She reportedly “fell in love” with her foster baby – but only until she found out the state wouldn’t pay for childcare

Indiana State Capitol (Photo by Warren LeMay)

The foster mother at the center of this story probably does an excellent job caring for children. She made a reasonable financial calculation concerning her real family. The point of this post is not to criticize her or her decision. It is to note the difference between how she regards that real family and the foster children she does and does not take in, and to highlight the usual general “child welfare” system hypocrisy. So I won’t name her or link to the story in question. Since this was essentially your typical story about a saintly foster mother, when I get to her story toward the end of this post, I’ll just call her “Saintly Foster Mom.” 

For a short time, Indiana had a commendable, robust childcare subsidy program for low-income families – well, mostly low-income families. One group of middle-class or even affluent families not only was in on it, they were at the front of the line: foster parents.  After all, you can’t very well expect foster parents who proclaim their enormous love for the children in their care and who already get a monthly payment from the state to actually pay for their foster children’s childcare, can you? 

Indiana funded this with $1 billion in federal aid during the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the aid expired, the state stopped giving out new vouchers and set up a waitlist. 

Since then, lawmakers have bent over backwards to accommodate middle-class foster parents. They passed a law setting aside 200 vouchers just for foster parents. And now that the state is moving money from other agencies to make more vouchers available, foster parents get to cut to the head of the line. 

In other words, children who might have been taken away because of “lack of supervision” charges, because their parents couldn’t afford childcare, are placed with middle-class foster parents – who get childcare for the same children, paid for by the state. 

We don’t know how many children in Indiana are taken away due, in whole or in part, to lack of supervision. But we do know that Indiana tears apart families at a rate nearly triple the national average, higher than all but five other states. And see the box below for what else we know about Indiana’s status as an extreme outlier for child removal, and its confusion of poverty with neglect. 

Keep in mind that Indiana foster parents already get a minimum of about $28-per-day-per-child. The story about Saintly Foster Mom points out that this covers about 69% of the average cost of childcare. On the other hand, that $28-per-day-per-child is tax-free. There’s also a $200 initial clothing allowance, a “personal allowance” of up to $300 per year, and annual $50 checks for birthday and holiday presents. After all, you wouldn’t want a foster parent to have to pay for their foster child’s own birthday present, would you? 

So now, consider how the story about Saintly Foster Mom begins: 

[Saintly Foster Mom] has welcomed nearly 40 children into her home in the past decade. Some were long-term foster placements, others were emergency or short-term stays. She and her husband focus on giving these kids a sense of stability and safety. 

In her home, there are no iPads or Netflix accounts. Instead, there are stacks of books, like "Goodnight Moon," used to bridge developmental gaps for children who arrive only knowing a few words. To [SFM], fostering is a lifelong ministry. 

“I'm passionate about children and just focusing on one child at a time, just helping whatever child can come into our home for the time period that's given,” said [SFM], who fostered four infants and toddlers for long-term stays. 

But [Saintly Foster Mom], who owns a small business with her husband and has three biological children, said her calling is at a standstill. She recently made the difficult decision to turn down an infant she had already fallen in love with while providing short-term care. The reason was the lack of a child care voucher. 

No one should begrudge this foster parent her decision. It’s entirely reasonable to consider the financial consequences of taking in a foster child for yourself and your own children. Doing so does not mean a foster parent is “only in it for the money.” But please, news organizations, spare us the treacle about foster parents “falling in love” with children – when they’ll only take them if they can get a childcare subsidy over and above their monthly pay.  And just once, news organizations, how about asking lawmakers why middle-class foster parents get to skip to the head of the line ahead of low-income birth families. 

THE CONTEXT: FAMILY POLICING IN INDIANA

● Nationwide, 37% of children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  In Indiana, it’s 58%.  Nationwide, 53% of Black children will have to endure this trauma. In Indiana, it’s 79% - the highest rate in America. 

