My 2010 encounter with child protective services
A couple of recent conversations on Facebook got me thinking again about my experience with being reported to Child Protective Services (in MA it's called DCF - Department of Children and Families), which I realize I never posted about publicly at the time (spring of 2010). It was not a fun time.
The summary of what happened, as best I can recall almost five years later: We were at a Little League game where Isaac was playing in the "farm league" (one step up from t-ball). Ruthie kept running out onto the field and I had told her a thousand times that she could not go on the field until the game was over. You know how it is. She was 4 years old and not listening to me at all. I probably told her a hundred times semi-calmly and then started to get more frustrated.
Then, the ball came in our direction, followed by a thundering horde of 7-year-olds. You gotta understand that in farm league it is pretty much chaos. The kids do understand, at least in theory, that each kid has an assigned position on the field and is supposed to stay there; but in reality what happens is that the ball gets hit in a particular direction and EVERY kid on the field -- sometimes including kids on the opposing team -- runs after it. Mayhem. And these kids are a lot bigger than a 4-year-old (they looked huge to me at the time :) ), plus many of them were wearing cleats. So, not so safe for a little one to be in their path. Of course, just as the ball and the thundering horde came toward us, Ruthie chose to run out onto the field for the thousand-and-first time. So I grabbed her and yanked her back. Did I handle her more roughly than one would like to think, ideally, that one ever handles one's child? Sure. Was my action spurred just as much by frustration and anger at her, as by fear for her safety? Sure. I guess maybe there are moms out there who never get mad at their 4-year-old for doing a thousand times what they've been told not to, but those moms are freaks and I was not one of them.
So, I grabbed Ruthie and pulled her off the field, not taking the time to be particularly gentle because of aforementioned factors. In the process, she twisted/slipped out of my hand and fell to the ground pretty hard, and started crying. I immediately sat down on the grass and took her on my lap and comforted her. But in that moment of time, some anonymous busybody, whose identity is still unknown to me, saw something they didn't like in my parenting and felt strongly enough about it to call DCF and report me for child abuse.
Now, at this particular point in time, I was in the process of preparing for my first-ever business trip out of the country. I was going to Scotland for a two-week training course, a time period that encompassed the end of the school year, and therefore the end of built-in daily childcare and the transition to summer camp, with two extra days in between (plus a weekend). So, the planning for my absence during that time was extremely complicated and stressful, exacerbated by my feelings of guilt and anxiety about leaving the kids for that long. I had this whole big spreadsheet of who was in charge of them at every moment: who was picking them up and dropping them off, and where and when, and who was sleeping at our house or having the kids sleep at their house, for each day of the two weeks. Plus extras like Isaac's ball games and various end-of-school-year activities, what to feed the kids, care and feeding of our cat, etc......... It was a whole big thing that I was really kind of freaking out about. I was supposed to fly out on, if memory serves, a Saturday. The aforementioned incident on the baseball field happened on maybe the Wednesday(?), and on the Friday I got the phone call from DCF letting me know that an official case file had been opened. You can perhaps imagine how much that knocked me for a loop. The incident at the ball field wasn't even on my radar; it was such a normal incident in the life of a family with a 4-year-old at that point. I was absolutely gobsmacked to learn that someone had actually reported it. And I didn't have the time, energy, mental capacity to deal with it. Telling the DCF person that I was about to leave the country without my kids for two weeks made me feel even more like a terrible mom.
Here's something I wish people understood about Child Services: They are legally required to thoroughly investigate EVERY report that they receive. I get the feeling that some people think they can call DCF on someone, and if it isn't real abuse, then DCF will just glance at the situation and go "Nah, we don't need to look into that." Unfortunately, the system does not give caseworkers that kind of leeway. They're required to go through the entire process for every report. That means talking to the child's doctor and teacher(s), and siblings' teacher(s) if applicable, interviewing the parent(s) extensively, speaking to the child and any sibling(s) extensively, both with and without the parent(s) present. ALL of that, because one person saw one instant in our life and decided to pass judgment on me as a parent. Meanwhile, how many cases of real child abuse were sitting on that caseworker's desk, waiting for them to get around to it?
