Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)
In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.
We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.
A parent from the other team was sitting in our group and disapproved loudly of the timeout and the forced bathroom match, she almost certainly was the one who complained.
All of this is normal kid stuff. What kind of parent is so spiteful they will call child services on an opposing teams parents?
I find this to be common in liberal states, from talking with my friends. In conservative, religious states, children are raised with discipline and there isn't any helicopter parenting at all.
An ugly person.
Some parents get very, ridiculously caught up in the excitement of their kids' sports, and a very small number go too far. I have seen parents fighting in the stands at 10U football games (10 and under). I have heard parents screaming at coaches threatening to sue them. I have seen parents mocking and degrading the opposing team's kids. I have seen parents encouraging taunts and chants from the crowd to throw off a pitcher or a quarter back. I've seen a nasty, abusive man ejected from a high school building entirely for cursing and screaming at opposing kids. And of course we had CPS called on us.
It's only a very small percentage, but they really ruin the experience for everyone.
(former lacrosse and then crew parent)
https://www.nj.com/news/2022/06/nj-youth-baseball-umpire-vio...
Never heard any yelling at my kids' piano recitals.
My brother in christ 3 years old is a bit young to hit the tables.
At least this was funny and easy to understand, sometimes I’m careless and it’s such complete gibberish if I come back to the comment an hour later I don’t understand what I wanted to write.
I suspect it was a typo. What he meant to type was "she hates betting when she loses".
We got in a verbal argument with a care worker who wouldn't do anything when she came to take care of him, wouldn't feed him, clean him, talk or even look at him. Except for the few times where she screamed at him she just waited for her time to leave. After the argument she sent a complaint letter to the local government claiming he was improperly taken care of (even though we cared for him every day in addition to paying people like her to help).
Here is where it gets good: He was put under care of the state until the matter was resolved, with a state appointed curator who received a percentage of his pension as payment and had full control of all decisions related to his care as well as his bank account. That meant we could no longer make accommodations in his house without their approval, every decision we took for him had to go through them. We had to pay for the large costs of care ourselves because it's not remotely realistic to go through the government to expense food, hygiene supplies and everything needed to take care of an elderly man near death. In addition to that we couldn't get rid of the agency that provided the abusive care workers, they made sure to make buddy-buddy with the curator and to paint us as abusers.
We went to his home every day to care for him and we would see the care workers just sitting there doing nothing, perfectly aware we were powerless to change anything or even throw them out. Eventually, after months of legal costs and being treated like abusers, we got in front of a judge and we were put back in charge after my dad begged for it. He was very close to the end then and I will always be bitter at how the state and these people conspired to take him away from us and prevent us from getting him better care during his final months.
What state was this in?
She's been incarcerated in a care home since the start of covid, although rather than one near to where family lived they refused to let us move her. Took 18 months of going through court to get her moved, she has degraded so far she barely remembers me now.
(And of course despite legally being kept in the car home she has to pay for it. Had she broken the law and gone to prison she'd have more freedom and wouldn't have to pay!)
We now have power of attorneys for our parents.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/crime-prisons-lawsuits-connecticu...
It is similar to the PACE scam, where government lets a company steal someone's house with a fake "energy credit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv8ZPFOxJEc https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-do-i-avoid-risk...
Stuff like this turns me Anarchist in the "Government can't work" sense. The criminals are always 10 steps ahead of (or in cahoots with) the government, turning every attempt at "promoting the general welfare" into highway robbery, and no one in government is willing to prosecute and convict these criminals, because white collar crime gets the "it's too complicated to explain" Get Out of Jail Free card.
The government is a very, very scary thing. Because I'm disabled, I've had many encounters with the faceless and all powerful hand of the government, sometimes it feels like they'd want a medical certificate just to allow people like me to keep breathing. But paradoxically, I believe in a fairly strong government, I think it's best to have an organization at the top which is explicitly defined to serve the need of the people, rather than whatever would rise to the top in its stead. As long as one remains aware of how terrifying the government can be and is willing to go out and throw a few bricks at government buildings. I think it's served us well, comparing my country to the rest of the word.
Government contractors introduce horrible conflicts of interest at every level. The US used to get projects done early and under budget before contracting took over, but that doesn’t make anyone wealthy.
Private individuals run into the tragedy of the commons.
etc etc
You might make a case that federal employees would do better than 3rd parties, but this beside the point I am trying to make.
You cant have abusive legal guardianships without state involvement, contractors or not.