● In any given year, among all children, Indiana takes them from their homes at a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

● When going up against this family police juggernaut, families often are almost literally defense-less – because their lawyers often have so little time and so many clients. Many Indiana counties want to keep it that way. One in five actually turns down federal funds to improve representation for parents and also for children. One county court administrator explained that county’s refusal this way: “[T]he system we have works well.” So families often have no one who will, for example, get them a childcare subsidy so they can get back the children taken due to “lack of supervision.”

None of this is because Indiana is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than the national average.  In fact, in Indiana in 2025, 86% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care, their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse. Forty-two percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of any form of drug or alcohol abuse. As many children were taken away because of “inadequate housing” than because of physical and sexual abuse combined.

The Oregon family police agency fudges the figures at children’s expense

They’re misleading us about the rate of entries into foster care …

 Oregon is one of those states operating under a settlement resulting from one of those pointless McLawsuits that Marcia Lowry brings all over the country. (How pointless? The organization she now runs, A Better Childhood, is the fourth from which she has brought these lawsuits over the past 50+ years. All three of the others have turned their backs on her approach.) 

The settlement requires the state family police agency, the Department of Human Services, to submit “progress reports.” This is the most recent.   

DHS took advantage of the opportunity to engage in a whole lot of disingenuous figure fudging in an area the settlement doesn’t care about (because Marcia Lowry almost never cares about it): reducing entries into foster care. 

Let's start with the basics. In FFY 2025, Oregon took away children 2,391 times. That’s actually 227 more times than children were taken in Oregon in 2024. But what measure should be used to compare Oregon to the rest of the country? Oregon DHS's method is so ludicrous that if torturing logic were a war crime, they'd be hauled before an international tribunal.

After claiming that Oregon took away 2.7 of every thousand children in 2024, the progress report says: 

Oregon has a lower rate of foster care entry than the national median. Nationally, the median foster care entry rate in 2021 was 3.0. 

How are they misleading us? Let us count the ways: 

● The data for the national median are from 2021, while DHS compares it to Oregon data from 2024. Since nationwide entries have been declining slowly but steadily since 2021, odds are the median is lower now. And, by the way, as noted above, data now are available for 2025. 

● National median is an odd choice for comparison. If the DHS figures are correct, it would mean only that, compared to total child population, more states take proportionately more children than Oregon than take proportionately fewer. 

Source: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database

But comparisons typically are to the national average (the mean rather than the median). Why doesn’t DHS do that? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because when you do an apples-to-apples comparison involving the same year, 2025, Oregon took away children at a rate more than 25% above the national average, even when comparing entries to total child population (which, as is discussed below, is the wrong comparison anyway). 

And, by the way: While DHS says it took away 2.7 children for every thousand in 2024, in 2025 it rose to 2.89 per thousand.

But even that isn’t the worst of it. 

● DHS is using the wrong denominator, thereby hiding the full extent to which Oregon remains an outlier. DHS compares entries only to the total child population. But the far more valid measure is to compare entries to the impoverished child population. When you do that for every state, the national average is 16 children taken per thousand impoverished children. The figure for Oregon is 21.7 – thirty-five percent higher. 

By the way, that’s also the 23^rd highest rate of removal in the country, so it’s above the mean and the median. 

Sources: Entries: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database
Impoverished children: Census Bureau Current Population Survey (3 year average).

So, DHS misleads by comparing entries only to the total child population (and misleads about even that). That comparison is b.s. for one simple reason: Family police agencies don’t target the total child population – they target the impoverished child population. Can you find a middle-class family caught in the family police net? Occasionally. Can you find such a child placed in foster care? Even less often.

 As we explain in the annual NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index: 

We could have simply compared the number of children removed to a state’s total child population. But then all the states with high rates of removal and high child poverty rates would complain that this was unfair because we didn’t consider a risk factor for actual abuse (not to mention the factor most often confused with “neglect”) – poverty. 

In addition, since family policing agencies almost never take children from affluent families, using the total child population would allow affluent states that still take large numbers of children from impoverished neighborhoods to camouflage this fact. 

Based on per-capita Income, Oregon is America’s 18^th most affluent state. So Oregon DHS’s selective use of data hides what it does to its impoverished families by diverting our attention to what it doesn’t do to affluent families. And then it further hides the result by comparing only to the median instead of to the mean. 