I feel really conflicted about this whole thing, because in theory I do think it's a good thing that people watch out for other people's kids and notify the authorities if something seems wrong, and that every such report results in an investigation. I would hate to think that anyone would just ignore a case of child abuse. And I'm sure that if someone only saw those ten seconds of my and Ruthie's life, the ten seconds during which I was pulling her off the field and she accidentally fell out of my grasp, well yeah, probably that looked bad. Probably someone hadn't been paying attention to the preceding hour during which I tried everything I could think of to keep Ruthie entertained and occupied off the field. Maybe someone didn't stick around long enough to see me comforting her and cheering her up and going back to trying to keep her off the field for the remainder of the game. Maybe if I had been the one who only saw those ten seconds, maybe I would have been concerned also. On the other hand, I do like to think that if I'd been on the other side, I would have taken a few more minutes to observe the situation and feel some sympathy for the mom. I would have put myself in her shoes, mentally, and thought about how hard it is to handle a bored 4-year-old. I like to think I would have given her the benefit of the doubt. (Frankly, in the past ~5 years, keeping Ruthie entertained while I watch Isaac's Little League games has been a constant ongoing problem for me, and one that I feel bad about, because I get that it sucks for her, but I really want to watch the games!)
And here's another angle that I'm conflicted about here: some people say, "well, instead of calling DCF immediately, you should try to talk to the parent and express your concern." But easier said than done! Picture yourself in that situation. You're sitting there watching a Little League game and suddenly you see another mom roughly yank her child off the field. Maybe from your vantage point it looks like she was way too harsh. Do you really get up and go over there and say something to her? Anywhere on the spectrum from "Take your hands off that kid, you abusive monster" from "hey, do you need some help?" -- I can't envision myself doing any of that. It's not my nature and it's not the kind of society we have, even in a friendly mini-community like the Little League one usually is. We don't say anything to the mom directly because we're afraid of looking like a busybody, or afraid she'll freak out and start yelling at us, or worse. I like to think that if I were in public and saw a parent actively harming a child -- like punching or whatever -- that I would jump in and remove the child from the immediate danger; but if all I saw was one smack, for example, I can't at all envision myself going over and saying something to the parent. Would I call DCF on them, if I knew their name and contact info? Honestly, I don't know. Now that I know what I do about the DCF process and how awful it feels to be in that position, I can't imagine doing that to anyone unless I really seriously felt it was a dangerous situation to the child. And the thought that someone on that baseball field that day felt that way about me, is just really frustrating and hard to fathom.
So mostly I feel like whoever it was can't be blamed, as long as I tell myself that he or she didn't understand how the DCF process works. I tell myself that he or she probably thought, like I said above -- that DCF would take a cursory glance at the situation and dismiss it. I tell myself that, and sometimes it even works. But it still drives me crazy (albeit tempered by the passage of time) not knowing who it was. It had to be someone connected with Little League -- it couldn't have been some random stranger walking by, because they'd have had no way of knowing my contact info to pass on to DCF. Most likely it was someone on Isaac's team, because they would have known which kid's mom I was, and they'd have had access to the team roster which had my contact info on it. (But it wasn't anyone who really knew me, because my nephew was there that day and they told DCF that I had two sons.) At that time I didn't really know any of the kids or parents in Little League (by now I feel like I know them all!) so I really, really don't have a clue who it was. Sometimes I do have moments of wishing I did know so I could cuss them out educate them about the hell they put me through.
