A CPS Investigator’s 21-Year Journey
Beyond the Report: A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Child Protective Services, the Courts, and the Road to Reunification
Copyright © 2026 Tarsha Stewart. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-963789-01-0
No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Disclaimer. This book is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It is not legal advice, legal representation, or an official policy manual, and it does not create any professional relationship. Child welfare laws, regulations, and procedures vary by state and jurisdiction and change over time. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed attorney. All case examples in this book are composites, assembled from patterns observed over the author’s career with all identifying details removed or invented; any resemblance to a specific child, parent, or family is unintended. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent any agency.
First edition · 2026 · Las Vegas, Nevada [ Publisher / imprint ] · [ author website / contact ]
This book is dedicated to all children who have come to the attention of Child Protective Services.
May every child be safe, protected, loved, and given the opportunity to thrive regardless of the circumstances that brought CPS into their lives.
It is also dedicated to the children who have experienced removal from their parents and caregivers. My hope is that each child finds peace, healing, stability, and the opportunity to become a healthy and productive adult.
To the many children I have personally encountered throughout my career, thank you for allowing me to be a small part of your journey. My hope is that the interactions we shared contributed in some way to your safety, growth, resilience, and future success.
This book is also dedicated to my fellow Child Protective Services professionals.
To the investigators, caseworkers, supervisors, support staff, and administrators who dedicate countless hours serving children and families, often at the expense of their own personal time and emotional well-being, thank you.
This work is not easy. It requires strength, compassion, resilience, and sacrifice.
May you continue to find healthy ways to care for yourselves while caring for others, and may you never forget the importance of your own family and support systems.
Children come into this world as blank slates. They do not get to choose their parents… They simply arrive. And every child deserves the opportunity to grow up feeling safe, valued, protected, and loved.
— Tarsha Stewart
Tarsha! When I hear that name walking into work or even working overtime and notice that she is also present, it uplifts my spirit because I know how supportive she is. Tarsha is what I’d describe as the definition of committed. Before I completed the academy I would hear her name used in scenarios because she has so much experience and keeps going. I’ve always heard good feedback from others she had trained and used to ask myself when would it be my turn. I was unsure of how we’d work together as I know it takes patience to help someone who’s just getting their feet wet. One day I remember asking a question and not only did she guide me, she pulled up a chair sat beside me and showed me how to navigate. Then she comes back to check on you. Her care for children and their safety is unmatched. She always has a plan of help for kids and their families. She steps in and helps coworkers follow up on things because her number one priority is child safety so she wants to spread awareness. Needless to say, Tarsha has changed many people’s perspectives of Child Protective Services seeing someone so locked in and take pride in what they do is motivating to others and I hope she knows that.
Thank you,
Shi Lindsey
The attention this work demands did not begin with me. It is an inheritance, and before you read what follows I want to tell you where it comes from.
My father, Philip Laurence Handy Sr., was a Black man born in segregated Jennings, Louisiana, in 1943. He went from a town that told him what he could not be to the floor of McDonnell Douglas, where he helped build the S-IVB — the third stage of the Saturn V, the rocket that carried Apollo to the Moon.1 When the world watched men walk on the Moon, nearly a quarter of a million miles from home, they were riding on hardware that men like my father built to a tolerance that left no room for error. One careless weld, one number wrong, and astronauts die. He worked in a place where “good enough” did not exist.
My mother, Annie Mae Charles Handy, was his high-school sweetheart from Roanoke, Louisiana. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in one of the earliest civil-rights marches in the state — at a time and in a place where marching could cost a person everything. Where my father carried precision, my mother carried conscience: the refusal to look away from the people the world had decided not to see.
I am their daughter, and if you read this book closely you will find both of them in it.
You will find my father’s precision in how I assess a family — the engineer’s discipline that refuses to mistake a feeling for a fact, that checks and re-checks before a child’s life is moved, because being wrong in this work costs a child everything. And you will find my mother’s conscience on every page where I insist on seeing the parent the system was ready to dismiss, where I refuse to confuse poverty with neglect, where I name the system’s own failures out loud so the children inside it can be treated fairly.
Twenty-one years. Thousands of families. Countless children whose worst day I sat down in the middle of, and whose safety I had to weigh with no margin for error and no telemetry to check my work — only training, attentiveness, and conscience. That is the rigor my father built into rockets and my mother marched into the streets, carried into the one charge more precious than any spacecraft: a child.
My father helped send men to the Moon. My mother helped bend this country toward justice. I have spent my life trying to make sure children are safe. Three generations, one through-line: attention paid, with everything on the line, to lives that depend on someone getting it exactly right.
Tarsha Stewart is a veteran child welfare professional with more than two decades of frontline experience protecting children and supporting families in Las Vegas, Nevada. She currently serves as a Child Protective Services Investigator with the Clark County Department of Family Services.
Tarsha holds an Associate of Arts Degree in Liberal Studies, a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Master of Arts Degree in Education from Pepperdine University.
Before entering child welfare, she worked as an educator and youth development professional. She taught in the Pasadena Unified School District and later worked in the private education sector in Las Vegas. She also worked with the Boys & Girls Club before beginning her career with the Department of Family Services.
Tarsha began her child welfare career as a Child Development Specialist at Child Haven, where she cared for children who had entered protective custody. She later worked as a Transition Specialist, helping children successfully transition from Child Haven into foster homes and supporting both the children and the foster families during that process.
When the Transition Unit ended, she chose to enter Child Protective Services, where she has spent the last fifteen years as an investigator. Over more than twenty-one years in child welfare, she has worked with thousands of families, assessed the safety of countless children, testified in court, and collaborated with law enforcement, medical providers, educators, therapists, and the judicial system to protect children and preserve families whenever it is safely possible.
Her work is grounded in a single conviction: that the purpose of child protection is not punishment, but safety — and that, with the right support, families can change, heal, and remain together.
A devoted mother and a lifelong advocate for children, Tarsha has dedicated her career to child safety, family preservation, and helping families overcome challenges while ensuring children remain protected. Beyond the Report is her first book, drawn from more than twenty years of walking with families through the hardest moments of their lives.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Child Protective Services is that CPS workers get paid to remove children.
That is not true.
Another misconception is that CPS workers do not care about families, do not have feelings, or arrive at a family’s home with the intention of removing children.
That is also not true.
Throughout my career, I have met countless parents who were terrified when CPS knocked on their door. Many were afraid because of stories they had heard from others, experiences of family members, or misconceptions about what CPS does.
The purpose of this book is to explain the Child Protective Services process from the perspective of an investigator.