… and their data on abuse in foster care are meaningless 

The report also contains a bunch of gobbledygook about the rate of abuse in Oregon foster care. The report acknowledges that their rate appears high compared to a target number that is based on the rate in other states. DHS is right in claiming such a comparison isn’t really valid, because definitions of abuse and neglect vary so widely. But it doesn’t matter. Because the entire measure is such a farce that DHS should be ashamed to put forward the figures it does, and Marcia Lowry should be ashamed of using official agency measures of abuse in foster care in this, or any other, settlement. 

That’s because, in every state, official measures of abuse in foster care are ludicrously low. For example, in 2024, 6,675 children spent at least one day in Oregon foster care. DHS claims that, of that number, only 114 were abused by a foster parent or group home or institution staff – that’s 1.7%.  That means Oregon DHS wants us to believe that if you gathered 100 former foster youth in a room and asked them: “How many of you were abused in foster care in 2024?” only two would raise their hands. 

Yet, study after study after study, including at least one specific to Oregon, find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher. These studies use conservative methodology, often imposing limits on things like which placements or which perpetrators are counted.

(Oregon DHS may try to defend itself by saying theirs is a single-year estimate, while the studies may cover a longer time period. But the average length of stay in Oregon foster care is 18 to 24 months, so even if one doubles the amount of abuse Oregon admits to, as in the graphic below, that figure is vastly below the reality.)  

  1.                                   2.
1.=% Oregon admits to in 2024, x2
2.=LOW END national average estimate from indepdendent studies

The reason for the difference in findings is obvious: When agencies investigate abuse in foster care, they are, in effect, investigating themselves. That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file. 

DHS and the governor even tried to get the Oregon Legislature to pass a law that would make this worse – it would have raised the threshold before awful things done to children in group homes and institutions would count as “abuse.” 

The very fact that people in the Oregon family police agency have to know they are putting forward numbers that are probably between one-tenth and one-twentieth or less the real rate of abuse in foster care should be cause to question their credibility and even their fitness for their jobs. (Unfortunately, however, every state essentially lies this way about the real rate of abuse in foster care.) 

If DHS, or Marcia Lowry, really wanted to know how much abuse there is in foster care, they would do what those independent scholars do: Pull together a random sample of former foster youth  - and ask them. 

In fact, Marcia really does know. In 2010, she told the Philadelphia Daily News: 

“I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not.” 

And that’s only one kind of abuse. 

Marcia also commissioned an actual study of abuse in foster care as part of another of her McLawsuit. The study found vastly more abuse than officially reported.

Why we need to whack the weeds … 

Here’s why going so deep into the weeds is important. If people get the misimpression that Oregon DHS is removing children at a rate below the national average, it tees up the next inevitable false claim. It will happen right after the next tragedy involving the death of a child “known to the system.” Someone (and I think we all know who it’s most likely to be) will rush to claim that this “raises questions” about whether “the pendulum has swung too far” toward keeping families together. 

That is the biggest lie of all. 

Yes, Oregon has made some real progress. Tearing apart families at a rate “only” 35% above the national average is a big improvement over where things were many years ago. But it’s hard to give DHS the credit it's due, when it keeps trying to claim credit it doesn’t deserve. 

Meanwhile, maybe it’s time to add a corollary to a famous adage in journalism that goes: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Here’s the corollary: “If a ‘child welfare’ agency hands you data, check it twice!”

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 5, 2026

● Cruddy journalism by the San Jose Mercury News and grandstanding by a prominent politician have been so effective that it appears that some people in Santa Clara County, Calif. think there were no child abuse deaths back when the county was taking away far more children. It shouldn’t be necessary, but we set the record straight in this post. 

● The Boston Globe has an excellent story about abuse in Massachusetts group homes and institutions – in a state that tears apart families at a rate well above the national average. The Anchorage Daily News has a follow-up to a similar expose in that state, which tears apart families at an even higher rate. But, as noted in this post to the blog, neither story mentions that salient fact, and lawmakers in neither state seem prepared to face up to it. That means nothing is going to change. 