But just to finish the story: we were assigned a case worker and I explained the whole travel situation and put him in touch with my mom, who was to be the kids' main caregiver while I was away. Since the rules require the investigation to happen within a certain time period, my mom arranged to have the caseworker come to her house and talk to the kids there on a particular day while I was away. This involved a whole bunch of inconvenience as it required mom to pick up Ruthie from preschool early, thus interrupting Ruthie's naptime. (Also mom felt the need to spend half the day cleaning her house for this guy, which personally I felt was unnecessary, but well.) It was also arranged purposefully for before Isaac was to start summer camp, because once he started camp he would be basically unavailable from 8:30am to 4:30pm and the caseworker supposedly couldn't meet with anyone after 4pm.
So, all that having been carefully arranged ... the caseworker never showed up. And it was a full day later before he called my mom to apologize and say that he had had a "family emergency." And we never heard from him again. A few days later we were contacted by a new caseworker who said that the other guy was having "personal issues" so she was newly assigned to our case. Somehow, that mix-up magically made the time constraints go away, so she didn't need to meet with the kids until after I returned from Scotland. If memory serves, I met with her once by myself, and then she came to our house one evening to talk to the kids. The latter was pretty brief; she got there just as we were getting home from our day, so the kids were full of end-of-the-day energy and not too interested in answering bewildering questions from a stranger. But I think the main purpose was for her to see the kids and observe that they looked healthy, un-bruised, happy, etc., and that they didn't appear to be scared of me or anything like that. So, she was pretty understanding about their lack of cooperation, and she just talked to them for a couple of minutes and then a bit later I was notified that the case file was being closed as "unsubstantiated," or whatever the official language is that means "we found no evidence of abuse."
So a happy ending, right? Sort of. The thing is, even after being "exonerated," there's a lot of lingering anxiety and paranoia. You feel like, okay, when it was their first encounter with me it was easy for them to dismiss it, but what if some other busybody decides to report me again? Will DCF scrutinize me harder if it's the second time? Do I have to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder when I'm parenting in public, constantly second-guessing my parenting choices and trying to judge myself through the lens of some unknown unsympathetic observer? You feel like, everywhere you go, people are watching you and passing judgment on your every interaction with your kids. That's not a good feeling.
So I don't know how the problems with the system can be fixed. Aside from all of the high-profile, serious failures that you read about -- kids who die while under DCF investigation because the caseworker didn't follow up, the paperwork was lost, the child was placed with a known abuser as a foster parent, etc., kids who disappear and are unaccounted for, caseworkers massively overworked with more cases assigned per worker than any human being could reasonably handle -- there are all the cases like mine, where one random busybody or idiot with a grudge can put in a report, and it's treated just the same as a report from an actual reliable reporter, and it triggers this whole big investigation, tying up a caseworker's time and energy, and causing unnecessary stress, anxiety, embarrassment, etc. for a parent who hasn't done anything wrong. Wow, do overlook the horrendous run-on-ness of that previous sentence, please.
Like I said, I do think it's a good thing in theory that DCF has policies and procedures requiring them to investigate every claim. I just wish there were some way to weed out the false reports more easily, in a less punitive way. And a way to educate people about the realities of what a DCF investigation is like, what you're going to be putting people through when you decide to file a report. Maybe more people, if they knew that stuff, would choose to use common sense and really look at / think about a situation rationally, reasonably, before jumping immediately to involving the authorities. I doubt we can ever really do away with the problem of people making false reports, whether out of active malice (I know a mom whose ex-husband regularly reported her for child abuse as an attempt to get out of paying child support) or lack of common sense (coworker told me about a friend whose neighbor called DCF because they heard "a loud bang followed by a child crying"!!!) or what have you. But it just sucks that anyone can bring that down on anyone else, for any reason or no reason, at any time.
Anyway, I hope this was edifying for some. By the way, don't get me wrong -- all of that happened almost 5 years ago and it really isn't like I spend a lot of mental energy angsting about it these days. Not at all, really. It just happened to come up several times recently on FB, in relation to the currently high-profile case in Maryland (wherein parents were accused of abuse/neglect for letting their kids walk home from school). I found myself recounting my DCF story on several FB threads, piecemeal, so I thought I'd write up the whole thing more fully. And here it is. Phew, as usual I got long-winded. If you read the whole thing, you get a virtual cookie. (Probably a Thin Mint. We're pretty well-stocked with those right now. ;) )
The summary of what happened, as best I can recall almost five years later: We were at a Little League game where Isaac was playing in the "farm league" (one step up from t-ball). Ruthie kept running out onto the field and I had told her a thousand times that she could not go on the field until the game was over. You know how it is. She was 4 years old and not listening to me at all. I probably told her a hundred times semi-calmly and then started to get more frustrated.