So, my point is if you can’t trust people, companies, or the government then what’s left? IMO, the best option is to simply limit the number of things we need to trust. You don’t need to trust news organizations for them to act as a balance on government corruption. That only goes so far, but it’s still useful.
In this case, if durable legal guardianship against the wishes of the ward did not exist, there would be no need to trust anyone, the government or otherwise.
To be clear, what I'm proposing in this case is that nobody can have their assets seized without their permission.
Similarly, I don't have to invest trust in my underwear stain inspector, governmental or otherwise because nobody has the right to stop me inspect my underwear.
To be clear I am not saying government is the right solution, just that the problem does exist. Not just because people get taken advantage of but because taxpayers gets stuck taking care of people who have lost everything.
PS: Being able to trust children is one solution that works at the individual level, but it unfortunately doesn’t scale.
I think that is a crucial difference morally, legally, and politically.
It is one thing to give up your own autonomy because you don't trust yourself, which is entirely reasonable.
It is another thing to give up everybody's personal autonomy because you don't trust yourself.
Giving the government the power to strip someone's rights and place them in guardianship I'm sure avoid some elder abuse and suffering.
My point is that I don't think it is ethical for those who want this protection to make that decision for everyone.
Every day people do lose the ability to make informed decisions without preparing for that change. How and why we respond to that doesn’t change the underlying biology.
How many many benifical guardianships are an acceptable trade for one abusive guardianship?
Maybe the answer is absolutely 0 and this should be off limits for policy.
You should watch the movie "I care a lot" with Rosamund Pike - it's terrifying how believable it is.
Businesses learned this a long time ago, which is why they never tell you why they get rid of you. They just say your services are no longer required.
You're defending yourself without knowing the charge, with the investigator/judge/jury CPS agent presuming you are at least somewhat guilty.
Be careful that you don't try to extrapolate a few N=1 stories into how normal people act.
How many people heard about this and decided to waste time and resources either wilfully or unwittingly, and is that a reflection of the state law enforcement and social services?
Saying "This is an N=1 story." is a bit disingenuous
Acting on anecdotal evidence is premature, sure, but no one here is making law, or even policy. We are sharing.
N is getting bigger
Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a sports team.
Cue Will Ferrell yelling at kids:
False reports, especially those used for retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
Meanwhile, the conversation amongst the staff at the public school my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of society in general.
So I guess it all works out!
That's the saddest thing I've read this morning, assuming it is accurate. For every great staff member at school, I've met at least one other than was barely able to function in adult society. I don't know which direction the causal effect is going, but there's a correlation between working all day with young children and being able to relate to other adults.
My son's elementary school is more like a prison now, after a huge transformation in the last two years, and I can't wait for him to move up to the middle school. Which thankfully isn't quite so authoritarian. Yet. I'm right on the edge of pulling both kids out of school and going online with it, and probably would have except my daughter really didn't fare well during the pandemic version of online school. My son would be quite happy though. Make it self-paced and he'd have his high school diploma at 12.
maybe i'm confused. are you saying it's sad that staff members at an elementary school aren't for punishing false reports to cps? i don't know what's sad about that. if reports are anonymous, how could you punish a false reporter? and how could you prove the report was intentionally false? seems like you'd catch a tiny portion of malicious reporters that for whatever reson left undeniable evidence of that intention to falsely report, and to do that the reporting would have to no longer be anonymous, which would stop a lot of people from reporting.
In our case the County Superintendent is supposed to monitor the local districts, but ours refuses to. He is just window dressing. Local superintendents know this and have carte blache.
We ended up pulling our kids and sent them 40 minutes away to private schools. When we pulled them both had B averages, but scored in the 20th percentile on State tests. Entering private school both had horrible first semesters as the learning deficit became clear. Luckily they are both smart (just ignorant, thanks to the prior school) and are catching up.
Here's what she/I meant (she's also super annoyed that I'm bothering her with "nerds fighting about nonsense on the internet"):
The gist of her argument and paraphrased: "The problem is that CPS is by necessity anonymous. It's not that people aren't being punished for reporting false claims, it's that if you really wanted to catch everyone who was reporting false claims then you would have to make them present some form of identification. What if this is about a legitimate case of abuse from a scary motherfucker? Someone might not report because they don't want to realistically be murdered by said scary motherfucker. Also, the communities that have the most problems with child abuse also have a higher number of people who do not want to interact with law enforcement for a number of reasons. There is a trade-off with any situation that requires anonymous reporting."
Jesus, jail time! I can tell you right off the bat that that would absolutely disincentivise me from reporting anything - some process I'm not privy to decides it was a 'false' report and I get jail? That makes for a very high bar for me not to wind my neck back in - and if that's what you want, only something that's too heinous to ignore gets reported, fine. But it's certainly not an insane suggestion that there's a link there.