My goal is to help parents understand why CPS becomes involved, what investigators are looking for, how safety decisions are made, and what families can expect during an investigation.
Most importantly, I want parents to understand that the primary goal of CPS is child safety and, whenever safely possible, keeping families together.
When people hear that I have spent more than twenty years in child protection, they often assume this book is only for families who are “in trouble.” It is not.
Some of you are reading this because an investigator is standing in your living room right now, and your hands are shaking. I wrote this for you.
But some of you have never met a CPS worker, and I hope you never do. Maybe you are raising your children with a partner. Maybe you are doing it alone. Maybe you and your child’s other parent live in separate homes and are learning to share the most important job either of you will ever have. Maybe you are a grandmother raising grandchildren you did not expect to raise, a stepparent finding your place in a child’s life, or a foster or adoptive parent loving a child whose first chapters you did not write. I wrote this for you, too.
Because the heart of this book is not “how to survive an investigation.” It is something every caregiver can use: how to tell the difference between a problem and a danger, how to recognize what a child truly needs, and how to build the kind of protective home where a crisis never has to begin. The parents who never get a knock at the door are very often the parents who learned, somewhere along the way, exactly what this book is about.
So wherever you are sitting as you read this — frightened, or simply curious, or quietly making sure you are doing right by a child you love — you are in the right place.
Before this book begins, I want to be honest with you about where it comes from, what it can offer, and what it cannot.
This book is written from one chair in a very large room.
I am a Child Protective Services Investigator. For more than twenty years, I have sat across from parents on the worst days of their lives, knelt down to talk with frightened children, walked through homes, read records, written reports, and testified in court. That vantage point lets me see things many people never see. It also has its limits. I see families at a moment of crisis, not across the whole arc of their lives. I see the system from the inside, where its intentions are clearest and its blind spots are hardest to notice.
I have tried throughout this book to be faithful to both — to what the work looks like from my chair, and to what it looks like from the chairs across from me.
On confidentiality. Every family I have ever worked with is protected by law and by conscience. For that reason, this book contains no real cases. Every example, scenario, and illustration in these pages is a composite — a blend of patterns I have seen many times, with all identifying details removed or invented. Any resemblance to a specific child, parent, or family is unintended. The situations are true to life. The people in them are not real individuals.
On evidence. Much of what I share comes from experience. But experience is not the only teacher, and a reader deserves to know where the ideas come from. Where this book draws on established frameworks — the stages of behavioral change, the assessment of present and impending danger, the research on childhood adversity and trauma, and the laws that govern child welfare — I have noted those sources so you can read further and judge for yourself. A list of references and recommended reading appears at the end of the book.
On epistemology — the kind of knowing this book offers. It is worth being precise about what a practitioner’s account can and cannot claim. Much of what an experienced investigator knows is tacit knowledge in Polanyi’s sense (1966) — the trained intuition that Schön (1983) called the reflective practitioner’s “knowing-in-action.” That knowledge is real, and it is hard-won, but it is also situated: it is the view from one chair, in one county, over one career, and it carries the partiality that standpoint theorists (Harding; Collins) remind us all knowledge carries. A single practitioner’s testimony is, in research terms, an n of one. For that reason, this book treats experience as a hypothesis-generator rather than as proof, and triangulates it against the empirical literature at every turn. Where the two converge, I write with confidence. Where my intuition runs ahead of the evidence, I have tried to say so. Readers should weigh the claims accordingly, and the back matter — including a survey of where scholars disagree — is offered in that spirit.
On perspective. I believe deeply in the protective purpose of this work. I have also come to believe that loving this work means being willing to tell the truth about it, including the parts that are uncomfortable. You will find, especially in the later chapters, that I do not shy away from the system’s hardest questions — questions about race, poverty, and the real costs of intervention. I raise them not to tear the work down, but because the children at the center of it deserve a system honest enough to keep getting better.
This book is one investigator’s attempt to explain a misunderstood process, to ease the fear of parents who find themselves caught in it, and to hold the work I love to the standard the children in it deserve.
That is the perspective from which everything that follows is written.
This book was written for more than one reader, and you may use it in more than one way.
If you are a parent facing a CPS investigation right now, you do not have to read this book in order. Start with the chapter that matches your situation. Chapter 1 explains what is happening when CPS first makes contact. Chapter 9 explains the court process. Chapter 10 explains how change is measured. A glossary at the back defines the terms you will hear. Read what you need, when you need it. You are not behind. You are not alone.
If you are a student or a professional — in social work, education, law, medicine, foster care, or a child-welfare academy — the chapters build a full picture of how safety is assessed, how the court process unfolds, and how families change. The later chapters take up the field’s hardest questions about race, poverty, and reform. Discussion and study questions for each chapter appear in the appendices, along with a list of references for going deeper.
If you are a caregiver who simply wants to do this well — a parent, a co-parent, a stepparent, a grandparent, a foster or adoptive parent — read Chapters 2 through 8 as a quiet self-check. They are the same things I look for when I assess a family, written so that you can look for them in your own home before anyone else ever has to. Chapter 2 (the difference between a good parent and a safe parent), Chapter 6 (the difference between a problem and a danger), and Chapter 8 (building protective capacity) are the ones caregivers most often tell me they wish they had read sooner.
If you are a reader who simply wants to understand a system that touches millions of families, read straight through. The book moves from the knock at the door, through the assessment and the courtroom, to an honest reckoning with what the system gets wrong and where it must go next.
However you read it, hold on to one idea: this is a book about safety, but it is also a book about families, and about the belief that — with honesty, humility, and the right support — most families can heal.
Foreword
Where I Come From About the Author Why I Wrote This Book A Book for Every Family A Note on Method, Confidentiality, and Perspective How to Use This Book Introduction: Situating This Book in the Field
PART I — When CPS Comes 1. The Day CPS Knocked on Your Door 2. Good Parent vs. Safe Parent
PART II — What CPS Assesses 3. Adult Functioning: The Foundation of Child Safety 4. Parenting Functioning: Understanding Your Child’s Needs 5. Child Functioning: Understanding the Child Behind the Case 6. Understanding Present Danger and Impending Danger 7. Domestic Violence, Substance Abuse, and Mental Health 8. Safety Planning and Protective Capacities
PART III — The Court Process and the Road Home 9. Court, Removal, Reunification, and Case Plans 10. The Stages of Change
PART IV — Reflections and the Road Ahead 11. The Harder Truths 12. Toward a Safer, More Just System
A Message of Hope Through Their Eyes
Appendix A — Child Welfare by the Numbers Appendix B — Glossary of Key Terms Appendix C — Discussion and Study Questions Appendix D — Your Rights and Responsibilities as a Parent Appendix E — The Nevada Process at a Glance Appendix F — The State of the Evidence Appendix G — A Research Agenda Notes on Sources References and Further Reading Acknowledgments A Note on the Next Book
Lay readers may proceed directly to Chapter 1. This introduction is written for students, researchers, and practitioners who want to understand where this book sits within the scholarship on child welfare — its argument, its theoretical commitments, and its relationship to the existing literature.