● Ashley Cross, executive director of HOPE585 in Rochester, New York, writes in The Imprint about how child abuse prevention is not about pinwheels and fearmongering. She writes: 

When families lack stable housing, enough food or access to child care, the margin for error disappears. One missed shift, one unexpected expense, one sick day can spiral into a situation that brings them to the attention of the system. … 

Families living in poverty are far more likely to come to the attention of child protective services. Not because they care less about their children, but because they are navigating impossible trade-offs every day. Do you go to work and risk leaving your child home sick, or stay home and risk losing the job that pays your rent? Those are not parenting failures. They are resource failures. 

● Even as the Trump Administration pushes the use of what amounts to computerized racial profiling (a.k.a. “predictive analytics”) in child welfare, the title of this British study says it all: “Beware the algorithm: a scoping review of predictive analytics in children’s social care.” 

● And you read it here first: The latest data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting system are now public. There seems to be little change on average nationally in the number of children taken from their homes or the number in foster care on any given day, but there’s bad news in several states, particularly Missouri and Maryland. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Former foster youth are suing the Washington State family police agency seeking compensation for what one lawyer describes as “some of the worst abuse. Just absolute horrific conditions, and unfortunately an all-too-common textbook example of a house of horrors.” The family police agency has been trying to hide the evidence by withholding records. The Center Square reports that the State Supreme Court has ruled that the agency is going to have to come clean. 

● From WTVJ Miami: 

A Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue lieutenant and his wife were arrested for allegedly locking their 12-year-old adopted daughter for years inside a room at their Coral Springs home, authorities said. … According to arrest reports, the couple is accused of subjecting the child to "ongoing mental and physical abuse" over a period of about three years.

How to NOT fix abuse in group homes and institutions in 8 easy steps. Lessons from Massachusetts and elsewhere

Steps already completed are checked: 

_x_Take away children at a rate far higher than the national average, creating an artificial “shortage” of foster homes. 

_x_Due to “shortage,” use group homes and institutions, the worst form of “care,” at a rate that’s also well above the national average, creating conditions for rampant abuse of children in group homes. 

_x_Newspaper does an excellent job exposing rampant abuse of children in group homes but does not mention the high rate of removal. 

_x_People most responsible for, over decades, creating the climate of fear and demonization of families leading to the state’s high rate of removal, are quoted extensively condemning the abuse, while taking no responsibility for creating those conditions. 

__Lawmakers express shock and outrage and promise sweeping reforms and/or hearings (all duly noted in the traditional follow-up story). 

__Reforms consist entirely of increasing inspections, and screening and training, the same promises made the last time this sort of abuse was exposed, and the time before, and the time before that. This time, they might throw in closing the “age of consent” loophole. 

__Attention fades, and the state continues to take away children at a rate well above the national average. The new training, screening and inspections change nothing. 

__The entire cycle repeats. 

That’s the Massachusetts version. Something remarkably similar is playing out in Alaska.

 Of course, there is one way to break this cycle …

The latest AFCARS data are just out: No change nationally, but some bad news from a few states

CORRECTION, MAY 6: This post has been changed to reflect that I erred in overstating the increase in entries into care in Missouri.

The federal government has released its annual update to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), a database that attempts to track, among other things, entries into foster care, exits, and the number of children trapped in foster care on Sept. 30 of each year – known as the “snapshot number.” The data are labeled preliminary, as they are every year when first released. Though it's rare, in a few states revised numbers can be a few hundred higher or lower.

Nationally, when compared to FFY 2024, there is virtually no change in the entry or snapshot numbers. Either there was a slight increase or a slight decrease. We don’t know which, because this year, for the first time since 2022, Wyoming and Washington State finally got their acts together and submitted data. They were not counted in 2023 or 2024. So whether entries slightly increased or slightly decreased probably depends largely on what the actual numbers for those states were in 2024. The only thing we can be sure of is the “slightly” part. There may, however, have been a real, and disturbing, decline of roughly 10,000 in the number of children exiting foster care. 

But, of course, the national figure hides wide variation among states. 

