NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending November 4, 2026

● “There has to be a place where you can ask for help without it being used against you.” But if you’re poor, in a world where almost every helping professional is a “mandatory reporter,” such places are almost impossible to find. That’s what Hope585 found after conducting focus groups with 21 parents in Rochester, New York. 

Writing in The Imprint, Hope585 Executive Director Ashley Cross explained: 

Women described reaching out for help and becoming the subjects of investigations. They spoke about unmet basic needs being interpreted as parental failure, children with behavioral challenges being misunderstood, and interactions with child welfare professionals that left them feeling powerless, judged and afraid. 

But perhaps the most consequential finding was this: Many women said they learned that asking for help was dangerous. … 

“If you reach out, someone’s going to judge you and report you,” one participant explained. 

● One of the mothers interviewed told her story in the Rochester Beacon: 

The first time Child Protective Services knocked on my door, my oldest child was only six months old. 

I had barely slept. My baby had cried for hours the night before. I fed him, changed him, rocked him, and walked the floor until my body ached. Nothing worked. Eventually, overcome by exhaustion, I let him cry so I could get some rest. 

I was a young, single mother trying to survive without the support of a village. Every day brought another worry. How would I pay the bills? How would I keep food in the house? How could I be the mother my child deserved when I was barely holding myself together? 

The next morning, CPS was at my door. Someone had reported me because my baby had been crying for too long. I remember the fear and shame. Who called them? Were they going to take my baby? Had being an exhausted mother somehow made me an unfit one? 

● But help without judgment is getting harder to find. Study after study finds that providing more concrete help to families reduces child abuse. Unfortunately, the reverse also is true. A new study finds that when states stopped providing extra SNAP benefits as part of a program initiated during the COVID pandemic, abuse and neglect increased. 

● What would the foster-care-at-all-costs crowd say if a dramatic drop in the number of children in foster care in Los Angeles County had been accompanied by increases in child abuse deaths? Yes, exactly. But when such deaths plummet as foster care goes down, they’d rather you not know. So we’ll have to tell you about it in this blog post. 

● Tearing apart more families doesn’t make children safer. But what does? Nora McCarthy of the NYC Family Policy Project discusses that on the latest edition of The F Word podcast. Also on that episode, Ella Bat-Ami, whose stunning comments on the first episode are discussed here, returns to discuss next steps. 

● KNXV-TV follows up on its story about how the head of the Arizona “child welfare” agency wants to solve the problem of foster youth running from group homes: Delay reporting the runaways to the police. 

● And Gene Weingarten has an update on the story of a Georgia mother persecuted after her infant died in a hot car – and the damage that’s doing to the surviving children.

Some remarkable data from America’s largest locally-run family policing system. Interpret with caution – but don’t overlook it:

In Los Angeles County, from 2015 through 2025:
 
●The number of children reported trapped in foster care on any given day dropped dramatically:

● The number of children reported torn from their families over the course of a year dropped dramatically:

● And child abuse fatalities, including deaths of children “known to the system,” ALSO dropped dramatically: 

(See below for details about how to find these data after clicking on the links.)

Maybe the best way to save children’s lives is to cut short all that needless foster care. Or maybe we should simply stop pretending we can measure system performance by fatality numbers, no matter what those numbers show in one community.

Long ago I proposed something to those who constantly push for a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare: a mutual moratorium on the use of horror stories to make our case. Of course they haven’t accepted. They can’t. That’s because horror stories are all they’ve got. 

The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that the child welfare surveillance state they have championed and nurtured for decades, reveling in its growth to monstrous proportions, has not only destroyed millions of families, it’s made all vulnerable children less safe. 

So, since they didn’t accept the offer, we include regular reminders in our weekly roundups of family preservation journalism and commentary that the horror stories go in all directions. Here’s a sampling from last year. 

More recently, I suggested going further: I proposed a mutual moratorium on using statistics about child abuse fatalities. The reason is one for which we all can be grateful: Though each is the worst imaginable tragedy, the number is low enough to rise or fall for all sorts of reasons unrelated to the behavior of the family policing system, sometimes including random chance. 

But those wedded to tearing apart families don’t want to do that either. On the contrary, they have a habit of cherry-picking fatality data, sometimes over short periods of time and in relatively small jurisdictions. 

The worst demagogues exploit horror stories even when the statistics show no evidence of a change in the rate of child abuse fatalities. That’s happening now in Santa Clara County, California. 

Given that, let’s look at data in one of the largest jurisdictions in the country, in fact, the largest locally run family policing system in America, in a locality with a larger population than 40 states: Los Angeles County, California. And let’s look at the fatality data going back as far as the County has posted it online, to 2015: 

As the screenshots at the top of this post make clear: From then through 2025, child abuse fatalities went down by a lot – both total child abuse fatalities and deaths of children “known to the system.” (2026 data are for the first half of the year only.) 