This book makes a claim that is, on its surface, simple: that the central question of child protection is not whether a parent is good, but whether a child is safe — and that, properly understood, child safety and family integrity are far more often allies than adversaries. From that claim follows a larger argument that the book develops across its chapters and states plainly in its later ones: that a child-welfare system organized primarily around investigation and removal is less effective at producing child safety than one organized around the conditions that make families safe in the first place.
This is not a neutral description of the system. It is an argument about it, advanced from inside it, and tested throughout against the empirical record.
The field of child welfare has, for more than a century, oscillated between two imperatives that are often framed as opposites: protecting children from harm, and preserving the integrity of families. Histories of the field (Lindsey, 2004; Myers, 2006) trace a pendulum — from the “child-saving” movement of the nineteenth century, through the rediscovery of “battered child syndrome” (Kempe et al., 1962), to the family-preservation reforms of the 1980s, to the safety-and-permanency emphasis codified in the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, to the prevention turn of the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018.
This book takes the position that the framing of safety versus family is largely a false binary. The weight of the evidence — reviewed in the chapters that follow and synthesized in the back matter — suggests that the conditions that protect children (economic stability, treatment, social support, competent caregiving) are precisely the conditions that keep families together. The opposition is real only at the margins, in the comparatively small number of cases involving severe, intractable danger. For the majority — disproportionately cases of neglect entangled with poverty — the opposition dissolves.
The book is grounded, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly, in four overlapping frameworks.
An ecological-developmental framework. Following Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory and its application to maltreatment by Belsky (1980, 1993) and Garbarino, the book treats child safety as a product of nested, interacting systems — the child, the family, the community, and the broader social and economic context — rather than as a property of individual parental deficit. A parent’s behavior is read in context, not in isolation.
The family-stress and social-determinants model. Drawing on the family-stress tradition (Conger et al.), the book understands much of what the system labels “neglect” as the downstream product of material hardship and chronic stress. This is the lineage of Pelton’s (1989, 2015) “poverty hypothesis” — the long-documented observation that poverty is the single most powerful correlate of child-welfare involvement.
A developmental-trauma framework. The book takes seriously the evidence, beginning with the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (Felitti, Anda, et al., 1998), that early adversity has durable developmental and health consequences — including, critically, the adversity of removal itself.
A structural and critical framework. Finally, the book engages — without wholly adopting — the structural critique associated most prominently with Roberts (2002, 2022) and the empirical literature on racial disproportionality, which insists that the system’s burdens fall unequally and that this inequality is not incidental to how the system works.
The book’s distinctive contribution is not a new dataset; it is a synthesis. It places the tacit, experiential knowledge of a long-serving investigator (Polanyi, 1966; Schön, 1983) in deliberate dialogue with the empirical and theoretical literature, and asks where the two converge and where they strain against each other. Its claim to authority is therefore dual: the situated knowledge of the practitioner, and the corroborating weight of the research. Where the two agree — as they largely do on the dominance of neglect, the costs of removal, and the protective power of economic support — the argument is strong. Where practitioner intuition outruns the evidence, the book says so.
This standpoint has both warrant and limits, which the next section — the note on method and epistemology — makes explicit.
This is a crossover work. It is written to be read by a frightened parent at a kitchen table and to be cited by a graduate student in a seminar. Those are different readers with different needs, and the book serves them in different registers: the chapters are accessible and narrative; the introduction, the methodological note, and the back matter are scholarly. Readers should take what they need. The argument is the same in both registers, because a claim that cannot survive translation into plain language is usually a claim that has not yet been clearly thought.
The knock at the door — and the difference between a good parent and a safe one.
What is really happening when a CPS investigator shows up at my door — and what should I do?
For most parents, the day Child Protective Services arrives is a day they never expected and never forget.
♥ For parents. Stay as calm as you can. Ask for the investigator’s name and contact information. You may consult an attorney at any time. Cooperating with the assessment is not an admission of guilt — it is how the truth comes out.
There is a knock at the door.
A stranger introduces themselves, shows identification, and explains that the agency has received a report regarding the safety of the children.
In that moment, many parents feel fear, anger, confusion, and panic all at once.
Some parents immediately become defensive.
Some become emotional.
Some refuse to open the door.
Others stand frozen, unsure of what is happening or why.
These reactions are completely normal. No parent wants to be told that someone is concerned about their children. No parent wants a stranger walking through their home asking personal questions.
I have knocked on hundreds of doors throughout my career.
I have met parents on the worst day of their lives.
And one thing I have learned is this: the way an investigation begins is almost never the way parents imagine it will.
Many parents assume that CPS shows up because the agency has already decided they did something wrong.
That is not how it works.
Before an investigator ever knocks on a door, someone made a report.
Reports come to the agency in many ways. They may come from teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists, school counselors, law enforcement officers, daycare providers, or other professionals who are required by law to report concerns. These individuals are known as mandated reporters.
Reports may also come from family members, neighbors, friends, or even anonymous callers.
Some reports are made out of genuine concern.
Some are made out of misunderstanding.
And unfortunately, some are made out of anger, retaliation, or a desire to cause problems for the family.
When a report is received, the agency does not automatically know whether it is true, exaggerated, misunderstood, or completely false.
That is exactly why an investigation takes place.
One of the first things many parents ask is, “Who called CPS on me?”
It is a natural question.
However, the identity of the person who made the report is confidential.
This confidentiality exists to protect reporters so that people who are genuinely worried about a child feel safe coming forward. If reporters feared retaliation, many concerns would go unreported, and children who truly need help might never be identified.
I understand that this is frustrating for parents.
But the focus of the investigation is never on who made the report.
The focus is on whether the children are safe.
When CPS responds to a report, the investigator has specific responsibilities.
The investigator generally needs to:
See and speak with the child or children. Observe the home environment. Interview the parents and caregivers. Assess any immediate safety concerns. Gather information related to the allegations.
Parents are often surprised that the investigator wants to see the children alone or wants to look in the refrigerator, the bedrooms, or the home in general.
This is not done to embarrass anyone.
