Child Protective Services as Gateway and Gatekeeper in the New Welfare State

A Moralized and Racialized Welfare System, with Foster Care as Its Alternative

Until the early twentieth century, the responsibility for ensuring adequate care for children was limited to private charities and informal community efforts. Progressive-era reformers pressed the state to assume a larger role in supporting child and family well-being (Skocpol 1995). Their vision centered on family preservation, with the 1909 White House Conference on Children affirming that “the home should not be broken up for reasons of poverty” (United States Government Printing Office 1909, 10). Therefore, advocates reasoned, the state should provide parents—envisioned as deserving White mothers in particular—with resources to care for their children at home.

Aid to Dependent Children (which later became Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC]) was created in 1935 under Title IV of the Social Security Act to provide federal funds for welfare assistance, aiming to boost families’ economic security as a means of preventing the need for foster care placement (Rymph 2017). However, these early welfare efforts were highly restricted and moralized from the start, with benefits intended only for children in so-called suitable homes, in the authorities’ eyes (Gordon 1994). In evaluating families’ home environments and scrutinizing mothers’ moral character, welfare caseworkers determining eligibility “were given great latitude to use their professional and personal discretion,” which facilitated discrimination based on characteristics such as race and marital status (Frame 1999, 725).

The idea that deserving parents should receive resources to rear their children at home (United States Government Printing Office 1909) raised the question of what states should do with families deemed improper and unfit for aid. As the “alternative to financial aid for those lacking sufficient parenting skills,” governmental authorities envisioned foster care (Frame 1999, 724). An affidavit presented to welfare recipients in this period, for instance, asked recipients to agree to raise children “to the best of [their] ability” and to affirm, “I understand that should I violate this agreement, the children will be taken from me” (Patterson 2000, 86).

In the three decades or so after the New Deal, it was primarily White families who were considered deserving and received government assistance. Meanwhile, families of color, especially Black families, were excluded from welfare assistance and had to contend with the punishment of foster care if they requested aid (Gordon 1994; Simmons 2023). Welfare assistance was thus racialized in ways that reserved aid primarily for families conceptualized as White while invoking family separation for families of color.

A Contracting Cash Welfare System and Expanding Child Welfare System

In the early 1960s, state child protection and foster care systems expanded and federal legislation formalized the link between public assistance and foster care. For parents deemed unfit, federal AFDC benefits could be directed to state foster care agencies to fund out-of-home placement. This new funding stream for foster care, based on children’s eligibility for AFDC, framed welfare benefits and foster care placement as two parallel forms of support for poor children. Even today, federal reimbursement for foster care costs remains tied to 1996 AFDC eligibility standards.

During this time, child welfare systems explicitly turned away from any focus on families’ economic conditions. Senator Walter Mondale, who shepherded the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to its passage in 1974, recognized that economic resources could facilitate child-rearing; however, anti-poverty programs had become politically unpopular in the years following the War on Poverty (Raz 2020). After welfare-rights activism during the 1960s and 1970s enabled more women of color to access benefits, the welfare system had become racialized as one serving the undeserving (that is, Black) poor. In this context, politicians such as Mondale oriented the response to child abuse around individual psychotherapeutic treatment—fixing and separating individual families—rather than material support (Raz 2020). Child welfare caseloads ballooned in the years that followed, and the system increasingly intervened with families of color.

The 1996 restructuring of AFDC into the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grant and the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), signed a year apart, reflect the racism and rush to punishment of that time. The former ended an entitlement to economic assistance based on poverty; the latter substantially increased permanent family separations. TANF limited the assistance families could receive and amplified the disciplinary, paternalistic, supervisory, and punitive nature of the system (Gustafson 2011; Soss et al. 2011). Although ASFA maintained requirements from prior legislation that child welfare systems make reasonable efforts to prevent and remedy family separation, ASFA put its teeth behind new timelines that significantly increased the termination of parents’ rights and the creation of “legal orphans” (Raz and Edwards 2024), which early welfare proposals had explicitly sought to prevent. As Dorothy Roberts (2022, 122) has written, “The coincidence of the welfare and adoption laws marked the first time in US history that the federal government mandated that states protect children from parental neglect but failed to guarantee a minimum economic safety net for impoverished families.”