And what happened to foster care numbers during that time? Well, the fact that none of the child removal evangelists in academia, government or media has sought to bring this to your attention is a pretty good giveaway: As child abuse deaths declined sharply, so did known entries into foster care and the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day. (As always, there's a caveat: We don't know how much of the decline is real and how much is simply making the placements "off the books" using hidden foster care.) 

Los Angeles still has plenty of room to improve. Even with the dramatic declines, it still takes away children at one of the highest rates among America’s largest cities and their surrounding counties.

Did the decline in foster care entries cause the lower number of fatalities? Who knows? The best available evidence, from a massive nationwide study, shows no connection, one way or the other, between foster care entry rates and child abuse deaths. Even in a jurisdiction as huge as Los Angeles, the number of fatalities is small enough to merit caution about drawing conclusions about system performance from fatality numbers. 

There are better measures, including overall re-abuse of children left in their own homes (which, in Los Angeles, has remained about the same even as foster care entries declined), foster-care “recidivism,” the proportion of children reunified who are placed again (which also has remained about the same in Los Angeles) and, potentially most reliable: random-sample casereadings done by experts who come to the task from all points of view. So once again, I’ll suggest that mutual moratorium.

Because, at a minimum, all this tells us that those who cherry-pick data to claim that foster care declines lead to increases in fatalities are engaging in rank intellectual dishonesty. 

They do it because, once again, that’s all they’ve got. 

Into the weeds: Here are the details and sources: 

Los Angeles County makes available online child abuse fatality data starting from 2015. Between then and 2025, total child abuse fatalities declined by 50%. Deaths of children “known to the system” declined 43%. (The data for 2026 are for only the first half of the year.) 

During that same time period, according to the California Child Welfare Indicators Project, the number of children taken away each year started to decline, slowly at first, then, starting around 2020, much more quickly, to the point that, by 2025, entries into foster care were cut by more than half compared with 2015. 

Something similar happened to the number of children in foster care on any given day. It stayed largely the same through 2019 and then plummeted. By 2025, the number had decreased by more than 45%. 

In both cases the declines in foster care numbers didn’t start until about 2020. We provide the data back to 2015 because that’s how far back the fatality data are available. 

(Foster care links will default to statewide data. Click on “Single County View” and then “Report Options” to get data specific to Los Angeles. For the fatality data, after clicking on the link, click on “fatality determinations.”)

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 27, 2026

● Who would have thought that one of the most damning indictments of foster care would come from one of the most prominent defenders of tearing apart families? But that’s what happened when Prof. Jill Durerr-Berrick declared that “We don’t know whether [foster care is] a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative.” So, best case, we’ve been spending decades conducting a massive experiment on human test subjects without their informed consent – all of them children and, of course, disproportionately nonwhite. If a drug company did it, it would be criminal. The full story is in this NCCPR column in Youth Today. 

● I was a guest on the podcast appropriately named “The F Word” discussing the high rates of abuse in foster care, the mountain of evidence documenting the inherent harm to children when torn from their homes, and the perverse financial incentives that oil the child welfare removal machine: 

 

● As for what to do about those awful financial incentives, check out this webinar from United Family Advocates (enter passcode: mEg.$4MM)  on their bipartisan reform plan. If you don’t have time for all of it, be sure to check out the part starting at 51:17 in, which answers those who can't imagine giving up open-ended entitlement funding for tearing apart families – just in case they feel some urgent need to tear apart more families. 

● Kanaiyah Ward was placed in foster care not because her mother abused or neglected her, but because her mother couldn’t handle her behavior problems – and couldn’t afford to buy the help routinely available to affluent families. So she surrendered her child to the family policing system – which dumped her into a hotel where she committed suicide. Now Kanaiyha’s mother has filed a wrongful death suit.  “They killed my child,” Ward told WRC-TV. “Kanaiyah was my only child, and I couldn’t take care of her as a parent and with her condition, so I gave her to the state and they killed her.” 

● Also in Maryland, from WBFF-TV: Still another expose of still another place where Maryland children are institutionalized. 

● Meanwhile in Arizona, which has seen many such exposes, KNXV-TV reports, the head of the state family police agency has finally figured out how to solve the problem of all those foster children who run away from group homes and institutions: Let the group homes and institutions delay telling the cops that the kids are missing! 

● When Congress passed the Family First Act, it was supposed to curb institutionalization of children. But the institutions lobby made sure they got a great big loophole: They could keep scarfing up federal funds as long as they met minimal requirements to become so called Qualified Residential Treatment Programs. The federal Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General decided to see how that was working out in Kentucky. Here’s what they found: 

70 instances of noncompliance in 25 of the 30 children's case files and records that we reviewed, including missing family support group documentation, court approvals, discharge plans, and health records and screenings. 

