We spend an extraordinary amount of time in Washington, DC debating whether child welfare professionals can distinguish poverty from neglect. Yet when you talk to the people responsible for protecting children, that’s simply not the problem that keeps them up at night.
I think we have to ask whether we’re solving the problems child welfare agencies actually face—or the problems Washington has decided they have.
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a Bipartisan Policy Center panel examining a case study on poverty, neglect, and decision-making in child welfare. For me, this conversation began in 2024, when I became a member of a workgroup tasked with differentiating between poverty and neglect.
I’ve spent much of my career working across both sides of this issue. I’ve overseen the systems responsible for helping families meet their basic needs and the systems responsible for intervening when children are unsafe. That experience has shaped how I think about this debate, and perhaps more importantly, where I believe our attention should turn next.
We don’t have to agree on every aspect of the poverty versus neglect debate to agree that families deserve better access to support and children deserve to be safe. But getting there requires us to move beyond slogans and wrestle with the difficult questions facing children, families, and the professionals responsible for protecting them.
The research offers important insight into how child welfare professionals understand and navigate these decisions. Among surveyed workers, 94% reported confidence in their ability to distinguish poverty from neglect. The case study also highlighted the role of collaboration, supervisory oversight, and professional judgment in decision-making, alongside the challenges workers face navigating fragmented services.
These findings don’t establish that every decision is correct. But they should cause us to ask whether the national conversation matches the realities of child welfare practice.
Poverty Is Visible. Protective Capacity Often Isn’t.
One of the things that gets lost in the national conversation is the role of protective capacity.
An outside observer can see what a family lacks. Material hardship is visible. But what’s not always visible from the outside are things like a parent’s ability to recognize danger, understand their child’s needs, and take action to keep them safe. Mental health challenges or substance use can also influence a parent’s ability to protect their child. And that’s precisely why we have child protection professionals. They have access to information an outside observer doesn’t, and they’re responsible for making distinctions that data alone cannot.
Seeing what a family lacks and understanding whether a child is safe are two very different things.
During my time in office, a family became vocal about how the department had targeted them for being poor. Their story gained traction, and I’ll admit that after hearing it, as someone raised in poverty myself, I feared we had removed a child we should not have.
So I poured through that case. Every note, recording, interview transcript, and piece of documentation available. What I found was that the story being told publicly was not an accurate representation of the circumstances. Significant information had been omitted, including serious safety concerns that went far beyond material hardship.
I had gone into that review looking for confirmation that we had done something wrong. Instead, I learned something important about how these cases are understood outside the system.
The full picture is rarely known publicly. And because of confidentiality protections, child protection agencies often cannot correct the public record. That doesn’t mean agencies always make the right decisions. They don’t. And we should demand accountability when they get it wrong.
But unverified claims that children are routinely removed simply because they lack a winter jacket or their family is poor make compelling headlines without necessarily reflecting the complexity of actual cases.
I accept that mistakes and inappropriate removals can happen. I reject the assumption that they represent the norm.
Poverty doesn’t establish neglect, but it doesn’t rule out danger, either.
Child Welfare Has Become the Default Fail-Safe for Broken Systems
This debate has increasingly become a test of which side you’re on rather than an opportunity to solve a problem.
We have spent decades building government programs designed to address poverty. Yet somehow, when a family is struggling, we still find ourselves relying on the child protection system to connect them to those services.
Child welfare has become the default place families are sent as a fail-safe for every broken and disconnected system. That should concern all of us, regardless of where we stand in this conversation.
During my time in Louisiana, I helped lead our One Door initiative. The premise was simple: Families don’t experience their challenges in the neat categories that government creates.
A family may be navigating employment challenges, housing instability, transportation barriers, and difficulties accessing health care simultaneously. Yet government organizes help around individual programs, each with its own rules, eligibility requirements, and administrative processes.
Families are left to face that fragmentation alone. That can and should change.
We should be asking how to safely redirect families toward connected community services that can respond to their needs before a crisis requires child protection involvement.
That’s a nice talking point. But the work of actually doing it without compromising safety requires bipartisan support and a willingness to go deep into the complexities of program design, from the federal level to our own backyards. There is space for everyone to contribute to that conversation, and success requires it.
Who Is Accountable When Services Fail Families?
We hold child welfare agencies accountable for the decisions they make. And we should. Those decisions have enormous consequences for children and families. But who is accountable for the systems that were supposed to help those families before they reached a crisis?