Here’s some of the bad news: 

They're cranking up the foster-care-to-prison pipeline in Missouri

There was more than a 12% a nearly 19%  a nearly 19% increase in entries in Missouri, a state that already had a high rate of removal. The increase may be the largest of any state in 2025. It's probably is due to a big change for the worse in leadership. When Darrell Missey ran the state child welfare agency, he tried to reduce entries into care. He was pushed out and replaced by Sara Smith, who has made her fanatical take-the-child-and-run approach abundantly clear. The increase in entries in 2025 wiped out the gains Missey made in 2024. 

There also was a disappointing 7.5% increase in entries in Texas; but entries there still are well below the level before groundbreaking reform legislation took effect. 

And there was a nearly 17% increase in entries in Maryland, probably the result of the usual wretched response to high-profile tragedies. The fact that one of those tragedies involved a foster youth who committed suicide after being taken away and dumped in a hotel doesn’t seem to have given anyone in Maryland government second thoughts about taking away more children. That, unfortunately, is typical. 

And then there’s Kansas. I’m holding off saying anything about this one, because in that state, there’s either been a giant increase in the number of children placed in foster care – or a giant data glitch. I don't know which. The state says it's the latter and the federal figures involve double-counting. I have inquiries out to federal officials, and I will update this post when I find out more.

And in case anyone in these states actually thinks this is something to celebrate, here’s one more reminder of what the research tells us about the multiple studies showing that, in typical cases, children placed in foster care typically fare worse in later life than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. And here’s one more reminder of all those studies showing high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

And the good news 

There are several states that have shown commendable decreases in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love – but I’m not going to highlight them here. That’s because as soon as a state or county becomes known for dedicating itself to sparing children the enormous inherent trauma of placement, and the high risk of abuse in foster care, it’s like painting a target on the backs of the system’s leaders. 

Those wedded to the failed take-the-child-and-run approach that has destroyed so many children’s lives bide their time until the next child abuse tragedy involving a child “known to the system” in that community. Since no jurisdiction can prevent every such tragedy, no matter how few – or how many – children they take, there’s always going to be one. (Indeed, a massive study finds no relationship between how many children are taken away and child abuse deaths.) 

Then those who are sincere but mistaken, those who are just grandstanding politicians, and those who, I suspect, deep down, just don’t want poor people, especially poor people of color, to be allowed to raise their children, come out of the woodwork, fingers wagging, to claim that the tragedy supposedly shows that the system is placing family preservation ahead of child safety. Case in point: Santa Clara County. Journalists who, at best, believe this because it sounds right and it fits their own stereotypes about parents who lose children to the system or, at worst, are just Pulitzer-sniffing, rush to amplify the false claims and shut out dissent. Case in point: Santa Clara County. 

So while anyone, including those who will misuse the data, is free to check the AFCARS database and do their own comparisons, I’m not inclined to assist in that process.

Foster-care panic in Silicon Valley: Tragically, in Santa Clara County, California, children DID die of child abuse before 2023.

A page from the 2018 report of the Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team

● A propaganda campaign by the San Jose Mercury News and a grandstanding member of the Board of Supervisors has been so effective, not everyone seems to know it. 

● Both the very limited available data from Santa Clara County and a massive peer-reviewed national study find no evidence that taking more children reduces child abuse deaths or that taking fewer children increases such deaths. 

See also our previous post about the Silicon Valley foster care panic.

It shouldn’t really be necessary to point this out. But judging by some statements during the public comment period at a recent meeting of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, it appears there may be people who think that children only started to die of child abuse in that county toward the end of 2023. 

The “journalism” from Julia Prodis Sulek of the Mercury News, and the comments of County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, certainly leave that impression. Though they presumably jumped to their conclusions with good intentions, they have wrongly scapegoated very recent efforts to keep families together for three recent deaths. They are undeterred by the fact that one of those deaths occurred well after those family preservation efforts were abandoned, while entries into foster care skyrocketed as a result of pressure from the Mercury News and Arenas. 