Today, child welfare agencies are increasingly on diverging paths from the cash-assistance safety net that serves the most impoverished families. Welfare cash-assistance systems are largely incentivized by law, funding structures, and public pressure to reduce assistance to families (Barnes et al. 2023; Edin and Shaefer 2016) and the proportion of poor families receiving cash assistance has dropped by two-thirds since 1996, from 68 percent to 21 percent (Azevedo-McCaffrey and Safawi 2022).¹ In 2023, the inflation-adjusted value of cash benefits—which were already meager—was below 1996 levels in thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia, leaving the poorest families with even fewer resources to make ends meet (Azevedo-McCaffrey and Aguas 2025). Meanwhile, the proportion of US children subject to a child welfare investigation rose by 30 percent between 1996 and 2018, from 3.6 percent to 4.8 percent (Fong 2023, 14), with one in three children—and one in two Black children—experiencing an investigation during childhood (Kim et al. 2017).

Poverty Reduction as a Promising Child Welfare Intervention

Most child welfare investigations involve manifestations of family adversity that—while potentially detrimental to child well-being—bear little resemblance to the horrific child abuse stories that draw media attention (Fong 2023; Lee 2016). The majority are based on allegations of neglect (United States Department of Health and Human Services 2025), often related to conditions of poverty. Nationwide, 83 percent of investigated parents have household incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line (Casanueva et al. 2024). Poverty-related challenges may make it difficult to meet children’s basic needs or may themselves be interpreted as maltreatment. Poverty can also spur child welfare cases well beyond those alleging inadequate housing, food, clothing, or other material goods. For instance, economic hardship may increase family stress—making adverse experiences such as domestic violence and substance use more likely—or reduce the resources families have to respond to stressors (Berger and Waldfogel 2011).

Though anyone can make a call, reports to state or county agencies primarily come from professionals mandated to report suspected maltreatment, such as health care, education, and law-enforcement personnel, who have limited resources to directly support families. Most cases are closed after a one- to two-month investigation, with maltreatment allegations unsubstantiated (United States Department of Health and Human Services 2025). Yet for families, investigations generate stress, amplify precarity, and undermine institutional trust (Fong 2023; Roberts 2022). Investigators with the authority to separate families conduct multiple home visits, often unannounced, ask for highly personal information about family health and habits, and request information from others involved with the family, such as doctors and teachers. The child welfare agency can continue monitoring families beyond the investigation, assessing compliance with service plans. Agencies may also pursue court supervision and foster care placement. Such experiences are especially traumatic, subjecting parents to the psychological and emotional toll of losing their children (or the substantial threat thereof) as well as to caseworkers and court officials they see as judgmental, demeaning, and antagonistic (Fong 2023; Merritt 2021; Rise 2021; Roberts 2022).

Research is increasingly clear that addressing families’ concrete needs can effectively prevent child maltreatment and child welfare system involvement, as scholars leverage exogenous public policy shifts to examine the impact of additional (or reduced) material resources. In the 1990s’ welfare reform debates, a central concern was that removing cash-assistance entitlements would increase child abuse and neglect cases, concerns ultimately borne out (Paxson and Waldfogel 2003). Reduced welfare support in the form of stricter sanctions and time limits is associated with increased child neglect reports and substantiated maltreatment reports (Ginther and Johnson-Motoyama 2022; Paxson and Waldfogel 2003; Slack et al. 2007). Meanwhile, policies providing additional material resources to families reduce child maltreatment and child welfare system intervention, including minimum wage increases (Raissian and Bullinger 2017), child support “pass-throughs” (Cancian et al. 2013), tax credits (Berger et al. 2017; Kovski et al. 2022), cash transfers (Bullinger et al. 2023), SNAP (Bullinger et al. 2021; Johnson-Motoyama et al. 2022), paid family leave (Tanis et al. 2024), and childcare subsidies (Klika et al. 2023; Yang et al. 2019). Implementing a package of anti-poverty policies, such as a child allowance, EITC and SNAP expansions, and an increased federal minimum wage is expected to reduce child maltreatment investigations by 11–20 percent (Pac et al. 2023).

Post-welfare reform, the cash welfare system has shifted more in the direction of child welfare, emphasizing behavioral modification, supervision, and sanctions (Soss et al. 2011). Meanwhile, child welfare may be trending in the opposite direction to embrace distributing material aid. Advocacy and shifts in federal financing have incentivized child welfare systems to better comply with the federal requirement that states make reasonable efforts to prevent and remedy family separation. In 2018, the Family First Prevention Services Act created a new funding stream for child welfare systems focused on preventing family separation, muddling the activities of these two arms of the state further. As social welfare scholar Laura Frame (1999, 742, 745) suggested shortly after the welfare reform, “if the welfare system severely limits its scope of economic responsibility for poor children, child protection may be faced with expanding needs it cannot meet.” Frame further noted that “child protection’s role may shift toward further insulating children from the uncertainties of the labor market”—that is, taking on the task of addressing families’ economic precarity. We take up Frame’s prediction a quarter century later, documenting the material assistance families receive from child welfare agencies in two jurisdictions and examining how stakeholders view the implications of providing assistance through these agencies.