Children are seen and interviewed privately because children sometimes act differently or answer differently when a parent is standing beside them. Speaking with a child alone, in a manner appropriate for their age, allows the investigator to better understand the child’s experience.
The home is observed because the agency must assess whether the living conditions are safe.
The questions are asked because the investigator needs accurate information to make a fair assessment.
None of these steps are about assuming guilt.
They are about gathering facts.
This is one of the most important things I want parents to understand.
An investigator is not a judge.
An investigator is not there to prove a parent guilty.
An investigator is there to assess.
Throughout the investigation, we gather information from many sources, compare what we learn, and try to understand what is actually happening within the family. Sometimes the report is accurate. Sometimes parts of it are true and other parts are not. Sometimes the report is completely unfounded.
We do not decide the outcome before we arrive.
We determine the outcome based on what we learn.
I have seen parents respond to that first visit in every way imaginable.
While every situation is different, there are things that consistently help parents during an investigation.
It helps to stay as calm as possible, even when it is difficult.
It helps to ask questions and to ask for the investigator’s name and contact information.
It helps to listen to the concerns being shared rather than focusing only on who made the report.
It helps to be honest.
And it helps to remember that cooperation does not mean admitting guilt. Cooperation simply allows the assessment to move forward so that the truth can be determined.
Parents have rights, and parents are allowed to ask questions throughout the process. CPS workers cannot provide legal advice, but parents are always free to seek the guidance of an attorney if they choose.
The first visit is not the end of anything.
It is the beginning of an assessment.
And understanding what the agency is actually trying to determine can make that assessment far less frightening.
One of the biggest misunderstandings about Child Protective Services is that parents often believe the agency already knows they did something wrong before the investigator arrives.
That is not true.
When a report comes into the agency, CPS receives information from a caller who believes a child may be experiencing abuse, neglect, or safety concerns. At the time the report is received, CPS does not know whether the information is true, partially true, misunderstood, exaggerated, or completely false.
That is why an investigation is opened.
The purpose of the investigation is to gather information and determine whether the concerns reported to the agency are occurring and whether they are affecting child safety.
The investigator’s job is not to prove a parent guilty.
The investigator’s job is to assess.
We gather information from multiple sources, including:
The child or children. Parents and caregivers. Teachers and school personnel. Medical providers. Therapists. Family members. Law enforcement. Other collateral contacts.
Every piece of information is like a puzzle piece.
As investigators, we are trying to put those puzzle pieces together to determine whether the report is accurate and whether the child is safe.
Sometimes a report is found to be true.
Sometimes parts of the report are true and other parts are not.
Sometimes the report is completely unfounded.
The assessment process allows CPS to determine what is actually happening within the family.
Throughout the investigation, CPS is attempting to answer several important questions:
Is the child safe? Are there present danger threats? Are there impending danger threats? Does the parent have sufficient protective capacities? What are the strengths of the family? What services, if any, are needed? Can the child safely remain in the home?
The goal is not to remove children.
The goal is to determine whether children are safe and, when concerns exist, identify what needs to occur to create or maintain safety.
At the end of every investigation, CPS must reach a conclusion based on the information gathered, not on assumptions, rumors, or allegations alone.
That is why investigators spend so much time interviewing people, reviewing records, observing interactions, and gathering information.
The purpose is simple:
To determine whether the concerns reported to the agency are true and whether the child is safe.
Can a loving, devoted, genuinely good parent still be — at this moment — an unsafe one?
One of the hardest conversations I have with parents is helping them understand the difference between being a good parent and being a safe parent.
▸ Key term — Protective capacity. The behavioral, cognitive, and emotional strengths that allow a caregiver to recognize danger and take action to protect a child. Love is necessary but not sufficient; protective capacity is what keeps a child safe.
Most parents love their children deeply.
Most parents want what is best for their children.
Most parents would tell you, without hesitation, that they are good parents.
And in many ways, they may be right.
But love alone does not always equal safety.
This is one of the most misunderstood concepts in child welfare, and it is one of the most important.
When CPS becomes involved, parents often focus on a single message:
“I am a good parent.”
“I love my children.”
“I would do anything for them.”
While those statements may absolutely be true, they answer a different question than the one the agency is asking.
A parent may be loving, hardworking, devoted, and well-intentioned and still, at a particular moment in time, be unable to keep a child safe.
A good parent is someone who loves their child, provides for their child, and wants the best for their child.
A safe parent is someone who can recognize danger, take action to protect their child, and ensure the child is shielded from serious harm.
Ideally, a parent is both.
But the two are not the same.
CPS is not in the business of measuring love.
CPS is in the business of assessing safety.
Consider a parent who adores their children but is struggling with an addiction they cannot control.
Consider a parent who would never intentionally hurt their child but repeatedly returns to a violent relationship.
Consider a parent who loves their child but leaves that child with an unsafe caregiver because they have no other options.
In each of these situations, love is present.
But safety may not be.
The agency’s role is not to decide whether these parents are good people.
The agency’s role is to determine whether the children are safe and, when they are not, to identify what needs to change so that safety can be restored.
This is why an investigator will sometimes acknowledge that a parent clearly loves their child and, in the very same conversation, identify a serious safety concern.
Those two things can be true at the same time.
I want to be very clear about something.
CPS is not looking for perfect parents.
Perfect parents do not exist.
Every parent makes mistakes. Every parent has bad days. Every family experiences stress, hardship, and difficulty.
The question is never whether a parent is flawless.
The question is whether a parent can recognize a problem, take action, seek help when needed, and protect their child from serious harm despite life’s challenges.
That ability — the ability to protect — is what separates a good parent from a safe parent.
It is also the foundation of everything CPS assesses.
These protective abilities have a name. We call them protective capacities.
One of the biggest misconceptions about CPS is that once a safety concern is identified, the agency automatically removes children from their parents.
That is not always the case.
The purpose of CPS intervention is to assess safety and determine whether protective capacities exist or can be strengthened to keep children safe within their family whenever possible.
Protective capacities are the actions, decisions, and behaviors parents demonstrate to ensure their children’s safety.
Example: One Parent Protecting While the Other Parent Receives Help
Consider a family in which both parents reside in the home.
During the investigation, the mother tests positive for methamphetamine and discloses ongoing substance use. Prior to the assessment, the father was unaware of the mother’s drug use and had no knowledge that she was using substances while caring for the children.
Once the concern is identified, the father is informed of the safety threat and asked to participate in developing a plan to ensure the children’s safety while the mother receives services.
Rather than immediately removing the children, the assessment focuses on whether sufficient protective capacities exist within the family to manage the danger.