Then, the ball came in our direction, followed by a thundering horde of 7-year-olds. You gotta understand that in farm league it is pretty much chaos. The kids do understand, at least in theory, that each kid has an assigned position on the field and is supposed to stay there; but in reality what happens is that the ball gets hit in a particular direction and EVERY kid on the field -- sometimes including kids on the opposing team -- runs after it. Mayhem. And these kids are a lot bigger than a 4-year-old (they looked huge to me at the time :) ), plus many of them were wearing cleats. So, not so safe for a little one to be in their path. Of course, just as the ball and the thundering horde came toward us, Ruthie chose to run out onto the field for the thousand-and-first time. So I grabbed her and yanked her back. Did I handle her more roughly than one would like to think, ideally, that one ever handles one's child? Sure. Was my action spurred just as much by frustration and anger at her, as by fear for her safety? Sure. I guess maybe there are moms out there who never get mad at their 4-year-old for doing a thousand times what they've been told not to, but those moms are freaks and I was not one of them.
So, I grabbed Ruthie and pulled her off the field, not taking the time to be particularly gentle because of aforementioned factors. In the process, she twisted/slipped out of my hand and fell to the ground pretty hard, and started crying. I immediately sat down on the grass and took her on my lap and comforted her. But in that moment of time, some anonymous busybody, whose identity is still unknown to me, saw something they didn't like in my parenting and felt strongly enough about it to call DCF and report me for child abuse.
Now, at this particular point in time, I was in the process of preparing for my first-ever business trip out of the country. I was going to Scotland for a two-week training course, a time period that encompassed the end of the school year, and therefore the end of built-in daily childcare and the transition to summer camp, with two extra days in between (plus a weekend). So, the planning for my absence during that time was extremely complicated and stressful, exacerbated by my feelings of guilt and anxiety about leaving the kids for that long. I had this whole big spreadsheet of who was in charge of them at every moment: who was picking them up and dropping them off, and where and when, and who was sleeping at our house or having the kids sleep at their house, for each day of the two weeks. Plus extras like Isaac's ball games and various end-of-school-year activities, what to feed the kids, care and feeding of our cat, etc......... It was a whole big thing that I was really kind of freaking out about. I was supposed to fly out on, if memory serves, a Saturday. The aforementioned incident on the baseball field happened on maybe the Wednesday(?), and on the Friday I got the phone call from DCF letting me know that an official case file had been opened. You can perhaps imagine how much that knocked me for a loop. The incident at the ball field wasn't even on my radar; it was such a normal incident in the life of a family with a 4-year-old at that point. I was absolutely gobsmacked to learn that someone had actually reported it. And I didn't have the time, energy, mental capacity to deal with it. Telling the DCF person that I was about to leave the country without my kids for two weeks made me feel even more like a terrible mom.
Here's something I wish people understood about Child Services: They are legally required to thoroughly investigate EVERY report that they receive. I get the feeling that some people think they can call DCF on someone, and if it isn't real abuse, then DCF will just glance at the situation and go "Nah, we don't need to look into that." Unfortunately, the system does not give caseworkers that kind of leeway. They're required to go through the entire process for every report. That means talking to the child's doctor and teacher(s), and siblings' teacher(s) if applicable, interviewing the parent(s) extensively, speaking to the child and any sibling(s) extensively, both with and without the parent(s) present. ALL of that, because one person saw one instant in our life and decided to pass judgment on me as a parent. Meanwhile, how many cases of real child abuse were sitting on that caseworker's desk, waiting for them to get around to it?