In-Kind Goods

Child welfare agencies in both jurisdictions provide limited in-kind assistance to families at any stage of system involvement. In New York City, some providers of preventive services, rooted in the settlement house tradition, had long focused on connecting families to the safety net and addressing material needs. More recently, ACS has sought to standardize and expand those efforts, training all contracted preventive-services providers to connect families to support for concrete needs and expanding an emergency services budget line for in-kind goods. At an ACS-contracted provider, an administrator described the many things her agency provides families, bolstered by significant private philanthropic support: “We honestly assist with furniture, beds, cribs, playpens. We assist with dressers, dinette set[s], a sofa, bedding. There’s families that will approach us and ask for assistance with infant formula, milk, food, clothing, assistance with paying their light bill, assistance with paying their gas bill, to purchase an AC, an air conditioning unit, to install in the window. … During the pandemic, there were families that were calling us for assistance with Pampers, wipes, infant formula. Our purchasing team, we would order from Amazon and have it deliver a month’s worth of items for them.” ACS itself specifically encourages these practices. As one administrator explained, “We have an expectation that all of our contracted agencies are going to meet the concrete needs of the families that they’re working [with].” Likewise, contracted foster care providers can provide ancillary items to parents, such as carfare, and reunifying families are eligible for more significant resources, such as a furniture grant.

More recently, families under investigation—even in cases that will close without further services—may receive in-kind goods from ACS. For families with newborns, an administrator said, “We’ll provide them pack and plays. … We would provide them with a baby bag filled with just necessities to start out as a mom.” When families have material needs, such as for a washing machine, children’s school uniforms, or furniture, the agency now aims to address those needs. In several boroughs, ACS has partnered with the city food bank to outfit ACS-specific food pantries “with really good food, steak, chicken, all the meats you could think of, shrimps … canned goods and dry goods,” in the words of this same administrator. Although this resource is not strictly limited to ACS clients (and food pantries abound in New York City), it functions to make a burdensome aspect of poverty management easier for child welfare–involved families.

In Connecticut, when staff noticed families’ hardship but could not cover these material needs through structured supports, they often tried to meet these needs. Office-wide emails scouting around for all sorts of items for families proliferated; caseworkers asked their colleagues if they had any strollers, baby clothes, bedding, and so on that they could donate to a family in need. In one case observed, after the mother shared that her son did not have enough clothing, the investigator responded accordingly: “I did get some donations and helped her with some of his clothing. I did notice that she didn’t have a sheet and mattress pad and a blanket. I happened to have a donation of some new stuff for his bedroom.” Investigators offered bus passes, issued furniture or clothing vouchers, and procured Christmas gifts and school supplies. An investigator explained that if a newborn’s family were reported to DCF and the family did not have baby supplies, “We would purchase the necessary things,” such as diapers, a bassinet or crib, and a car seat. She said that this would be the agency’s responsibility: “DCF would have to help.”

Housing

Housing is a major need for child welfare–involved families. In Connecticut, although DCF staff emphasized that they did not have any ins with the housing authority to provide long-term support, DCF has offered a supportive housing program since the late 1990s, currently serving approximately five hundred families. To participate, families must be reunifying from foster care or have DCF cases open for ongoing oversight. This program “provides housing services and intensive case management to DCF families where lack of appropriate housing present[s] a barrier to reunification,” according to the agency (Connecticut Department of Children and Families 2024). For up to two years, participating families receive housing subsidies as well as referrals to and coordination of services such as those for substance use, mental health, and parenting.

At the investigation stage, DCF could pay for emergency shelter (such as hotels) on occasion, for families who had move-in dates or shelter interviews upcoming. For example, in an investigation launched because of the family’s homelessness, the mother had secured an apartment but could not move in right away. The investigator recognized that if the mother paid for a hotel until her move-in date, she would not have the funds for the apartment, so he requested DCF funding for a hotel to bridge the gap. The agency could also cover security deposits and other one-time costs for families whose income could sustain the rent. “I’ve tons of money,” remarked another investigator, saying that for families with an affordable housing option identified, “I’ve paid up to the first month’s, two months dedicated for my clients. … We do have some funds that we can tap into all the time.”