I'm not arguing that people who are wrong in good faith be punished, just that we punish people who we can prove lied in order to retaliate against people they don't like.
The difference is the police won't go after false reporting often, probably because they are worried it will have a chilling effect on people talking to them.
If 10% of murder convictions are mistaken it would stand to reason that the false accusation conviction error rate would be equally high or higher.
It's fun to say, punish everyone that does crime X. But you have to accept a false positive rate.
Why in the world would you be sure of that?
> Why in the world would you be sure of that?
A democracy
(Whether it's worth that deterrent is a question that I am not going to attempt to grapple with on a technology message board.)
I feel that what you are saying is true, but I know that this would result in a system where the wealthy and connected would then run amok while their honest accusers sat in prison.
How about if we instead simply make the investigation process less threatening and terrifying, particularly at initial stages? For example, in the linked article, it's insane that the investigator required that the mother return to therapy because she'd been to therapy in the past for a bout of depression.
But in instances where someone has incontrovertibly made a false report because they wanted to ruin someone's day (or life), that should follow them around. There is a large blurry area between reporting someone because their kid has a black eye every couple months and reporting someone because their kid is better at baseball than yours where you can't prove bad faith, and in that instance it doesn't make sense to ruin anyone's life.
That seems extremely difficult to prove.
1. There's a case to be made for anonymous reports which the current system allows and your system wouldn't allow. Abusive parents can also be violent parents, it's understandable that in some cases teachers or people who know about the abuse going on wouldn't want to report that abuse.
2. This also reverses the current issue with CPS where a report leads to an investigation that's traumatising for the family and the children that CPS is supposed to protect. If you investigate any report to prove that the report was made in bad faith, then anyone reporting will potentially have to go through a process that's traumatising even if they are not guilty.
I think instead snozolli's solution of making CPS' investigations less threatening and more humane with an expedited process when there was clearly a misunderstanding and creating laws that make it clear that certain behaviors are not negligence would go a long way toward solving all this.
The actual problem, with the responsibility being laundered by placing it on random busybodies. Maybe have a system where anonymous denunciation doesn't lead to trauma and misery.
If those resources do get allocated, there's a good chance these same folks downvoting you would complain about wasted government resources because the nuance in allocating those resources doesn't shine through in obvious ways.
What's the solution to this? I don't know, unfortunately. AI scientists have to take every problem that involves this nuance on a per-case basis and work with their business partners (or whoever the "client" is) to decide what's a good point on the curve for the operational model. Similarly social scientists (and politicians) influencing government operations presumably have to determine where that balance lies. And likely the downvoters don't have those answers either. Maybe the real solution is to have a not-too-complex-or-lengthy redress mechanism for those caught unfairly in the "system", with the ease-of-redress driven by how far to one side or other the balance tips.
They can make your life hell and take your children away. They do it for things as minor as possessing marijuana in your home, and they do it every day to people who are poor. You just don't hear about it because those stories don't make it into the news.
Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good.
Do you have any evidence to back this statement?
GP questioned, and made a contrary assertion without evidence: "Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good."
Seems unfair to call out GP for not providing evidence, but not OP, especially since GP's claim was more moderate).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_protective_services#Hist...
The stories of abuse and neglect were hair raising, and our kids had their own fair share before they came to us.
CPS exists as an alternative to cops doing this kind of work. When done right, they are compassionate and understand how to deal with kids in a variety of sm high stress situations. They do evaluations. They take kids out of homes safely. They do transport to foster care or elsewhere. They evaluate potential adoptive families.
When all done right. We know some fabulous workers doing incredibly hard work here.
We also know it’s easy to abuse the system, and they could use a lot more checks and balances.
But they definitely cause a lot of harm, and it shouldn't be a secret that foster homes are the most dangerous homes for kids.
Here is some statistics and links to more:
Most families are good to their children. Foster homes only get the worst: most kids never go to a foster home. That means kids that are harder than normal to care for and thus their parents are also also going to get frustrated (in fact they often have: many kids in foster homes the parents just need a break), and in turn means the foster parents will face the situations where they are more likely to lose their temper in a bad way - but the real parents have likely done the same. There are also kids who are abused by their parents, and that abuse is likely to make those kids worse than normal kids.
As a parent I can assure you that taking care of normal kids is hard. I know other foster parents: enough to know that foster kids are even harder. Most foster parents are doing the best they can, but the job is a lot harder than normal kids.