They’ve been aided in their propaganda campaign by County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. In response to the latest tragedy, Rosen has pledged to investigate who, besides the actual killer, “is responsible criminally, civilly, morally, ethically, and systemically for what happened in this case. And I think that we should all be asking questions of county officials at the highest level…”  It turns out Rosen has another problem with at least one county official at the highest level. Rosen wants to take funds desperately needed by the county’s health care system to offset federal Medicaid cuts, and divert some of that money to his office. The County Executive disagrees.

Of course, no one literally said that there were no child abuse deaths before 2023. Instead, those pushing the take-the-child-and-run response to recent fatalities engaged in what should be called “inference peddling.” We were left to infer that in all those years before the county tried to do more to keep families together, child abuse deaths didn’t happen.  Therefore, it is suggested, anyone in charge of child welfare in the county now or whose work brought them anywhere near the three recent tragedies should be fired and, ideally, tarred and feathered. 

But of course, children have died of abuse in Santa Clara County, probably every year going back decades if not forever. That’s true in every other jurisdiction of Santa Clara’s size – nearly two million people – and many that are far smaller. 

We don’t know much more than that because of a process for tracking fatalities in Santa Clara County that is subjective and inconsistent. 

For decades, the county has had a Child Death Review Team. It issues periodic reports, on no apparent schedule, in which it examines child deaths and assesses the causes. But determining whether a death is due to abuse or neglect is surprisingly subjective. 

Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning, while his parents are asleep, a three-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the back door of the family home and wanders away.  He falls into a body of water and drowns.  Accident or neglect?  The history of American family policing suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion, it will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park, it will be labeled neglect. 

The subjectivity is magnified for an ironic reason: Each child abuse death is the worst imaginable tragedy; the only acceptable goal is zero. But in most places, the number of child abuse fatalities is low enough that, depending on how even one or two deaths are characterized, it can suggest a pattern that does not exist or obscure one that does. Even random chance can play a role. If in one year, say, a father comes home drunk and shoots his wife and two children, that can create a “spike” in child abuse death statistics. 

Compounding the problem: The Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team sometimes neglects to note its assessment of cause of death. Other times, it does not mention the relationship between the victims and the alleged perpetrators. 

So, below is a graphic representation of what I was able to infer from the available data for most of the years from 2005 through 2023. But please read these caveats: 

● There were no data available for 2013 and 2014.

● The official report for 2010, 2011, and 2012 – one death in each year -- is much to be hoped for, but unlikely.

● From 2017 on, the reports gave totals for two or three years, without breaking them down by year, so the numbers shown in this graphic for those years are multi-year averages. 

Source: Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team Reports

So, everybody see the pattern? 

Exactly. There is no pattern. 

While it might be tempting for family preservation advocates to argue that the reported numbers were larger in the early years, when the number of children taken away was at its highest, the relatively low raw numbers and the unreliable reporting methods don’t allow such a conclusion. In fact, they allow only two conclusions: 

● Yes, children did die of abuse and neglect before 2023.

● There is no pattern concerning deaths and entries into foster care.

That should surprise no one – though given the propaganda campaign waged by Sulek, Arenas and their allies, it probably will. 

Once again, the reason is one for which we all should be grateful. In Santa Clara County in 2023, there were allegations of abuse and, far more often, neglect involving 12,036 children. There were approximately six known child abuse fatalities. That means of all the children known-to-the-system that year, at least 99.951% did not die of child abuse. The odds of finding an impurity in Ivory Soap are greater than the chances of a Santa Clara child “known to the system” dying of abuse or neglect. 

Again, the only acceptable number of child abuse fatalities is zero. But such fatalities are needles in a haystack. Here’s the haystack; look closely for the needles. And even this representation makes the needles easier to spot, because they’re all in one place: 

Sources: Investigations: California Child Welfare Indicators Project;
Fatalities: Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team Reports

By pressuring everyone to make the haystack far bigger, Sulek, Arenas and their allies have only made it less likely that the next child in grave danger will be found in time. 