In New York City, reunification from foster care gives a family priority with the city’s public housing agency (NYCHA 2026). This priority is shared by other groups, often overlapping with these families, such as homeless families with children; moreover, administrative challenges and caseworker discretion or lack of knowledge can still block access. Nevertheless, the priority confers a significant advantage when activated. One parent described the yearslong waiting game after applying for public housing. Then, once she had an ACS case requiring stable housing before reunification, her application was “pushed,” she said. Her ACS caseworker made some calls: “I viewed [the apartment] within the next week. … I got my keys the same day. … If it wasn’t for them [ACS], I feel like I would still be waiting on the waiting list to get into housing.” In addition, ACS tries to gather vouchers—though typically just a dozen each year, well below the number needed—from the federal Housing Choice Voucher program and designate these vouchers for their clients, both youth aging out and families seeking to reunify.

ACS also operates a new rental subsidy program for families receiving preventive services. In New York City, preventive-services agencies offer case management and clinically focused, evidence-based programs. Regulations stipulate that these services are for families at risk of foster care placement. Although preventive services are technically voluntary, 80 percent of families enroll following an investigation, and monthly office and in-home visits by caseworkers are required (Casey Family Programs 2020). The preventive rental subsidy can be paid monthly for up to three years or provided as a lump sum of up to several thousand dollars to cover rental arrears or moving costs. As an ACS administrator explained, “As long as they’re receiving services from ACS, they are eligible to apply. We will apply for them to get the housing subsidy for them to cover their rent. … As long as you have an ACS active open case, and preventive services, if you apply, you will get it.” However, it had been underutilized at the time of interviews (the grant amount had been $300 per month until recently). The agency was also just launching a pilot project to obtain one hundred city-funded housing vouchers (of over fifty thousand of these vouchers citywide), paying at or near market rate, to keep families in preventive services from entering homeless shelters. Administrators explained that they pursued this initiative because they recognized that “stable, affordable housing is critical,” with “huge implications on child welfare.”

Childcare

ACS provides a subset of city childcare vouchers earmarked for families under investigation or otherwise involved with ACS. Even during periods when New York City had long waiting lists for childcare vouchers, families could access these vouchers, according to ACS administrators. “It is a very quick process to get a family that is child welfare–involved connected to childcare assistance,” one said. Even for families involved with ACS via an investigation only, this administrator continued, “there is a very clear and smooth referral pathway to get a childcare voucher.” Notably, however, maintaining that voucher requires remaining under ACS monitoring.

In New Haven, Connecticut, DCF also had a partnership with the local Head Start provider. Even in cases that DCF would ultimately close after investigating, investigators offered to make childcare referrals and indicated to parents that their applications would receive priority. As one investigator put it to a parent, even if children were not removed, the childcare application would look like “one of our [DCF] kids” because of the referral coming from DCF. “It’ll get me in the door,” the mother suggested. “Exactly,” the investigator replied. In another case, a housing case manager had tried to get a family into Head Start the prior year, only to be wait-listed. However, once DCF became involved, the investigator told the mother he had a “separate in” with the childcare provider: “We have our own list.”

Advocacy

Child welfare–involved families may also benefit from the agency or its contracted providers advocating on their behalf to other public agencies. An administrator at one New York City preventive and foster care provider explained that they “advocate a lot” for families on their caseload and that this facilitates resource provision: “The advocacy, just us calling and talking to someone that maybe we’ve developed a relationship [with], absolutely would help the process.” In another example, during the study period, New York City was housing newly arriving migrant families at hotels. Recently, an administrator at a private provider said that families were receiving notice that they had to leave the hotel in sixty days. For families with ACS preventive services cases, “we were able to draft them a letter indicating they’re preventive families. Their children are attending school in Manhattan, and just creating a scenario for them of like, ‘It would be really helpful if they could be able to stay in Manhattan, so their children are close to their school and they’re not traveling on a train from Brooklyn or the Bronx to get to Manhattan.’” This kind of advocacy, the provider explained, is limited to families receiving ACS-contracted services and would not be available to other families that walked in requesting quick assistance or support.