The father develops a plan.
He arranges for daycare services and appropriate childcare while he is at work. He ensures the children are supervised by safe and appropriate caregivers. He makes sure the children are not left alone with the mother while she is actively using substances and until her safety concerns have been addressed.
At the same time, the mother is connected with services designed to address her substance use, including assessments, treatment recommendations, and support services.
In this situation, the father’s actions demonstrate protective capacities. He recognizes the safety concern, takes action to protect the children, follows through with the plan, and prioritizes the children’s safety while the mother works toward recovery.
The focus is not punishment.
The focus is child safety.
Example: Hard Times Do Not Always Mean Unsafe Parenting
Not every CPS case involves abuse, neglect, substance use, or domestic violence.
Sometimes families experience unexpected hardships that temporarily create safety concerns.
For example, a mother living in Las Vegas with her children experiences a medical emergency that causes her to miss several days of work. As a result, her paycheck is significantly reduced, and she falls behind on her utility bill.
During the summer months, temperatures exceed 115 degrees. The family’s electricity is disconnected, leaving the home without air conditioning.
When CPS becomes involved, the concern is not that the mother intentionally failed to provide for her children. The concern is whether the children can safely remain in the home without electricity during extreme heat conditions.
During the assessment, the mother provides documentation of her employment, explains the circumstances that resulted in the missed payment, and demonstrates that this is an isolated incident rather than an ongoing pattern.
The investigator works with the mother to identify immediate solutions.
The mother contacts a family friend who agrees to allow the family to stay temporarily in the home until the utilities are restored. The investigator verifies the arrangement and confirms that the temporary residence is safe and appropriate for the children.
In this example, the mother demonstrated protective capacities by identifying a solution, utilizing her support system, cooperating with the assessment, and taking immediate action to protect her children.
The family experienced a hardship.
The hardship created a safety concern.
But the parent demonstrated the ability and willingness to protect the children.
That distinction matters.
The Difference Between a Problem and a Safety Threat
Every family experiences problems.
Job loss.
Financial hardship.
Relationship difficulties.
Medical emergencies.
Housing concerns.
The existence of a problem does not automatically mean a child is unsafe.
What CPS evaluates is whether the parent has the protective capacities necessary to recognize the problem, take action, seek help when needed, and ensure the child’s safety despite the challenge.
Parents do not have to be perfect.
They do not have to have unlimited resources.
They do not have to have all the answers.
But they must demonstrate the ability and willingness to protect their children from harm.
That is what protective capacities are all about.
One of the questions I ask every parent during an assessment is:
“What discipline techniques do you use when your children are doing something they are not supposed to be doing?”
Another way of asking the same question is:
“How do you change your child’s behavior?”
The answer to that question tells us a great deal about parenting practices, protective capacities, impulse control, and child safety.
What Is Discipline?
Discipline is a method used to teach, guide, redirect, and correct a child’s behavior.
The purpose of discipline is not to hurt a child. The purpose is to help children learn appropriate behavior, understand expectations, and develop self-control.
Effective discipline teaches.
Effective discipline redirects.
Effective discipline helps children make better choices in the future.
What Is Punishment?
Punishment is the consequence that follows a behavior.
Punishment is intended to discourage a behavior from occurring again.
Examples of punishment or consequences may include:
Losing television privileges. Having electronics taken away. Losing access to video games. Having Wi-Fi privileges suspended. Being grounded. Losing access to a vehicle. Missing social activities. Losing sleepover privileges. Being assigned additional chores.
The discipline is the method used to correct behavior.
The punishment is the consequence associated with the behavior.
When Does Discipline Become Abuse?
This is one of the most important questions parents can ask.
Discipline becomes abusive when it causes injury, leaves marks or bruises, creates fear through excessive force, or involves inappropriate instruments or methods.
Parents often tell investigators:
“I was disciplined that way and I turned out fine.”
However, child safety standards have changed over time, and CPS must assess whether discipline practices create a risk of harm to children.
Examples of discipline that may be considered abusive include:
Leaving marks or bruises. Causing injuries. Using excessive force. Using dangerous instruments. Striking vulnerable areas of the body. Repeatedly striking a child while angry or out of control.
When parents lose control of their emotions, discipline often shifts from teaching a lesson to expressing anger.
That is when children are most likely to be injured.
Inappropriate Discipline Instruments
Examples of inappropriate instruments may include:
Extension cords. Hangers. Ropes. Chains. Heated objects. Electrical cords. Paddles designed to cause pain. Other objects capable of causing injury.
The concern is not only the instrument itself but also the potential for significant injury.
Why CPS Asks Detailed Questions About Discipline
When allegations involve physical discipline, investigators ask detailed questions to understand exactly what occurred.
Questions may include:
What happened? What behavior led to the discipline? What instrument was used? Where was the child struck? How many times was the child struck? Did the child sustain any injuries? Were there any marks or bruises? What color were the marks or bruises? How long did they remain visible?
Investigators may also conduct body checks and photograph injuries when appropriate.
The purpose is not to embarrass the child or parent.
The purpose is to accurately assess safety and determine whether the discipline crossed the line into abuse.
Age-Appropriate Consequences
Children of different ages require different forms of discipline.
For infants and toddlers, discipline often involves redirection.
For example:
Removing a dangerous object. Redirecting the child’s attention. Moving the child away from danger. Brief age-appropriate time-outs when developmentally appropriate.
As children grow older, consequences may include:
Loss of privileges. Grounding. Reduced screen time. Additional responsibilities. Temporary restrictions on activities.
The goal is to teach responsibility and decision-making rather than inflict pain.
Why CPS Asks How You Were Disciplined
Investigators often ask parents how they were disciplined as children.
The reason is simple.
Many parents discipline their children the same way they were disciplined.
Some parents continue those practices because they believe they were effective.
Others intentionally choose different methods because they were negatively impacted by the discipline they experienced growing up.
Understanding a parent’s own experiences helps investigators understand how discipline practices developed and whether those practices create safety concerns today.
Discipline Should Teach, Not Harm
Every child requires guidance, structure, and correction.
No child is perfect.
The question is not whether children should be disciplined.
The question is whether the discipline method teaches the child while keeping them safe.
The most effective discipline promotes learning, accountability, and healthy development.
The least effective discipline relies on fear, pain, anger, and injury.
At the end of the day, discipline should help a child grow.
It should never place a child at risk of harm.
Safety, functioning, and danger: how investigators decide whether a child is safe.
How do an adult’s behavior, thinking, and emotions shape a child’s safety?
