Professors Sarah A. Font and Emily Putnam-Hornstein’s op-ed (“Children are being harmed by Illinois’ tepid response to abuse and neglect,” April 23) turns a legitimate concern — child fatalities — into a false policy choice between prevention and removal of children from their home.
Every day, in every community across Illinois, front-line child welfare professionals are providing critical help to families with young children.
They’re providing them with a vast array of support — everything from mental health counseling to food assistance and emergency child care. I know this because I’m the CEO of Brightpoint, a statewide organization that has served children and families for more than 143 years.
Severe child maltreatment is not reducible to a single cause, and serious child welfare policy cannot be reduced to a single response. Many of the underlying causes — including substance use, domestic violence, mental illness, chronic stress, poverty and social interaction — are often intertwined. In the case of some families, an immediate removal is necessary; other families need earlier stabilizing support. Still others require both, at different points in time.
That is why the most horrific cases should be handled with care in public argument. They demand scrutiny but not overgeneralization. Font and Putnam-Hornstein offer no evidence that the tragedies they cite reflect a broader rise in danger caused by prevention-oriented policy.
Here’s the data-backed truth: We can keep children safe and provide families with early support to prevent abuse and neglect. We can fund prevention and help children who are unsafe in their own homes.
We’re doing both in Illinois, and it’s working.
• From 2020 to 2024 (the most recent data available), the number of child fatalities in Illinois decreased by more than 35%.
• During the same period, the total number of child maltreatment victims decreased by more than 10%.
• And the total number of children in foster care dropped 10%.
To be clear, there is no acceptable number of child fatalities or child maltreatment cases. But these are encouraging data points supporting policy and programs — such as home visiting, Head Start and crisis nurseries — that help keep families together and children safe.
Child welfare makes advancements when we are willing to test what we do not fully understand with discipline and humility and then build policy accordingly. We need more disciplined policy thinking equal to the seriousness of the challenge.
Researchers and academics should be raising the level of the policy debate, not flattening it.
— Mike Shaver, president and CEO, Brightpoint, Chicago
Professors, seek more perspective
The focus of the professors’ op-ed is that child maltreatment has not changed. I wholeheartedly agree; it is a chronic, terrible and sometimes deadly problem.
Yet, these authors and their peers such as Naomi Schaefer Riley continually shrink this extraordinarily complex problem to outcomes only — framing broken families in deeply dark narratives of horror, highlighting failures and demanding accountability.
It is time to shift how we perceive the problem.
Prevent Child Abuse America, Children’s Trust Fund Alliance and the National Family Support Network are other voices in the conversation examining how social conditions correlate to child maltreatment. There are several national philanthropic agencies, trusted by our American government, pursuing collaborative efforts to help children, families and the systems serving them. These organizations also acknowledge children should be safe in their homes.
When the professors talk about families refusing services, they indicate those services are just (and only) what parents need and that the families’ flat refusal makes subsequent child abuse shockingly intentional. Are those the exact services a family needs and can rely on to avoid tragedy?
Chronic social conditions that impede parents’ “capacity to provide safe and appropriate care indefinitely” were not created by them.
There are more stories than the meticulously curated horrible ones cited by the professors and their peers. There are stories abounding in hope, growth, and strength, from people with lived experiences. Their perspectives rarely are given sufficient amplification.
Stories are the best way to gain the perspectives of others. Sit with people without titles, perceived influence and clout and talk about problems and solutions together. It is time to abandon the “your problem, our solution” framework. Be Strong Families can help the professors put down the gauntlet and join the conversation.
No single person or family, agency or department can change conditions. It takes a multisector approach, not a siloed one.
Making something great is easier and more meaningful when we build it together.
— Tecoria Jones, secretary of the board, Be Strong Families, Chicago
Support, not separation, is needed
If you were to talk about the child welfare system, would it be an anecdote about your adventurous and accident-prone toddler or a story of shame, fear and anxiety?
If you know anything about the history of the child welfare system, often referred to as the family regulation system, you understand that the way you experience and talk about the system correlates to a very high degree with your race and income level. The family regulation system impacts more than half of Black children over the course of their lifetime, with each intervention carrying the risk of an indication for abuse or neglect or worse — separation from your children.
If these investigations and interventions solely were focused on rooting out physical abuse, few people would dispute their necessity — and as an anti-violence organization, we fully support targeted efforts to prevent abuse. Unfortunately, the system’s net has expanded well beyond those targeted efforts, sweeping up cases of children playing outside, accidental injuries that are promptly reported and treated, housing instability stemming from poverty, and survivors of domestic violence who are investigated as wrongdoers and punished for seeking help. In these cases — which, framed as neglect, make up the vast majority of family regulation investigations — the impact of the intervention is almost always more harmful than the alleged conduct, and the impacts fall disproportionately on Black mothers.
Moreover, the sheer volume of these cases distracts from cases in which serious abuse is alleged, making it harder to focus on and serve kids who may be in real peril.
Until you’ve spoken to parents whose lives were upended by an investigation, it’s easy to imagine a system that whisks children out of harm’s way and delivers them to a better, safer life. While most of the people who work in the system really do want to help families, research shows that except in very rare circumstances, children have better outcomes with family members than in foster care.
So, despite professors Sarah A. Font and Emily Putnam-Hornstein’s call for more family separations, we’ll continue to advocate for responses that support Illinois families: legal representation for impacted parents and caregivers, domestic violence advocates partnering with Department of Children and Family Services investigators to serve survivors, and systems that support, rather than separate, families.
— Margaret Duval, executive director, Ascend Justice, Chicago
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