I feel really conflicted about this whole thing, because in theory I do think it's a good thing that people watch out for other people's kids and notify the authorities if something seems wrong, and that every such report results in an investigation. I would hate to think that anyone would just ignore a case of child abuse. And I'm sure that if someone only saw those ten seconds of my and Ruthie's life, the ten seconds during which I was pulling her off the field and she accidentally fell out of my grasp, well yeah, probably that looked bad. Probably someone hadn't been paying attention to the preceding hour during which I tried everything I could think of to keep Ruthie entertained and occupied off the field. Maybe someone didn't stick around long enough to see me comforting her and cheering her up and going back to trying to keep her off the field for the remainder of the game. Maybe if I had been the one who only saw those ten seconds, maybe I would have been concerned also. On the other hand, I do like to think that if I'd been on the other side, I would have taken a few more minutes to observe the situation and feel some sympathy for the mom. I would have put myself in her shoes, mentally, and thought about how hard it is to handle a bored 4-year-old. I like to think I would have given her the benefit of the doubt. (Frankly, in the past ~5 years, keeping Ruthie entertained while I watch Isaac's Little League games has been a constant ongoing problem for me, and one that I feel bad about, because I get that it sucks for her, but I really want to watch the games!)
And here's another angle that I'm conflicted about here: some people say, "well, instead of calling DCF immediately, you should try to talk to the parent and express your concern." But easier said than done! Picture yourself in that situation. You're sitting there watching a Little League game and suddenly you see another mom roughly yank her child off the field. Maybe from your vantage point it looks like she was way too harsh. Do you really get up and go over there and say something to her? Anywhere on the spectrum from "Take your hands off that kid, you abusive monster" from "hey, do you need some help?" -- I can't envision myself doing any of that. It's not my nature and it's not the kind of society we have, even in a friendly mini-community like the Little League one usually is. We don't say anything to the mom directly because we're afraid of looking like a busybody, or afraid she'll freak out and start yelling at us, or worse. I like to think that if I were in public and saw a parent actively harming a child -- like punching or whatever -- that I would jump in and remove the child from the immediate danger; but if all I saw was one smack, for example, I can't at all envision myself going over and saying something to the parent. Would I call DCF on them, if I knew their name and contact info? Honestly, I don't know. Now that I know what I do about the DCF process and how awful it feels to be in that position, I can't imagine doing that to anyone unless I really seriously felt it was a dangerous situation to the child. And the thought that someone on that baseball field that day felt that way about me, is just really frustrating and hard to fathom.
So mostly I feel like whoever it was can't be blamed, as long as I tell myself that he or she didn't understand how the DCF process works. I tell myself that he or she probably thought, like I said above -- that DCF would take a cursory glance at the situation and dismiss it. I tell myself that, and sometimes it even works. But it still drives me crazy (albeit tempered by the passage of time) not knowing who it was. It had to be someone connected with Little League -- it couldn't have been some random stranger walking by, because they'd have had no way of knowing my contact info to pass on to DCF. Most likely it was someone on Isaac's team, because they would have known which kid's mom I was, and they'd have had access to the team roster which had my contact info on it. (But it wasn't anyone who really knew me, because my nephew was there that day and they told DCF that I had two sons.) At that time I didn't really know any of the kids or parents in Little League (by now I feel like I know them all!) so I really, really don't have a clue who it was. Sometimes I do have moments of wishing I did know so I could cuss them out educate them about the hell they put me through.
But just to finish the story: we were assigned a case worker and I explained the whole travel situation and put him in touch with my mom, who was to be the kids' main caregiver while I was away. Since the rules require the investigation to happen within a certain time period, my mom arranged to have the caseworker come to her house and talk to the kids there on a particular day while I was away. This involved a whole bunch of inconvenience as it required mom to pick up Ruthie from preschool early, thus interrupting Ruthie's naptime. (Also mom felt the need to spend half the day cleaning her house for this guy, which personally I felt was unnecessary, but well.) It was also arranged purposefully for before Isaac was to start summer camp, because once he started camp he would be basically unavailable from 8:30am to 4:30pm and the caseworker supposedly couldn't meet with anyone after 4pm.