One of the biggest misconceptions parents have when CPS becomes involved is believing that the investigation is only about the child.
▸ Key term — Adult functioning. How a person manages the responsibilities of adulthood, assessed across three areas: behavioral, cognitive, and emotional functioning.
While the child is always the focus, investigators must also assess the adults responsible for caring for the child.
Why?
Because children depend on adults for safety, supervision, protection, guidance, and care. If an adult is struggling in significant areas of their life, those struggles may impact their ability to safely parent their children.
Adult functioning can generally be viewed through three areas:
Behavioral Functioning Cognitive Functioning Emotional Functioning
When investigators assess adult functioning, they are trying to understand how an adult’s behaviors, thinking, decision-making, and emotional well-being impact child safety.
Behavioral Functioning
Behavioral functioning focuses on what people do.
Investigators assess whether an adult’s behaviors create safety concerns for children.
Questions often include:
Do you have impulse control concerns? Do you engage in substance use? Do you misuse alcohol? Is there a history of domestic violence? Do you have a criminal history? Are there medical conditions affecting your ability to safely parent? Are there patterns of behavior that continue to create safety concerns?
Behavior tells a story.
An investigator is not simply interested in what a parent says. Investigators also look at what a parent does.
For example, a parent may say that their children are their highest priority. However, if that same parent repeatedly drives under the influence, engages in domestic violence, leaves children unsupervised, or continues using substances despite safety concerns, the behavior tells a different story.
Investigators also look at whether adults take action when problems arise.
Do they seek help?
Do they follow through with recommendations?
Do they recognize concerns and attempt to address them?
Or do they remain stuck in patterns that continue to place children at risk?
The ability to recognize a problem and take action is an important protective capacity.
Cognitive Functioning
Cognitive functioning focuses on a person’s ability to think, reason, understand, learn, problem-solve, and make decisions.
Investigators assess whether a parent understands how their choices affect their children.
Questions may include:
Do you understand cause and effect? Do you recognize dangerous situations? Can you identify safety threats? Do you understand your child’s needs? Can you develop and follow a plan to protect your children? Do you make decisions that prioritize child safety?
Cognitive functioning also includes a person’s ability to process information and understand the consequences of their actions.
Some individuals may have developmental delays, intellectual disabilities, learning difficulties, or other cognitive challenges that impact how they understand and respond to situations.
Having a cognitive limitation does not automatically mean someone cannot parent.
The question is whether the individual understands the child’s needs and can make decisions that keep the child safe.
Emotional Functioning
Emotional functioning focuses on how people manage emotions, cope with stress, handle adversity, and maintain stability during difficult situations.
Life is difficult.
Everyone experiences setbacks, disappointments, losses, trauma, and stress.
The question is how those experiences impact a person’s ability to parent.
Investigators often explore:
How do you cope with stress? What do you do when life becomes overwhelming? How do you handle setbacks? What do you do for self-care? Do you have healthy support systems? Are there unresolved issues affecting your daily functioning?
Many parents spend so much time caring for their children that they forget to care for themselves.
Unfortunately, when emotional needs go unaddressed for long periods of time, those struggles can eventually impact parenting.
Some individuals turn to drugs or alcohol to cope with stress, trauma, depression, anxiety, or other emotional challenges.
Others isolate themselves, become overwhelmed, or struggle to manage daily responsibilities.
Investigators are not looking for perfect emotional health.
They are looking for a parent’s ability to recognize challenges, seek help when needed, and continue functioning in a way that keeps children safe.
Mental Health and Adult Functioning
Mental health is an important part of adult functioning.
A diagnosis alone does not make someone an unsafe parent.
Many individuals successfully parent while managing conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or schizophrenia.
The concern arises when symptoms are untreated, unmanaged, or significantly impair a person’s ability to safely care for their children.
Investigators may ask:
Have you been diagnosed with a mental health condition? Are you currently receiving treatment? Do you take prescribed medications? Do you recognize when your symptoms are worsening? What steps do you take when you need help?
The focus is not the diagnosis itself.
The focus is how the condition affects parenting and child safety.
Looking for the Root Cause
One of the most important parts of assessing adult functioning is identifying the underlying issue.
Sometimes the behavior that brings CPS to the home is not the actual problem.
For example, a parent may be using drugs.
The drug use is the behavior that is visible.
However, the underlying issue may be untreated trauma, depression, anxiety, grief, domestic violence, or another mental health concern that has never been properly addressed.
When investigators identify the underlying issue, families can be connected with services that address the root cause rather than simply treating the symptom.
Adult Functioning and Child Safety
Adult functioning is like a puzzle.
Behavioral functioning, cognitive functioning, and emotional functioning all fit together.
Some parents may function well as adults but struggle with parenting.
Others may be loving parents but struggle with substance use, mental health concerns, or domestic violence.
The goal of the assessment is to understand the whole person and how their functioning impacts the safety and well-being of their children.
At the end of the day, CPS is not evaluating whether a parent is perfect.
The agency is evaluating whether the adult has the capacity to consistently protect, supervise, and care for their children in a safe manner.
Because when adult functioning is impaired, child safety is often impacted as well.
One of the things CPS assesses when evaluating adult functioning is whether an individual takes action.
Taking action is an adult protective capacity. It reflects a person’s ability to independently identify needs, make decisions, follow through, and handle responsibilities in their daily life.
This assessment is not focused on parenting. It is focused on how the person functions as an adult.
Questions investigators may consider include:
Does the person maintain employment? Does the person keep medical appointments? Does the person seek assistance when needed? Does the person maintain their home? Does the person pay bills and manage responsibilities? Does the person utilize available resources? Does the person have support systems and use them appropriately? Does the person follow through with commitments? Does the person take steps to address concerns in their life?
Taking action can be demonstrated in many ways.
For example, a person who is struggling financially may apply for assistance programs, utilize food banks, seek additional employment, or rely on healthy support systems until their situation improves.
A person in recovery may contact their sponsor, attend meetings, participate in treatment, and utilize recovery supports to maintain sobriety.
A person experiencing medical concerns may seek treatment, follow medical recommendations, and attend appointments.
Taking action demonstrates initiative, responsibility, problem-solving skills, and the ability to function independently as an adult.
Some individuals recognize problems but do not take action to address them. Others identify concerns and actively work toward solutions.
When assessing adult functioning, CPS is evaluating whether taking action is a consistent pattern within the person’s life.
The ability to recognize needs and independently take appropriate action is an important adult protective capacity because it demonstrates the person’s ability to function effectively and manage the responsibilities of adulthood.
Does this parent understand — and consistently meet — the needs of this particular child?
