

My parents were foster parents for about twenty years, so it is not my intent to vilify foster parents as a whole any more than it is my intent to vilify social workers as a whole.  I am, however, seeking to point out that statistics strongly demonstrate that except in the most egregious cases of abuse, or gross neglect (e.g. not feeding an infant), children are better off with their parents.  And certainly when we’re dealing primarily with matters of philosophy — like educational choices, seeking a second medical opinion, when a home is “clean/tidy enough to be healthy but messy enough to be happy,” or what to put in a school lunch — foster care shouldn’t even be an option on the table!

We need to stop putting blind faith in a system that has been soundly demonstrated to be broken.