Likewise, a case in Connecticut involved a homeless mother in New Haven trying to get a scarce spot in a shelter. Calling 2-1-1 had been fruitless. The DCF investigator sat with the mother into the evening to continue calling shelters and 2-1-1. DCF ended up arranging funds for a hotel. Then, the following week, the investigator reported that the family’s shelter assessment intake had been moved up. The investigator accompanied the mother to the meeting to convey the urgency of the situation. They were told that the next shelter opening would not be available for another three weeks. The investigator emphasized that DCF would not be able to fund a hotel for that long. Later, the investigator told the researcher that this seemed to move the intake staffer, who said she could get on the phone to see what might be possible. This mother had called DCF herself to report her homelessness, which ended up giving her access to advocacy that, in turn, increased the likelihood she could access limited shelter resources.

DCF also facilitates access to material resources by referring families in cases designated as lower risk at intake to another community agency. This partner agency provides case management and has some funds available to cover things such as security deposits, furniture, and summer camps. Investigators framed the program to families as an opportunity to get help with whatever they needed. This referral is exclusive to DCF, meaning that only DCF-involved families (specifically, those with cases on the lower-risk track) can access this program.

Individual and Inconsistent Responses to Poverty

Even as ACS and DCF provided meaningful and often much-appreciated assistance, they are not equipped to provide sustained support at any large scale. Moreover, much of the support that these agencies provide is not necessarily distributed systematically—that is, there are no clear criteria identifying families eligible for a particular kind of assistance. In addition, it can be ad hoc. The fact that aid is discretionary and sometimes random creates an opening for perceptions of deservingness to affect resource distribution. “I can’t say we have a really rigorous methodology at all” for distributing aid, reflected an administrator at a New York City private provider. Further, the privatized nature of New York City’s child welfare system means there are substantial differences between providers. Caseworker familiarity with an informal and complex bureaucracy also determines resource access options, as does the willingness of a caseworker to take extra steps for a parent, often tied to informal assessments of deservingness. In Connecticut, we saw DCF staff make concerted efforts to pay for some families’ hotel stays, such as in the New Haven case described earlier, while ignoring others. “What we usually do, we will help [with a hotel] any client who doesn’t really have a history of transiency,” an investigator said. Another investigator requested a $200 furniture gift card for a family lacking beds for their children: “I don’t like to use it a lot, but I think they have, obviously, some strengths. … They’re doing a lot of things right,” she said.

New York City parents we interviewed remarked that when it came to material assistance, it felt like ACS and provider agencies went on a case-by-case basis or exhibited favoritism. Caseworkers can use their own judgment and discretion to weigh whether a particular family really needs or would benefit from support. Indeed, funding that private providers earmarked for in-kind goods for families was referred to as discretionary funding in New York City and flex funding in Connecticut.

As child welfare agencies cannot fill the gap between market conditions and available safety net assistance, some parents expressed frustration about the lack of assistance they received to address their material needs. For example, although the mother referenced earlier had her housing application accelerated by ACS, another New York City mother shared, “As far as, like, them helping me with, like, finding an apartment and stuff like that, they have not helped me with that.” Parents were clear about the family instability that could result when material support is not offered. This mother and her teenaged son had reunified to a shelter and she had been repeatedly denied public benefits, even though being home for her son had forced her to quit a job with late hours. The agency had provided two gift cards but no help with her public benefits case at a time when the benefits agency made headlines for its long waitlist. “I need some backup,” this mother said. “I would have expected somebody to go with me, or like, give me a letter or something.” She felt triggered by being in the shelter and concerned about maintaining her calm with her son and sobriety under stress. “That just brings me back all the memories from when my kids got tooken away, you understand? Because I was in a shelter at that time. So that’s not good, like for my mental [state]. Every day, I gotta come in [by curfew], I gotta sign in. Same stuff that I was doing ten years ago.” She added, “Some days I do break down and cry, you understand? Because it’s a reminder of everything.” Absent support with basic needs, families managing significant transitions could feel quite precarious.

When child welfare agencies take on material support work, they can determine for themselves which families to assist and to what extent. Because material assistance is not their primary activity, there is little accountability for inequitable treatment or leverage, aside from legal representation, for parents to ensure their needs are met. This positions frontline staff as gatekeepers determining who receives resources.

Support Tethered to Accusations of Maltreatment

First, distributing concrete support through child welfare agencies means that a pathway to assistance runs through a child maltreatment report. Because child welfare agencies are taking on this role, other state systems may fail to ensure that all families in need can navigate and access assistance. Families with material needs may find it difficult to access assistance until after things escalate into crisis situations—a setup that belies broadly espoused goals of preventing child maltreatment.