Parenting functioning is different from adult functioning.
♥ For parents. Be ready to describe a typical day, your child’s strengths and challenges, and your plan of protection: who helps you, and what you do when something goes wrong. Specifics show capacity.
Adult functioning focuses on how a person functions as an individual.
Parenting functioning focuses on how a person functions as a parent.
When CPS assesses parenting functioning, investigators are looking at a parent’s ability to meet their child’s needs, provide protection, supervise appropriately, understand their child, and maintain a safe environment.
Parenting functioning can be viewed through three areas:
Behavioral Parenting Functioning Cognitive Parenting Functioning Emotional Parenting Functioning
Behavioral Parenting Functioning
Behavioral parenting functioning focuses on what a parent does on a daily basis to care for their children.
Investigators often ask questions such as:
How do you supervise your children? What does a typical day look like? Who watches your children when you are at work? How do you get your children to school? How do you ensure their medical needs are met? What is your daily routine?
One of the easiest ways to assess parenting is to ask a parent to describe a typical day.
Many parents have routines that help their households function smoothly.
For example, a parent may wake up before the children, prepare breakfast, assist with hygiene, get the children ready for school, transport them to school, go to work, pick them up after school, assist with homework, prepare dinner, and establish a bedtime routine.
These routines help create structure, consistency, and stability for children.
Investigators also assess whether parents can adjust when circumstances change.
Children’s needs change over time.
A child with medical needs, developmental delays, behavioral challenges, or mental health concerns may require different parenting approaches than another child within the same family.
Parents who can adapt and modify their parenting to meet the unique needs of each child demonstrate stronger parenting functioning.
Cognitive Parenting Functioning
Cognitive parenting functioning focuses on what a parent understands about their child.
A parent may love their child deeply, but investigators also need to know whether the parent understands the child’s individual needs, strengths, limitations, and vulnerabilities.
Questions often include:
Describe your child. What are your child’s strengths? What are your child’s challenges? What does your child enjoy? What frustrates your child? What are your child’s emotional needs? What are your child’s developmental needs? What does being protective mean to you?
Investigators are assessing whether parents recognize threats and understand how to keep their children safe.
For example, a parent may have unrealistic expectations of a child.
A five-year-old may be expected to care for an infant sibling.
A seventeen-year-old with developmental delays may be expected to supervise younger children beyond their abilities.
A parent may fail to recognize how domestic violence, substance abuse, unsafe caregivers, or inadequate supervision impact a child’s safety.
Parenting requires understanding not only what a child needs but also what a child is capable of doing.
One of the most important cognitive parenting capacities is the ability to articulate a plan of protection.
Parents should be able to explain how they keep their children safe, who helps when needed, and what steps they take when concerns arise.
Emotional Parenting Functioning
Emotional parenting functioning focuses on the relationship between the parent and child.
Investigators assess whether there is a healthy emotional connection and whether the parent responds appropriately to the child’s emotional needs.
Questions may include:
How do you show love to your child? How do you comfort your child when they are upset? How do you respond when your child is struggling? What activities do you do together? How would your child describe your relationship?
Investigators also observe interactions between parents and children during home visits.
The relationship should demonstrate affection, attachment, empathy, nurturing, and emotional support.
Parents should be able to understand their child’s feelings, respond appropriately, and place the child’s needs above their own when necessary.
For example, a child struggling with the absence of a parent may display anger, frustration, or behavioral concerns. A parent who understands those emotions can help the child process those feelings in a healthy way.
A parent who responds only with punishment may miss the underlying issue that is driving the behavior.
Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together
Parenting functioning is like putting together a puzzle.
No single answer determines whether a parent is functioning appropriately.
Investigators gather information from interviews, observations, records, collateral contacts, and interactions with family members to understand the complete picture.
A parent may be strong behaviorally but struggle cognitively.
A parent may understand their child’s needs but struggle emotionally.
A parent may provide structure and routine but have difficulty adapting to a child with special needs.
The goal is not to find perfect parents.
The goal is to determine whether the parent understands their child, meets their needs, protects them from harm, and provides a safe and stable environment where the child can grow and thrive.
At the center of every parenting assessment is the same question:
Does this parent have the capacity to safely meet the unique needs of this child?
One of the questions I often ask parents is:
“What does being protective mean to you?”
Many parents immediately respond by saying things like:
“I would do anything for my child.”
“I would die for my child.”
“I would never let anyone hurt my child.”
While those responses demonstrate love, protectiveness goes beyond what a parent says. Protectiveness is demonstrated through a parent’s actions.
Being protective means ensuring that children are safe from harm, danger, and unsafe environments. It means recognizing threats and taking action to prevent those threats from impacting your child.
Protective parents ensure their children are:
Free from unsafe supervision. Protected from domestic violence. Protected from substance abuse environments. Protected from unsafe caregivers. Protected from physical abuse. Protected from sexual abuse. Protected from emotional harm. Protected from unsafe living conditions.
Being protective also means ensuring that children’s medical, emotional, mental health, educational, and developmental needs are met.
Children depend on adults because they cannot fully protect themselves. They rely on parents to make decisions that promote safety and healthy development.
Protectiveness means recognizing that children are vulnerable and taking steps to reduce risks before harm occurs.
For example, a protective parent carefully considers where their children go, who they spend time with, and what situations they are exposed to.
A parent may decide not to allow a child to attend an event, spend the night at someone’s home, or participate in an activity because they are uncertain about the safety of the environment or the individuals involved.
Protective parents understand that it is their responsibility to evaluate risks and make decisions that prioritize their child’s well-being.
Articulating a Plan of Protection
Another important parenting capacity is the ability to articulate a plan of protection.
A plan of protection is a parent’s ability to explain how they keep their children safe on a daily basis and how they respond when challenges or emergencies arise.
Parents should be able to answer questions such as:
Who supervises the children when you are at work? What happens if childcare falls through? Who can assist during an emergency? What is your plan if your child has special needs? What is your plan if your child is a runner? What is your plan if your child has behavioral challenges?
Sometimes a plan works.
Sometimes it does not.
What is important is whether the parent recognizes the concern, adjusts the plan, and implements additional protections moving forward.
Protective parents understand that safety planning is an ongoing process.
Understanding Supervision
Supervision is one of the most important responsibilities of a parent.
Appropriate supervision depends on:
The child’s age. The child’s developmental level. The child’s cognitive functioning. The child’s emotional functioning. The child’s special needs. The environment.
Age alone does not determine whether a child can safely supervise themselves or others.
A seventeen-year-old with significant developmental delays may require more supervision than a younger child without those challenges.
