One day, when she was 14 and feeling ill, Daylesha Brown’s mother took her to a Baltimore hospital and did not return for her. Child Protective Services (CPS) placed her in a group home and she was forced to move to other homes for the next three years.

“My mother, she pushed me away,” Brown, now 23, said softly. “I was always getting in trouble with my mother.”

So last year when Brown discovered her daughter, Sa-Maji, had lead poisoning, a lingering problem in Baltimore where the rate of poisoning among children is nearly twice the national average, she was wary that she would lose her child to CPS because of her transient lifestyle. She wanted to spare her child the misfortunes she had experienced.

[For more of this story, written by Mark Beckford, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.5dc6a90bb256]