Why Do Child Welfare Agencies Keep Demanding Poor People Raise Their Kids ‘Independently’ When No One Else Does? [youthtoday.org]

I’ve just caught up with an excellent 2014 story from ProPublica on how child welfare systems deal with parents who have mental illnesses.

The story looked at two cases in which parents really did have some sort of mental illness (putting them in the same company as an estimated 43.8 million Americans in any given year). That sets the point of the story apart from another major problem in child welfare — quick-and-dirty “psych evals” that mislabel parents mentally ill largely because they are poor and/or because it’s what the child welfare agencies that pay for the evaluations want to hear. (ProPublica has dealt well with that issue too, as did the Arizona Court of Appeals in a recent decision.)

But what was striking about this story was a common theme in the two cases that was explored: Child welfare’s obsession with the idea that, in order to be allowed to raise their own children, parents must prove they can do so independently.

[For more on this story by Richard Wexler, go to http://youthtoday.org/2018/01/...g-it-of-poor-people/]