To strengthen child welfare and keep families together, we need structural change

For decades, policymakers have built federal child welfare policy brick by brick, relying on outdated assumptions about what the government should do when children and families struggle. They have designed programs and prescribed resources, while rigid funding structures have bound these layers together.

Over time, this structure has hardened in place, despite overwhelming data that challenges the child welfare financing institution and its corresponding incentives. Today, more than 2 million American families are investigated by Child Protective Services each year.

In 84 percent of those cases, there is no substantiated finding of abuse or neglect. Yet every year, approximately 175,000 children enter foster care, despite decades of outcomes that show the harm the intervention itself causes, and even when we now know there is no association between foster care entries and child maltreatment fatalities. 

For Nate Bustamente, family separation was an inescapable throughline in his life. Bustamente entered foster care as a child, and years later, after becoming a parent himself, he and his wife faced a child welfare case involving their own children. He worked long hours to meet the requirements imposed on his family while navigating the possibility of losing his children. After a second removal, the state pursued termination of his and his........

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