In recent years, conversations about America’s child welfare system have devolved into debates that seem at odds with reality and basic morals. What has long been a bipartisan debate to determine the balance between preventing unnecessary family separation and preventing child deaths at the hands of their parents has become a false either/or choice. The problem, however, goes beyond this false dichotomy. Policymakers and stakeholders need to understand how the conversation shifted, what it consists of today, and which opportunities for moving forward are essential to improving outcomes for children and families.
What’s being framed as “child welfare” has changed
It’s often noted that child welfare is a uniquely bipartisan space. More than a dozen federal bipartisan child welfare reforms passed between 1980 and 2018, and all but one passed by unanimous consent. But recently, there’s been concern that bipartisanship is changing. In some ways, that’s true: all sides have sought to leverage foster care to fight broader political debates. The issues have merit and are worthy of debate, but such fights should not come at the expense of children in foster care or other children who are also meaningfully affected by those issues. But, in other ways, the safety and stability at the core of child welfare have remained as bipartisan as ever, including the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act of 2025. What has changed is the scope of the system that some wish to discuss as “child welfare.”
Historically, the American child welfare systems have been limited to identifying and responding to child maltreatment (abuse, neglect ,and all the subtypes). The broad contours, key funding streams, and accountability mechanisms were established at the federal level while implementation and administration of policies and programs remain the purview of states and counties. As such, there is not a single universal child welfare system but many variations on a theme seeking to achieve safety, permanency, and wellbeing for children who have experienced or are at risk of maltreatment.
Within these bounds, child welfare has long-required balancing child safety with family autonomy and preservation. Robust debate about parents’ rights versus children’s rights and how precisely to intervene characterized the space for decades. Policy wins in the past twenty years have expanded the scope and bounds of child welfare, including the extension of federal support to subsidized guardianship with relatives, older youth, and limited prevention services. These all added important supports for children and families but also added complexity to the balance imperative.
Over the years, the voices of individuals who had been in foster care or otherwise interacted with child welfare systems became increasingly prominent in advocating for systemic reforms. Knowledge about child maltreatment grew, offering greater insights into the causes, consequences, and costs of maltreatment. Foster care caseloads grew steadily between 1985 and 2000, annual spending climbed to over $34 billion in 2022, and an ever-growing group of young adults, once in foster care, voiced the obvious but uncomfortable: “Why didn’t anyone prevent this?” What had once been a conversation focused on how to respond to maltreatment expanded to include prevention and root causes.
Ethically and economically, opening the aperture on the issue of child maltreatment was long overdue. Indeed, as is often the case, the conversation at the federal level was catching up to what communities and states have long understood and trying to navigate on their own.
Approaching child maltreatment more holistically with a goal to prevent it whenever possible seems obvious. But, unlike the issue of child protection which is dependably bipartisan, prevention is not. Prevention of maltreatment, at its most fundamental level, involves supporting families. Common sense says and research demonstrably shows that supported families are safer. But the logistics of prevention—what, when, by whom, and for whom—are complex and ignite deeply held personal and political views. Prevention necessarily travels down well-trod paths paved with decades of social safety net debates and opposing views on the role of government vis-à-vis the family.
The risks of commandeering child welfare to expand the social safety net are significant
Conversations about child welfare have grown to include things like economic and other material supports; not as part of the broader social safety net, but with child welfare as a funder and administrator of those supports. The push to expand the scope of child welfare in this way often involves recasting child welfare as a “child and family wellbeing” system. Conceptually, this may appeal, but seeking to expand the governmental social safety net via child welfare is problematic for several reasons.
First, expanding the safety net this way bypasses important opportunities to meaningfully engage stakeholders who have the perspectives and expertise to deliver a wellbeing system. Rather than streamlining extant social safety net programs to improve lives and family self-sufficiency, this approach asks more of child welfare systems already struggling to serve the purposes they were designed to meet. Repurposing those specialized resources toward general poverty alleviation reduces the child welfare effectiveness while increasing redundancies, inefficiencies, and wasteful spending.