Nationally, some defenders of the take-the-child-and-run approach have a bizarre response. They argue that these are not needles in a haystack because other causes of death – such as cancer – take fewer children’s lives. Of course, cancer tends to be a disease striking older Americans. I’m sure more children also die of child abuse than die of Alzheimer’s.  More important, the fact that other causes of death take even fewer lives means only that there are fewer needles; it is not a reason to keep growing the haystack. 

The only way to really know if there is any relationship between foster care entries and child abuse deaths would be if one could do a massive, peer-reviewed study looking nationwide over many years. Say, a study of 3.4 million records and more than 24,000 fatalities over 13 years.  Fortunately, that’s just been done. And, unsurprisingly, here’s the key finding: 

“Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.”

That means, at best, all those Santa Clara County children torn from everyone they know and love in the name of reducing child abuse deaths may well have had their own chance for a loving, secure future taken from them for nothing. At worst, making the haystack so much bigger may have contributed to the latest tragedy in Santa Clara County, the death of Jaxon Juarez, and perhaps others to come. 

There are far better ways to work to reduce fatalities – and all other child abuse and neglect – in Santa Clara County. But step one is to consider the possibility that a “Pulitzer-sniffing” newspaper and a grandstanding politician and their allies are not the most reliable sources. 

See also our earlier post about the Silicon Valley foster-care panic.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 29, 2026

● What is the result when some of the worst journalism about child welfare and some of the worst political demagoguery about child welfare happen in the same place? The mother of all foster-care panics. And that panic may well have contributed to the latest child abuse death in Santa Clara County, California. I have a blog post about the enormous harm done to children by the Silicon Valley foster-care panic – and who is responsible. The post includes a link to an excellent story from The Imprint on one key aspect of this tragedy – the closure of the provider of family defense in the county. 

● The second-worst example of political demagoguery about child welfare at the moment is coming from the Attorney General of New Mexico (see our recent Issue Brief). With everyone feeling the pressure to look tough, the state appears headed toward further ratcheting up the danger to children. In a column for the Albuquerque Journal, Layal Bou Harfouch, a drug policy expert for the Reason Foundation, writes: 

Under the proposed rules [to implement a new state law], any pregnant patient who admits to substance use, including prescribed medications or legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco or marijuana, can be required to comply with a Plan of Safe Care (POSC), including mandatory substance use treatment, even in the absence of a clinical assessment or diagnosis. Families accessing medication-assisted treatment, like methadone or buprenorphine, would be subject to the same requirements as those using illicit substances. Families deemed “noncompliant” with these plans can be referred directly to the Children, Youth and Families Department for assessment, bypassing the multilevel response system outlined in [the new state law]. 

● Meanwhile, Source NM reports that the author of a report from the Attorney General, which accused the state child welfare agency of supporting family preservation “at almost any cost” and of being guilty of a “systemic moral failing,” says NCCPR’s response is “not only misguided, but hyperbolic.” You be the judge. 

● Want to know why New York State – and every state – needs a Family Miranda law, so families know their rights when the family police pound on the door? Read this account, in the Albany Times Union, of what an investigation of a false report did to one family. 

● The Imprint interviewed Rowan Wilson, the chief judge of New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Asked about public misconceptions about foster care and child welfare, he replied: 

There are a few. One is that unless you are sort of putting your child in danger by abusing the child or something like that, your child can’t be taken away from you. That’s not true. You can lose your child for various reasons, a lot which have to do with poverty.  

If you’re middle-class and you’ve got a child who shoplifts something, you’ll take care of that — you’ll go to the store, you’ll deal with the person, you’ll pay them, and the thing is never going to wind up in the criminal justice system. If not, your child is apprehended, and things start to snowball. You may be in public housing, and the fact that your child is found with a small amount of marijuana — not any longer, but previously — may then disentitle you from public housing. So now you’re in a shelter. There are all sorts of snowball effects like this that disproportionately affect poor people and result in their children being taken away. …

● Still another review of the ever-growing mass of evidence shows that Judge Wilson is right. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes: 

When parents have enough money to pay their bills, buy nutritious food, and spend quality time with their children, they are better able to respond to their children’s needs and create a nurturing home, something every child deserves. 

