Frank Edwards grew up as a latchkey kid in Dallas. As early as age 9, he would walk home from grade school in the Lakewood neighborhood. The trip from his bus stop to his house was largely uneventful, part and parcel of his childhood.
But for other kids, those circumstances might spiral into an investigation by Child Protective Services. “We see this a lot. A mom has to go to work and there’s no child care available, so a 4-year-old is left unsupervised,” said Edwards, now a criminal justice professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Whether that family is investigated as a result, though, can depend on the family’s race.
In a recently published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Edwards and his colleagues at Rutgers and Duke University found that in the 20 most populous counties in the U.S., contact with CPS is pervasive — with consistently high rates for Black children.
Texas trends track with national trends. In Dallas, Tarrant, Harris and Bexar counties, about half of all Black children will be investigated by CPS by age 18. (The journal’s original numbers for investigations were corrected after an error in the analysis code was found.)
“This system was never intended to investigate most children,” Edwards said. “We tend to think of CPS as an extreme intervention that doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s happening a lot.”
These rates mean that Black children are overrepresented in initial interactions with the child welfare system. The racial disparity increases in later-stage interventions by CPS, such as confirmed maltreatment or neglect, foster care and termination of parental rights.
These disparities, Edwards said, are a reflection of “profound racial, income, wealth and housing inequality.” Each intervention comes with not only the human cost of family stress and instability, but also an economic cost.
“If a child is taken into foster care, the state and federal governments spend an incredible amount of money to remove that child from their home,” he said. “There are less expensive alternatives that would almost certainly be better for everyone involved.”
In Dallas County, the study found that Black children are 1.88 times more likely than white children to be investigated by CPS and 2.29 times more likely to enter foster care. In Harris County, the gulf widens — Black children are 1.95 times more likely to be investigated and 3.24 times more likely to enter foster care.
The state has struggled with capacity issues in foster care placement, in part due to a lack of funding for increasing provider payments. In June, 415 children stayed in unlicensed foster homes, like churches, motels and offices — the latest challenge in a system so plagued that it has faced a decade-long federal lawsuit on failure to care for foster children.
The Department of Family and Protective Services, CPS’s parent agency, “has been committed to partnering with representatives across systems and, importantly, with communities to listen and to address issues of disproportionality in CPS,” wrote Tiffani Butler, a DFPS media specialist, in an email.
CPS staff are required to attend trainings “to increase cultural responsiveness and understanding of poverty issues,” Butler wrote. CPS also provides financial support for family members who take in children.
How were these disparities identified?
These findings are based on the most recently available data at the time from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System and the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, national databases managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Researchers collected data from 2014 to 2018 and used a demographic method called synthetic cohort life tables, which is often used in healthcare, to estimate the probability of a certain interaction with CPS from birth to age 18.
The typically preferred method is called birth cohort life tables, where a group of children — say, all infants born in 2003 — is followed from birth to age 18 and their interactions with CPS are tracked. Then, this year, the probability of those interactions could be calculated.
However, this method can be skewed by changes in policies like mandated reporting or rules for terminating parental rights, said Timothy Bray, the director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at the University of Texas at Dallas. He was not involved with the study conducted by Edwards and his colleagues.
“The advantage of this shortened window with the synthetic life table is that you rule out the effect of these changing societal norms,” Bray said.
Why do these disparities exist?
Those changes often impact poor families experiencing job or housing instability most, said Lori Duke, a co-director at the Children’s Rights Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.
“I can count on one hand the number of families that have had resources in my cases, meaning a well-paying job with health insurance,” said Duke, who as an attorney has represented hundreds of children in cases where the state seeks custody or termination of parental rights.
Meanwhile, if parents have immediate safety nets, such as family members who can provide child care, then their children may never come into contact with CPS in the first place, she said.
Not having a safety net while facing allegations often leads to further intervention by CPS, which means children come in and out of the welfare system until they age out or parental rights are terminated and custody rights are reassigned.
“Some people say parental termination trials are equivalent to the death penalty in criminal cases,” Duke said.
Interaction with CPS can also be traumatic for children, which in turn perpetuates a cycle that Duke often sees. Many of the children she represents have parents who were in foster care themselves.
“For children who are in longer-term foster care and may even end up aging out of foster care, the outcomes are not encouraging,” said Kathleen LaValle, the president and CEO of Dallas CASA, a child advocacy nonprofit. “The impacts of that trauma can be lasting and serious … Removal itself can be a trauma.”
What are the solutions?
To mitigate that trauma, Texas CASA and DFPS are partners in a program called collaborative family engagement.
When a child enters foster care, extended family members and unrelated adults with whom they have a family-like relationship are engaged not only to be potential caregivers but also to provide emotional support.
“It’s important not to think of it as a luxury for children and their families,” LaValle said. “Children should continue to feel that connection to family and to community and to culture.”
Other advocates have focused on prevention and early intervention efforts, which aim to stop outcomes like abuse or neglect — and thereby interactions with CPS — before they happen.
For example, DFPS funds the Texas Nurse Family Partnership, a program that partners nurses with first-time, low-income mothers to improve prenatal care and conduct home visits after childbirth.
“Can you imagine how helpful that could be, instead of just letting some unmet needs fester?” said Kerrie Judice, a CPS research and policy analyst at TexProtects, a child advocacy nonprofit. “If it’s already addressed, then you help that family remain in their home and intact, but still get the services and support that they need.”
Neither of these programs exists statewide, though. They also don’t necessarily address the underlying issues that might lead to interventions by CPS — like poverty and housing insecurity, Edwards said.
Remedying those root causes, he said, means strengthening the safety net available to a family.
That can take the form of increasing income support, like the recently expanded Child Tax Credit. It can also include improving supportive housing programs, like domestic violence shelters or transitional housing, which are largely run by private providers.
“We’re taking a complex social problem, and we’re trying to manage it through surveillance and punishment, rather than through social support,” Edwards said. “Is this the right approach to addressing family crisis and children in crisis? That’s a question that we need to ask ourselves really seriously.”