Second, a safety-net catch-all approach risks pathologizing poverty by forcing families through the doors of child welfare to get services. The expansionist approach conflates neglect with poverty by suggesting that most if not all neglect is dgest poverty. This misunderstanding is not a benign one. More children die from neglect alone than die from abuse alone. Research consistently shows that the most common types of neglect that are investigated involve substance use, mental health challenges, and domestic violence. Conversely, supporting families who are dealing with just poverty—material poverty rather than complex poverty —is the goal of many existing safety net and governmental programs. Shifting the child welfare system to usurp the material support function seems less about aligning capabilities to needs and more about creating a one-size-fits-all mode of entitlement funding.
Third, recasting the child welfare system as a child wellbeing system risks either dismissing the need for child protection or putting it in competition for prioritization and resources. It’s too early to have definitive data on whether this mission creep into prevention distracts from or pulls resources from child protection, but policymakers should monitor this situation closely. Finally, there’s little reason to believe that a social safety net that is functionally tethered to child welfare will be effective. This is largely because such a structure runs counter to what parents want. Parents want supports that are easy to access, responsive to their unique needs, and available without the extra conditions and strings that undermine their self-condidence. Subjecting oneself and family to surveillance and judgment in exchange for support is demeaning. Policymakers should offer assistance without making recipients feel mistrusted or shamed.
Why differentiating prevention and protection matters
Separating the administration of prevention and protection does not imply that they are unrelated. They are intimately related, but the functions must be appropriately distinguished. This involves both right-sizing the role and scope of governmental child welfare and increasing the capacity of communities and non-child welfare systems to take the lead in wellbeing.
There are times when leveraging the coercive force of the state is appropriate to ensure the safety of children. The bounds of that can and should be debated. But coercive force or control—explicit or implied—has no place when parents seek to strengthen their families, regardless of their financial status. That is, when parents ask for help, that help should not come with strings that jeopardize their role as parents through intrusive government actions and scrutiny. This is a serious danger of using child welfare systems—which are primed to look for signs of danger in at-risk homes—to distribute basic aid to families.
To meaningfully prevent child maltreatment, policymakers must look outside of the child welfare system.Children and families having their needs met helps prevent maltreatment. The incidence of child maltreatment is one metric for understanding how well a given society—not its child welfare system—is functioning. Prevention is multi-faceted, expanding well-beyond the confines of any single policy silo.
Instead, the multiple systems, institutions, and individuals in communities must arrange themselves to provide the best environment for families to flourish. Laws, policies, and norms inform who is best positioned to lead on a given issue, avoiding a tragic diffusion of responsibility in which no one is ultimately responsible for any failure.
When it comes to safety and stability for children who have experienced or are at risk of child maltreatment, it is appropriate for governmental child welfare to take the lead. This can and should be coupled with support from other institutions and the community. In contrast, family, neighbors, and communities are optimal to promote family strengthening and well-being. Businesses and institutions of faith play critical roles and, for families with limited financial means or other challenges, safety net and other government programs can provide them the basic necessities that are a precursor to flourishing. Defaulting to child welfare for basic assistance, however, risks misallocation of resources away from the children most at risk to intrude upon families who just need some help to get by.
Moving from current state to a better future
There’s broad consensus that the current child welfare system isn’t working. Every year children known and unknown to the child welfare system are killed by their parents and caregivers. Millions of children and families are subjected to traumatic investigations each year that don’t yield findings of maltreatment nor meaningful access to supports. For too many of the relatively few children and youth who end up in foster care, their experience is marked by instability and loss.
For some children, the child welfare system literally saves their lives. Dedicated caseworkers, supervisors, and foster parents help committed parents navigate difficulties to reunify and stabilize their families. But, for a system charged with safety, there are far too many errors.
Moving from the current state of affairs toward the desired future in which society reliably supports prevention whenever possible and protection whenever necessary will require the a comprehensive strategy, advanced intentionally and thoughtfully sequenced.