Supporting families and improving economic security have many benefits, including reducing near-term hardship among families with children. Evidence from a wide range of income support programs also shows another important benefit — reducing involvement in the child welfare system. 

By now you’d have to be willfully blind to think otherwise. But, unfortunately, in “child welfare,” where so much is in short supply, willful blindness exists in abundance. 

● ChildTrends reports that their new analysis of federal data 

… shows that parental drug use is a factor in roughly one in three children’s entry into foster care, although the rate of children entering care for this reason is at its lowest since 2009. 

What that also means is that, contrary to the impression those same willfully blind fearmongers try desperately to leave, in two-thirds of entries into foster care, parental drug abuse was not a factor.

● The “child welfare” system has long been obsessed with adoption by strangers as the only “real” form of permanence for children. Never mind that we don’t even know how often these adoptions fail.  But this Associated Press story offers some alarming clues. From the story: 

An Associated Press investigation finds that a business known for tough-love boarding schools for rebellious, rich teenagers has also set its sights on a different demographic: adopted kids. Experts say adoptees, only 2% of American children, account for an estimated 25-40% of those in residential treatment. 

Adoptees told the AP they believe they’ve been enmeshed in a shadow orphanage system where children end up with the very fate that adoption was supposed to spare them — promised ‘forever homes’ but institutionalized instead, some for years, in oppressive and sometimes abusive facilities. … 

Police reports reveal children as young as 9 experience or witness violence, chaos, self-harm and sexual abuse inside facilities. Adoptees and adoptive parents said children left more traumatized than when they arrived — if, that is, they ever left. Some have died inside the facilities that promised they would keep them safe. … 

The industry no longer relies exclusively on the checkbooks of wealthy parents. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted more bipartisan political support for youth mental health funding, bolstering programs that tap public taxpayer dollars via healthcare, child welfare, juvenile justice and school systems. 

Two footnotes: The estimate that 25 to 40% of those in residential treatment are adoptees does not mean that 25 to 40% of adoptive placements fail, only that adoptees are overrepresented among the institutionalized. And those adoptees include many who were not adopted from foster care. 

● Even when the adoption doesn’t fail, often it still means cutting children off not only from parents but also extended family, friends, teachers, classmates and often even siblings. It’s permanence on paper, but for the child welfare establishment, that’s all that counts. In Youth Today, Molly Bernard, a youth connections advocate with Raise the Future, argues that it’s time to emphasize not paper permanence but the real thing. She writes: 

Legal permanency has long been the goal of the child welfare system. But too often, it fails to deliver what young people actually need: lasting, supportive relationships that continue into adulthood. 

● In 2024, Minnesota passed a law that does little more than require counties, which run family policing in that state, to get serious about helping families so their children don’t endure the trauma of needless foster care. In the state’s largest county, Hennepin, it may already be showing success. But what’s really startling about this article in The Imprint, is that what the law demands hasn’t been standard operating procedure all along. And yet, now rural counties are whining about how being given a mere three years to prepare to do their jobs isn’t enough and the law should be delayed. 

● The Trump Administration’s persecution of immigrants extends to children, of course. Whether they crossed the border alone or were swept up in raids targeting their parents, some are institutionalized, sometimes in the same institutions that family police agencies use for foster youth. One of those places was Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, NY. Now, CNN reports, Children’s Village 

faces allegations of physical abuse, including placing some children in isolation in a so-called “red room,” according to multiple sources who spoke with CNN about what’s unfolded at the shelter. 

One teen who was transferred to another facility recalled spending four days alone in what he described as a “red room” with a red light and no door, according to an account shared with a shelter clinician in early January and reviewed by CNN . … 

Over those four days, the teen said he didn’t bathe and was only provided bread for food. The boy said the room was located near the shelter’s security staff office, so personnel could monitor him while he was confined to the room. 

The teen also recalled a so-called “special” unit that would swoop in when fights occurred or restraints were required. He said he was thrown to the floor and hit, as well as placed in restraints, nearly two dozen times. 

Even Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is investigating the allegations, which Children’s Village denies. Children’s Village is no longer housing migrant children. It still houses foster youth.