For example, a case in the Connecticut study came in shortly after a family’s investigation closed. The mother had left the home, so the father returned to the DCF office seeking help getting food assistance benefits in his name to provide food for his children. “Since the case was closed, we couldn’t offer anyone assistance,” an investigator explained, adding that a supervisor advised the father, “If there really is an issue, then call the [child maltreatment hotline] and make a report.” Only after he did was he able to get from DCF the documentation he needed to show the public benefits office that the children were living with him. Getting help involved alleging maltreatment by his children’s mother and opening his family up for investigation.

An administrator at a New York City private provider echoed, “Someone has to allege that you abuse your child, that you’re having a hard time, in order to receive support.” She shared her perspective that the system is not set up to truly prevent families from falling into crisis—it is only afterward that assistance available through ACS is activated. For families “doing right by their children” but “having a hard time,” she advised, “do not allow them to continue to suffer to the point where they’re abusing their children. That’s when you’re going to step in.” Under the present system, she added, “you have to, lack of a better word, commit a crime before you get a receive out.”

Likewise, an investigator in Connecticut lamented that she could do little to help a family access housing because the mother was not abusive or neglectful, saying, “this case does not make it” for supportive housing, given the program’s requirements that the DCF case be ongoing. For this family, the investigator said, “You almost wish there was some level of mental health that would make her neglectful, where you could transfer the case [to ongoing DCF oversight] and know they’re going to connect her with services. Not that we want her to be neglectful, but that’s the only way that we can transfer and help.” Essentially, they needed to wait until conditions deteriorated—and the mother could be labeled neglectful—before any housing assistance could be provided. A randomized controlled trial found that Connecticut’s supportive-housing program increased family reunification rates, decreased family-separation rates, and decreased substantiated maltreatment report rates (Farrell et al. 2018). However, this program could not be offered to families unless or until they met the threshold of child maltreatment risk necessary for an open DCF case.

Even parents who appreciated the material support facilitated by their individual ACS cases recognized how this arrangement could cut off those without ACS involvement from needed assistance. The New York City mother whose housing application ACS pushed acknowledged that without ACS, she would still be in a shelter suffering. Families without ACS cases, she noted, are “waiting years.” If a family became homeless but did not have an ACS case, she wondered, “What assistance would you get?” Given her experience, she concluded, “They have to do an investigation first before you get the necessary assistance that you need.”

Families’ Needs Interpreted as Risks, Inviting Further Monitoring or Separation

Child welfare agency administrators and staff recognized poverty and material hardship as drivers of child maltreatment, and thus viewed providing material assistance as a way for agencies to prevent maltreatment. An ACS administrator described the “coaching that happens with the frontline staff” to help them understand how not meeting families’ basic needs can become a “safety or risk” situation. “When a family is in need of certain things, and they don’t get it, that’s a risky situation,” said another ACS administrator. A DCF trainer told trainees it was “kind of a no-brainer” that, “if I’m struggling to meet basic needs, stressors in my life are going to be different.” She added that “concrete stressors can take a toll on a parent” and “lead to secondary issues.”

Given this perception, parents accessing material assistance through child welfare agencies must disclose needs—or even requests—that can be perceived as risks by an agency focused on child abuse and neglect and that can open parents up to additional questioning and monitoring. A parent advocate described what she had observed: “If I ask for diapers or I ask for wipes, there’s going to be questioning about, well, how do you usually get it? And what happens when we leave? How will you get it? Are you going to be able to provide the minimum degree of care for this child? What are you doing with the money that you are getting from public assistance? How are you managing that?” This advocate recalled requesting discretionary funding so that a client who had just reunified with her child could purchase hot food. In response, she received a “long email back saying, ‘Well, if she can’t plan for this, if she can’t figure it out, then maybe the court should have thought about it, should reconsider the decision to have returned the child back to her.’” The advocate said that such reactions could escalate to the point where the agency might ultimately find reasons to request child removal. She summed up this approach as paternalistic, adding that it was “dangerous for our clients sometimes to continuously ask for things” even during transitions understood to be difficult.

Parents recognize and weigh these trade-offs. A mother with an ACS case who was not receiving sufficient public assistance to meet her family’s needs said, “I know they have resources around that, but they also, you know, penalize you if you don’t have enough food and things of that nature.” Another New York City mother recognized the childcare and housing assistance ACS could potentially provide, but wondered, “What if you got another case? Will they remove everything from you? What if you’re not responding to them after they gave you the necessary things that you needed for your household? Where would you be at this point?”