165 instances of noncompliance across the 15 QRTPs that we reviewed related to requirements for background checks, personnel and training records, written policies, staffing, and physical environment. 

These weaknesses exposed children in Kentucky’s QRTPs to unsafe environments, inadequate care, and unqualified staff, and resulted in $571,306 ($416,009 Federal share) in improper Title IV‑E payments during the placements. 

● Family police agencies just hate it when you call them family police agencies. Good heavens, no! We’re kindly caseworkers who just want to help!  And yet, The Center Square reports, those kindly caseworkers at Georgia’s family police – sorry, child welfare agency spent nearly $1 million on a spy truck  - a specially-equipped Chevrolet Traverse outfitted with the latest high tech spy gear – the kind of stuff generally used by, uh, police departments that are supposed to get, you know, warrants before doing the spying. 

Oh, and those kindly caseworkers paid for their big, fancy specially-equipped spy truck in part with money from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) – the program that’s supposed to help poor people become self-sufficient. You can read more here about how many states routinely use TANF as a child welfare slush fund. 

● The Guardian tells a story of international adoption in general and adoption of Korean children in particular that is largely ignored amid the treacly features about white savior American parents “rescuing” supposedly abandoned children. From the story: 

In March of 2025, South Korea admitted government responsibility for enabling private adoption agencies to “mass export” Korean children for sale abroad, sometimes without the consent of birth families, since the 1950s. Now, more than 100,000 Korean-born adoptees in the US are asking themselves questions like: “Who am I, really? And how did I get here?” … 

South Korea announced international adoption of its children will end by 2029. … Months before the announcement, Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, offered a “heartfelt apology” to adoptees and birth parents for the government’s complicity in allowing agencies to dismantle generations of Korean families so white people could make new ones in the west.

The Guardian tells the stories of what some of those children endured.

NCCPR in Youth Today: A massive human experiment without informed consent

Suppose, hypothetically, a big pharmaceutical firm comes up with what they think will be a miracle drug. They call it, say, Fosterox. They are in a hurry and worry they can’t find enough test subjects for their clinical trials if they seek informed consent. So they use the drug on human subjects without such consent. 

The initial trials are inconclusive. The lead researcher tells the company president: 

“We don’t know whether Fosterox is a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative.” 

Instead of ending the experiment, the company president demands ever larger trials, all on human subjects, all without their informed consent. 

Oh, and all the test subjects for this massive human experiment are children, and they’re disproportionately nonwhite. 

If a drug company did that, they could be subject to lawsuits and civil penalties. In at least one state, California, those responsible could be jailed. …

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: Child welfare won’t change until help reaches the families 'struggling for support.'

The Times-Dispatch series this summer “Struggling for Support” paints a picture of children enduring horrific suffering while overloaded caseworkers look the other way, refusing to investigate cases or remove children in time. That’s half the story — or maybe less than half the story. 

Because for every such case there is another in which children were torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care, perhaps, as your series notes, because of “homelessness [or] inability to pay rent …” 

Read the full column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 21, 2026

● Last week, an NCCPR Blog post asked the question: “How often is institutionalizing children, and the foster-care system in general, not the cure for children’s “behavioral problems” – but rather the cause?”

An investigation by Hearst Connecticut Media helps answer the question. It’s the latest in a long, long line of stories across the country exposing hideous conditions in “residential treatment” – this time it’s the Albert J. Solnit Children’s psychiatric center. But consider one case the story examines: 

"Her behaviors are much worse, I would argue, in Solnit than they were when she was not hospitalized," [her attorney, Josh] Michtom said. "She's miserable now, and she wasn't miserable then." 

She is regularly placed on restriction and prevented from going outside when she misbehaves, he said. Her preferred language is Spanish, but Solnit has no Spanish-speaking clinicians, making it difficult for her to communicate, Michtom said. … 

She can't be released from Solnit until her behaviors improve, but Michtom says, her behaviors are unlikely to improve as long as she's there. 

"In this highly restrictive environment, she gets frustrated," he said. "So it's been a cycle of not being able to take her out of this restrictive environment because the restrictive environment itself provokes behaviors in her that lead to more restriction." 

A follow-up story looks further at this case.

Unfortunately, however, the solutions offered all focus on trying to make the institution bigger and better, instead of focusing on the issues raised in this other excellent Hearst Connecticut Media story: the need to stop taking children when their poverty is confused with neglect. 

Speaking of which ...

● NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on what really works to reduce child abuse tragedies – and what doesn’t:

Wrongful removal drives everything else. That’s why curbing it should be the first and foremost “way forward.” That requires more than heaving a sigh and saying, if only we made more use of the Family First Act — which, in fact, doesn’t allow funding the kinds of basic, concrete help most families need. It requires more than saying: We wish we had more preventive services but until then we’ll just have to hold children in foster care in a state with one of the worst reunification rates in America.