24/7 surveillance of children is an unreasonable expectation. Yet if there is any lapse observed, no matter how minor, it's an investigative offense. There is little understanding for parents. Not many people are parents these days, and if they are frequently they only have experience with one or two children in a world where every child can be quite different.
When CFS shows up, you are mostly at the mercy of the org. I've called attorneys and they kind of throw their hands up with a "not much they can do attitude". There isn't much due process except what exists internally to the org. When they make mistakes there is effectively no recourse except going public and shaming them in the media - which is not generally effective BTW.
Which brings is to harm. Removing a child from a home can be life altering dramatic. Yet they can do it without judicial oversight. The places they put them aren't guaranteed to be superior. Even if a child experiences some abuse they may also experience love in a home. Foster homes are also actually more likely to be places of abuse - https://www.focusforhealth.org/sex-abuse-and-the-foster-care...
So the metaphor that comes to mind is you are potentially removing a child from a pan, maybe not even a hot pan, and likely throwing them into a fire. To make that step you had better make 100% certain in triplicate that you are correct. And that bar is not met by the current system.
I'm not really sure how to convey a lifetime of experience as a parent and personal dealings DCFS and what is and isn't good for children. Children are, nearly universally, better off with their actual parents if those parents want them. Even when those parents demonstrate pretty egregious failings. Unless there is really solid proof of physical danger to their life directly from the parents or sexual abuse, it should be hands off.
The foster system just isn't good enough to justify anything else.
> Society tends to observe almost any mistake of parents as reasons to remove children.
This really varies from location to location (and definitely varies based on race/ethnicity and culture of parents). Where I am there is such a shortage of foster-homes that they really push for in-home services over removing the child.
The only near-universal thing that will get a child removed is if the child themselves directly report physical abuse.
> Which brings is to harm. Removing a child from a home can be life altering dramatic.
Agreed; if the child wasn't traumatized before being removed from their home, they definitely are afterwards.
> Even if a child experiences some abuse they may also experience love in a home.
In my experience neglect is actually far worse for the child than physical abuse (though it's not like abuse is sunshine and rainbows). Each child is different, but given a child who was beaten for minor infractions and a child who was often left strapped in a car-seat for an entire day with a sippy-cup and a box of cereal, I'd wager on the latter having more issues.
Sexual abuse has its own, separate set of issues that this margin is too narrow to contain...
Let me distinguish CFS desires from society. I've lived in well to do areas to poor areas to relatively lawless areas in the United States. In all of them, with some variance (rich are the worst), you will get reported for the smallest of infractions.
A few of my personal least favorites. Feeding your child goat milk (I kid you not). For a 2 year old toddler who dislikes clothes stripping while outside while parents chase them down. For having a child home during school hours, like ever. Letting a sleeping child sit in a car's car seat for 30 seconds to go back into a building/house for a small item.
Just the tiniest of perceived infractions and it's a report.
Then there are the falsified revenge-reports. Gas company did bad work and they had to come out and fix it, revenge report an unsuitable state of the house. Neighbors don't like xxx... Etc...
CFS doesn't care about all of this. Sometimes they do some of it. But this is often what kind of stuff is in their dossiers.
> In my experience neglect is actually far worse for the child than physical abuse
I generally agree here. And parents are far more likely to shove a phone or tablet at their kids than spend a few hours listening to them and their joys and concerns. You just can't fix this with an outside agency.
A few days ago, CPS had to get involved because somehow an eight year old ended up in the middle of a highway. Cops showed up first and shut down the highway to safely extract the kid. CPS got to bring the kid back to the parents.
People abuse kids all the time.
Cops over here receive specific psychological training and profiling to deal with all kinds of different people.
Listen to the police scanner sometime. It is mostly boring.
"Dispatch, my arrestee just swallowed a bag of cocaine. Moving to meet EMS" is about as exciting things get.
We need plumbers
but having no consequences means they CAN retaliate the same way
A few days later we get a knock on the door from our state’s version of DCF. Someone had complained that they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom. After an interview the state worker said it sounded like retaliation for our son and his team doing so well, and all but hinted it was an opposing team’s parent who called in the complaint. Sadly the law says they have to investigate every complaint, no matter how trivial, so we had to go through a couple interviews and they apparently interviewed others as well.
Just annoying for us, but other workers have told us about horror stories (our kids are adopted and we got to know that arm of the agency well).
Obviously these agencies are vital, but they need well balanced laws and regulations and some common sense injected into them so stupid complaints don’t end up sucking up resources and potentially disrupting lives for nothing.