In another case, a Connecticut mother appreciated her investigator giving her clothes and bedsheets for her children. Yet, she added, “I tend not to ask for much [from DCF] unless it’s a necessity.” For instance, she did not ask for a bed for her nine-year-old son even though his bed frame was broken and even though, as noted earlier, DCF can sometimes provide such furniture. The mother said, “A lot of people tell me, ‘Oh, get beds, get this.’ I don’t want them in my life forever, so I’m not gonna be like, ‘Well, I need this, this, this, and this.’” She explained, “If you sit there and ask for a lot of things, then they feel like, ‘Oh, well, she needs us, so let’s try to keep it open longer.’” As these parents articulate, sharing one’s need for assistance with the child welfare agency amplifies the perception that one’s family is at risk of maltreatment and thus invites the possibility of ongoing monitoring and even coercive intervention—a possibility parents may be understandably unwilling to take on.

Assistance Tied to a Policing Agency Can Inhibit Take-Up

Providing assistance through child welfare agencies ties support to intervention by an agency empowered to separate families. Interviewees shared how child welfare agencies’ surveillance and child removal practices make parents apprehensive about requesting and receiving assistance through these same agencies, deterring families from accessing available resources. Child welfare administrators and staff in both jurisdictions acknowledged their agencies’ negative reputation in impacted communities, as well as parents’ fears of engaging with child welfare authorities. Staff conveyed a recognition that they had to work to build trust with impacted communities.

In interviews with system-impacted parents, some described how they came to see helpful aspects of the child welfare agency’s intervention. Nevertheless, they expressed ambivalence, recognizing the benefits and costs of this intervention. As a mother in Connecticut reflected, “They did plug me into some good resources. Some of that stuff did actually come out of it, other than it racking my brain the whole time, the forty-five days [of the investigation].” She appreciated a DCF-contracted agency finding and funding her son’s summer camp. After her investigation, she said that she learned that “they’re not all bad.” At the same time, she emphasized that the investigation had fostered intense anxiety, as she didn’t know what could or would happen. Even after her case closed, the agency had a certain association: “DCF, oh God, stop, stop, stop, red light, red light, red light.” Similarly, a mother in New York City remarked that with an ACS case, “You’re really under surveillance for [sixty] days. Listen, no matter what, in that [sixty] days, anything can happen and your world is just turned upside down. Nobody wants to go through these situations in order to get the help that they need.”

Earmarking some material assistance for child welfare clients keeps some families from getting needed support. At an ACS-contracted private provider, an administrator said, some families were not willing to sign up for the provider’s services, owing to “the fear … of signing up for preventive services and having ACS become involved in your life.” This administrator’s colleague added that people “see prevention as part of ACS. Even when they are really suffering and going through hard times, they may not approach us. … They do not want any business, any connection, any linkages to ACS.”

In interviews, parents said they were wary about turning to the child welfare agency for help. One mother had heard that ACS offered childcare subsidies, including some vouchers not tied in any way to child welfare involvement. Yet, given the harm she had seen ACS inflict on families, this mother continued, she didn’t think she could trust them. “I don’t know if I would accept an ACS [childcare] voucher, because there’s so many things that come with ACS.” She said that she would struggle with that decision. On the one hand, she would need childcare to work, but on the other hand, “if I take this voucher, would it just be childcare? Or would it be them coming into my life and want to just surveil who I am and who I am as a parent?” Likewise, another parent said she would not feel comfortable going to ACS for help with childcare, housing, or other material needs given ACS’s focus on parental wrongdoing. She felt that asking for help from ACS would portray her as an “unfit parent”; her experience made her wary that the agency would “con” parents and “then they’ll have a worker at the door.”

A mother in Connecticut, too, grappled with whether to accept assistance through DCF. Her DCF investigator had hoped to refer the family to a partner agency for additional support, given the family’s material needs. The family was living doubled-up with another family. “None of them work. They don’t have state assistance. … [The mother] has four kids, her girlfriend, and her girlfriend’s son—they’re all in one room, one bedroom,” the investigator summarized. “I would think that hearing that there’s a program that could help you get your own place and space. … I didn’t get their reaction about the [partner agency] and what they could help with that I expected, I guess. Because I thought if anybody could use [partner agency] services, this was a family that could.” In a separate interview, the mother expressed that the partner agency’s services had indeed piqued her interest. She wanted “to see if [the partner agency] could help me put a roof over my children’s heads,” which she needed. At the same time, she planned to wait to make up her mind about the program. She said, “At the moment, I thought they were using that to keep an eye on me. That’s why I was so insecure yesterday. I thought, ‘If they want me to do this program to keep an eye on me, I am going to feel pestered.’” The program’s connection to DCF, a surveilling agency, made her hesitant to sign up. In the end, she declined the referral.