● Guests on this edition of The F Word podcast, include Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan discussing the lack of due process in family policing. 

● Last year in New Mexico, the governor issued a child confiscation at birth decree. Even as she was bragging that, supposedly as a result, no child had died, one child was dead – possibly as a consequence of that very approach. I have a blog post about it.

● Georgia Public Broadcasting reports on a judge’s decision to curb, slightly, the practice of the state family police agency of forcing parents to pay ransom to get their children back. But the ruling applies only to the most ludicrous cases. The general practice can continue. 

The lawyer representing the parent in this case points out that which is obvious to everyone except a vindictive family police agency: 

"The children were seized because of poverty in the first place," he said. "So then to turn around and bill those parents hundreds of dollars per month serves no purpose." 

● In The Conversation, Prof. Jennifer L. Brinkley of the University of Dayton writes about the harm done when family police agencies go after parents for letting their children exercise reasonable childhood independence: 

In my scholarship and in my work as a family lawyer, I’ve seen how overly broad child neglect laws can fail families. 

These statutes are being revisited as scholars, psychologists and journalists are increasingly finding fault with “helicopter parenting,” or overprotective parenting that limits children’s independence and autonomy. 

Yet cases like Parkinson’s suggest that when the boundaries of neglect are unclear, the law continues to give parents a powerful incentive to err on the side of constant supervision.

Was Skylar Magana a casualty of child-confiscation-at-birth in New Mexico?

 

Last year in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a child-confiscation-at-birth decree. Any child said to have been born exposed to certain substances is taken away on the spot, no matter what the circumstances. The rationale, of course, was the claim that it would save lives. In fact, for reasons discussed here, it is likely to lead to an increase in child deaths. The general failure of New Mexico’s plunge into foster-care panic is discussed here. 

Now it turns out that even as the governor was bragging that since the imposition of her decree no child has died, one child already was dead. And confiscation-at-birth might have been part of the reason why. 

Even before the official confiscation-at-birth edict, New Mexico’s family police agency, the Children Youth and Families Department, was glad to confiscate children at birth in these situations. That’s what happened to Skylar Magana when she was born in August of 2024. In May 2025 – just before the governor issued her edict, as it happens -- Skylar died, allegedly at the hands of her foster mother. The foster mother has been charged with intentional child abuse resulting in death. 

But her death has gotten almost no attention from New Mexico news media. Indeed, this story last week that touches on it – but de-emphasizes the circumstances – is only the second I can find in any mainstream New Mexico news outlet. The first, and a commendable exception, is this story from KOB-TV. 

Perhaps because the death of Skylar Magana calls into question the “master narrative”* of many New Mexico news organizations. 

Some news organizations practically swooned over the confiscation-at-birth directive. And some of them looooved it when the state’s foremost proponent of tearing apart families declared that “there is no other metric that matters.” 

One of the organizations that appears most keen on the confiscation-at-birth approach and on tearing apart more families in general is the Santa Fe New Mexican. Their reporter on this beat has managed to churn out scores of stories about child welfare without, as far as I can tell, even once including a comment from a birth parent. (I concede I might have missed one or two, so I emailed him yesterday morning (Oct. 19) to find out. So far, I have received no response.) 

In other words, a reading of his stories suggests that he views birth parents as so subhuman they can’t possibly have a perspective readers should know, and of course their children will be better off rushed into the arms of strangers, so let’s be sure readers never hear otherwise. 

That may explain why, in his story for the New Mexican, this reporter downplays the underlying facts in Skylar’s death.  Instead, the story focuses on CYFD’s refusing to turn over records to the lawyer representing Skylar’s estate in a wrongful death suit. Reporters love that issue since it touches on their own vested interests. 

Yes, the open records issue is in the public interest as well, and, when it comes to family policing, it’s especially in children’s interest. That’s why NCCPR has long favored a strong rebuttable presumption that almost all such records are open in all cases, not just fatalities or near fatalities. 

But it’s also in children’s interests not to effectively promote bad public policy that falsely equates child removal with child safety, allowing only occasional token dissent. And it’s journalistic malpractice when your biases are so blatant that you systematically shut out the perspective of parents who know how much their children are suffering when they are taken away when there are better, safer options.

*-The phrase “master narrative” was coined by the late William Woo, when he was editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is not something handed down from above. It's not some kind of media conspiracy. (As a former editor of mine liked to say, "There are no media conspiracies; we're not that well organized.")  Rather, the master narrative is simply the preconceived notions reporters bring with them to a story.  The best reporters seek out a wide variety of sources, including those who might challenge their master narrative. With some notable exceptions, most New Mexico reporters covering child welfare have not done that.