So, all that having been carefully arranged ... the caseworker never showed up. And it was a full day later before he called my mom to apologize and say that he had had a "family emergency." And we never heard from him again. A few days later we were contacted by a new caseworker who said that the other guy was having "personal issues" so she was newly assigned to our case. Somehow, that mix-up magically made the time constraints go away, so she didn't need to meet with the kids until after I returned from Scotland. If memory serves, I met with her once by myself, and then she came to our house one evening to talk to the kids. The latter was pretty brief; she got there just as we were getting home from our day, so the kids were full of end-of-the-day energy and not too interested in answering bewildering questions from a stranger. But I think the main purpose was for her to see the kids and observe that they looked healthy, un-bruised, happy, etc., and that they didn't appear to be scared of me or anything like that. So, she was pretty understanding about their lack of cooperation, and she just talked to them for a couple of minutes and then a bit later I was notified that the case file was being closed as "unsubstantiated," or whatever the official language is that means "we found no evidence of abuse."
So a happy ending, right? Sort of. The thing is, even after being "exonerated," there's a lot of lingering anxiety and paranoia. You feel like, okay, when it was their first encounter with me it was easy for them to dismiss it, but what if some other busybody decides to report me again? Will DCF scrutinize me harder if it's the second time? Do I have to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder when I'm parenting in public, constantly second-guessing my parenting choices and trying to judge myself through the lens of some unknown unsympathetic observer? You feel like, everywhere you go, people are watching you and passing judgment on your every interaction with your kids. That's not a good feeling.
So I don't know how the problems with the system can be fixed. Aside from all of the high-profile, serious failures that you read about -- kids who die while under DCF investigation because the caseworker didn't follow up, the paperwork was lost, the child was placed with a known abuser as a foster parent, etc., kids who disappear and are unaccounted for, caseworkers massively overworked with more cases assigned per worker than any human being could reasonably handle -- there are all the cases like mine, where one random busybody or idiot with a grudge can put in a report, and it's treated just the same as a report from an actual reliable reporter, and it triggers this whole big investigation, tying up a caseworker's time and energy, and causing unnecessary stress, anxiety, embarrassment, etc. for a parent who hasn't done anything wrong. Wow, do overlook the horrendous run-on-ness of that previous sentence, please.
Like I said, I do think it's a good thing in theory that DCF has policies and procedures requiring them to investigate every claim. I just wish there were some way to weed out the false reports more easily, in a less punitive way. And a way to educate people about the realities of what a DCF investigation is like, what you're going to be putting people through when you decide to file a report. Maybe more people, if they knew that stuff, would choose to use common sense and really look at / think about a situation rationally, reasonably, before jumping immediately to involving the authorities. I doubt we can ever really do away with the problem of people making false reports, whether out of active malice (I know a mom whose ex-husband regularly reported her for child abuse as an attempt to get out of paying child support) or lack of common sense (coworker told me about a friend whose neighbor called DCF because they heard "a loud bang followed by a child crying"!!!) or what have you. But it just sucks that anyone can bring that down on anyone else, for any reason or no reason, at any time.
Anyway, I hope this was edifying for some. By the way, don't get me wrong -- all of that happened almost 5 years ago and it really isn't like I spend a lot of mental energy angsting about it these days. Not at all, really. It just happened to come up several times recently on FB, in relation to the currently high-profile case in Maryland (wherein parents were accused of abuse/neglect for letting their kids walk home from school). I found myself recounting my DCF story on several FB threads, piecemeal, so I thought I'd write up the whole thing more fully. And here it is. Phew, as usual I got long-winded. If you read the whole thing, you get a virtual cookie. (Probably a Thin Mint. We're pretty well-stocked with those right now. ;) )