When a child welfare agency makes the wrong decision, we investigate it. We review the case. We demand answers.
But when a family can’t access services, when referrals go nowhere, or when programs fail to work together, where is that same accountability? Where is the scrutiny?
I had a front-row seat to a lot of oversight during my years in government. It was rarely those other systems sitting at the table.
If we’re serious about preventing unnecessary child welfare involvement, we have to stop treating prevention as something that begins at the child welfare agency’s front door.
In generosity and desperation, though some would say by design, we’ve assumed that responsibility. We’ve expanded the scope of child welfare well beyond protection, and now the agency is often the system held accountable when everything else fails.
That’s the conversation we should have next.
Professional Judgment Is Not a Flaw in Child Welfare. It’s a Necessity.
One of the most important things policymakers should recognize is that professional judgment is not a flaw in the child welfare system. It’s a necessary part of it.
We’re asking people to make extraordinarily difficult decisions about children and families, often with incomplete information, under tremendous pressure, and with real consequences if they get it wrong.
These decisions involve much more than checking a box on a form.
And professional judgment doesn’t have to mean individual judgment.
In well-functioning offices, difficult decisions are supported by collaboration, supervisory review, management oversight, and multiple opportunities to challenge or reconsider a course of action. Having led an agency, I know how important those safeguards are.
Yet after working across a dozen states this year, I continue to see much of the policy conversation focused on front-line caseworkers, with less attention paid to the supervisors, managers, and regional leaders who shape the quality and consistency of those decisions.
Front-line success is accelerated by strong leadership.
Policymakers should recognize these safeguards, understand where they’re working, and strengthen them. We still have important questions about whether decisions are consistent and accurate.
Are we identifying the children who are actually in danger? Are we learning from cases where the system gets it wrong? And are we giving workers the information and tools they need to make better decisions?
The answer to imperfect professional judgment isn’t to eliminate judgment.
We should be investing in better information, stronger decision support, quality assurance, and systems that learn from their mistakes. We should never ask a child protection professional to make a life-altering decision with less information than we could reasonably put in their hands.
There are opportunities to pilot, measure, report, and learn together.
The goal isn’t simply fewer investigations or fewer children entering foster care. The goal is making the right decision at the right time.
What If We Redirected More of Our Energy Toward the Problems We Already Know Exist?
When asked what additional research would be valuable, my first instinct is to say we should replicate existing studies, expand them to more states, add case-level data, interview more people, and see whether the findings hold up.
There’s certainly value in that, but I keep coming back to a different question.
What if we directed some of that research talent, philanthropic investment, and energy toward the problems we already know are sitting in front of us?
There are challenges in child welfare where the answers aren’t clear, where solutions are complicated, and where we desperately need new ideas and bold innovation.
- How do we identify children in danger earlier, before something terrible happens?
- How do we best address the needs of children with complex medical and behavioral health challenges who enter foster care?
And here’s one I think deserves far more attention.
- How do we minimize the trauma children experience when intervention is necessary?
We spend so much time debating whether a child should enter foster care. But what happens to that child after the decision is made? How do we build trust with a child whose world has just been turned upside down? How do we help them feel safe with unfamiliar adults, in new places, while the routines they know have suddenly disappeared?
Even when intervention is absolutely necessary, that child will still experience confusion and loss. And we have an obligation to understand how to reduce that harm. These are difficult questions. They don’t lend themselves to slogans or easy answers.
But they’re the questions that could fundamentally change what children experience in our care.
I would encourage the research community to think not only about where we can generate more evidence, but where new evidence could unlock the greatest improvement—improvement that can start now.
Childhood Doesn’t Pause While Adults Figure It Out
We should spend less energy defending assumptions about child welfare and more energy understanding how decisions are made, how services function, and who is accountable when families fall through the gaps.
We should absolutely care about whether children enter the system unnecessarily. But we should care just as deeply about children who need protection and never receive it, and those who enter the system because they must.
None of these children have the luxury of waiting for us to finish debating what the system should be.
The challenge before us isn’t simply to decide which side of a national debate is right. It’s to identify where we can move beyond debate, find consensus, and do the difficult work of improving what children and families actually experience. Sign me up to dig in and face those challenges, because these are the challenges that keep child welfare professionals awake at night.
Childhood doesn’t pause while adults figure it out. Let’s do this work now.