Availability of Resources Through Child Welfare Encourages Overreporting

Child welfare agencies’ taking on a material support role may incentivize other service providers to call on child welfare when they encounter families with concrete needs. Educators, health care professionals, and others may come to see child welfare as the clearest path to support. Child welfare officials recognized how their agency’s (actual or imagined) ability to assist families in need, rather than concerns about maltreatment, drove some hotline calls—“absolutely, absolutely,” according to an ACS administrator. Service providers had seen the agency provide material support previously, administrators explained, so they turned to the agency again when encountering families with material needs. As another administrator said, “I think people think that that’s the only way, the fastest way, the best way or whatever, ’cause they’ve seen it work. If the last struggling family needed X, Y, Z, you made this call, and they got it, and things are better now, so they do the same thing the next time.” After describing how DCF would provide baby supplies if a mother under investigation needed them, an investigator in Connecticut remarked, “That’s why they’ll make the report to DCF, so DCF would have to go out and provide those things.” In a case focused on a family’s housing conditions, the investigator attributed the report to the hospital “want[ing] to see what [DCF] can do to help the family,” rather than suspecting neglect. “They’re thinking that if they called us, then we could do something to help the family.”

In Connecticut, we interviewed professionals who indeed saw DCF as an agency potentially better suited to address families’ material needs. “A lot of times, they are willing to help link families to services,” explained a mental health clinician, adding, “They could help families with housing.” A police officer noted that families may need financial help, and he saw DCF as an avenue to that assistance: “The house was a disaster. I didn’t see any food in their refrigerator. … They may need a social worker to say, listen, do you know that there’s food stamps available to you, or this kind of counseling is afforded to you, what kind of health insurance is available to you if you don’t have financial means.” Likewise, a therapist reported her client, experiencing domestic violence, to DCF. This therapist did not want to see the client’s children removed, “but she needs some help” beyond the domestic violence concern, as she was facing eviction after losing her rental assistance. The therapist continued, “I was hoping between DCF and [the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services] that they can help her with that. … She needs case management and supports. I can’t do all that from my office.” Because professionals feel limited in what they can do for families, DCF’s resource provision may spur reports that might not otherwise be made.

Professionals’ perceptions are based on their prior experiences, and they also align with some child welfare agency messaging about the resources the agency can provide. In training for mandated reporters, for instance, DCF informs prospective callers about the supports available for cases on a lower risk, family assessment track. This track, the training describes, involves service plans and access to a community partner agency. As the training slide notes, these cases focus on what services can assist the family. In 2020, ACS rolled out a similar track for some reports deemed lower risk. The then-commissioner told the press, “Oftentimes, families reported to the New York state child abuse hotline are simply in need of a helping hand—whether that’s food, clothing, or extra support—and specially trained child protective staff help connect those families to the resources they need” (quoted in Dalton 2020). With these messages, we can see how other service professionals might understand DCF and ACS as a reasonable place to turn to connect families with material resources, and ACS has acknowledged that its public statements sent this message. For instance, ACS received inquiries about how to refer families to this track specifically, indicating interest in the case management and resource provision components more so than an investigation of child maltreatment allegations.

Recognizing reports driven by families’ resource needs rather than maltreatment concerns, DCF and ACS staff indicated that they hoped to shift course to prevent such situations from being routed to them. In a Connecticut training, a trainer acknowledged that the agency received many reports not necessitating a DCF response. This trainer put the onus on DCF to address the issue, saying, “we have to educate” prospective callers regarding when reports are and are not appropriate. Several ACS administrators described the agency’s efforts to educate mandated reporters, especially in schools and hospitals, about situations not requiring a report. One administrator explained, “New York City is really thinking proactively about how to retrain and reframe people’s thinking on this. … We’re really working with mandated reporters to help them understand where is the line between when you need to call and when you can really be thinking about connection with [alternative] supports?” Nevertheless, when the child welfare agency expands the resources it can provide, it becomes an appealing option for adjacent professionals. A limited social safety net, combined with vague definitions of neglect that could reasonably include conditions of poverty, means that frontline professionals may view child welfare as the most expedient way to get help for the families they work with, which ultimately increases families’ exposure to an entity they find threatening (Fong 2023).