Likewise, a young child with a history of running away, wandering, or engaging in dangerous behaviors may require constant supervision to ensure their safety.
Parents must understand their child’s individual abilities and limitations when making supervision decisions.
The question is not simply, “How old is the child?”
The question is, “What is this child capable of safely doing?”
Meeting Your Child’s Needs
Children have different needs.
Some children require very little intervention.
Others require extensive support.
Parents must recognize and respond to those needs.
Meeting a child’s needs includes:
Providing food, shelter, and clothing. Ensuring appropriate supervision. Addressing medical needs. Addressing mental health needs. Supporting educational needs. Addressing developmental concerns. Ensuring emotional well-being.
For example, a child with asthma may require regular medication and medical follow-up.
A child with diabetes may require careful monitoring, medication management, and dietary considerations.
A child with autism may require specialized services, structure, and additional supervision.
A child struggling with depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts may require counseling, therapy, medication management, and increased emotional support.
Parents are not expected to know everything.
However, they are expected to recognize when their child has needs and take action to ensure those needs are met.
Parenting Functioning and Child Safety
Parenting is not simply about loving children.
Parenting is about understanding children, meeting their needs, protecting them from harm, and adjusting when circumstances change.
Children are constantly growing and developing. Their needs change over time.
Protective parents recognize those changes and adapt accordingly.
At the heart of parenting functioning is a simple question:
Can this parent recognize their child’s needs and consistently take the actions necessary to keep their child safe, healthy, and supported?
Who is the child behind the case — and how vulnerable are they to harm?
Every case involves a child.
▸ Key term — Vulnerability. How susceptible a child is to harm and how dependent they are on others for protection — shaped by age, development, health, and the ability to protect or speak for themselves.
It is easy to lose sight of that.
When CPS becomes involved, there are reports to read, allegations to assess, parents to interview, records to review, and decisions to make. There are deadlines, hearings, and paperwork.
But at the center of every single case is a child.
A child with a name.
A child with a personality.
A child with strengths, fears, needs, and a story of their own.
When investigators assess child functioning, we are trying to understand that child as a whole person. We are trying to understand who they are, what they need, what they are capable of, and how the circumstances around them are affecting their safety and well-being.
Just as we assess adult functioning and parenting functioning, child functioning can be viewed through three areas:
Behavioral Functioning Cognitive Functioning Emotional Functioning
Behavioral functioning focuses on what a child does.
Investigators observe and ask about a child’s behaviors because those behaviors often tell us a great deal about what the child is experiencing.
Questions and observations may include:
How does the child behave at home, at school, and in the community? Does the child have behaviors that place them at risk, such as running away, wandering, or aggression? Does the child have any behaviors that require additional supervision? How does the child respond to stress or change? Are there sudden changes in the child’s behavior?
Children communicate through behavior, especially when they are too young or too overwhelmed to communicate with words.
A child who suddenly becomes withdrawn, aggressive, fearful, or regressed may be telling us something that they cannot yet say out loud.
Behavior is information.
Our job is to pay attention to it.
Cognitive functioning focuses on a child’s ability to think, understand, reason, and make sense of the world around them.
Investigators consider:
The child’s age and developmental level. The child’s ability to understand danger and safety. The child’s ability to communicate their needs. Whether the child has developmental delays, intellectual disabilities, or learning challenges. The child’s ability to protect or care for themselves in an age-appropriate way.
A child’s cognitive functioning directly affects how vulnerable they are.
A three-year-old cannot call for help, cannot leave an unsafe situation, and cannot understand danger the way an older child can.
A child with significant developmental delays may be far more vulnerable than their age alone would suggest.
Understanding how a child thinks, learns, and understands the world helps us understand how much they depend on the adults around them to keep them safe.
Emotional functioning focuses on how a child feels, copes, and relates to others.
Investigators pay attention to:
How the child expresses emotions. How the child copes with stress and difficulty. The child’s relationships with parents, siblings, and caregivers. Signs of fear, anxiety, sadness, or trauma. How the child responds to the people in their life.
Children who have experienced abuse, neglect, domestic violence, or instability often carry that experience inside them.
Some children become anxious or fearful.
Some become angry.
Some become quiet and withdrawn.
Some appear unusually mature, having learned to take care of themselves or younger siblings.
And some children, even after experiencing harm, remain deeply loyal to and loving toward the very people who hurt them.
This is one of the most important things for parents and the public to understand.
Children love their parents.
Even when children have experienced neglect, abuse, domestic violence, or substance abuse in the home, they very often continue to love their parents and want to be with them.
A child being removed is not a child being rescued from someone they hate.
In most cases, it is a child being separated from someone they love.
That is what makes this work so difficult, and it is why a child’s words must always be understood in context.
A child saying “I want to go home” does not always mean the home is safe.
A child protecting a parent does not always mean nothing happened.
A child smiling and appearing happy does not always mean a child is safe.
Children love their parents, and that love does not disappear simply because a home is unsafe.
One of the most important concepts in assessing child functioning is vulnerability.
Vulnerability refers to how susceptible a child is to harm and how dependent they are on others for protection.
Vulnerability is affected by:
The child’s age. The child’s developmental level. The child’s physical and medical needs. The child’s cognitive and emotional functioning. The child’s ability to protect themselves. The child’s ability to communicate or seek help.
An infant is completely dependent on caregivers for survival. An infant cannot feed themselves, protect themselves, or tell anyone when something is wrong.
A medically fragile child may face life-threatening consequences if their needs are not met.
A child with significant disabilities may require constant supervision and specialized care.
The more vulnerable a child is, the greater the impact a safety threat can have.
That is why two children in the very same home may not face the same level of danger. A safety concern that an older, capable child might withstand could be life-threatening for an infant or a medically fragile child.
We must always consider the individual child.
Many parents worry about their children being interviewed.
I understand that worry.
Interviewing children is one of the most delicate parts of this work, and it is done with great care.
When we speak with children, we do so in a manner appropriate to their age and development. We use simple, open-ended, non-leading questions. We do not put words in a child’s mouth. We do not pressure children. We do not tell children what to say.
The goal is never to frighten a child or to turn a child against a parent.
The goal is to understand the child’s experience in the child’s own words.
We also observe.
We watch how children interact with their parents and caregivers. We notice whether a child seeks comfort from a parent, whether a child appears fearful, and whether the relationship reflects safety, affection, and trust.
Sometimes what a child does tells us more than what a child says.
At the end of the day, child functioning is about seeing the child as a person, not as a file.
It is about understanding who this child is, what this child needs, how vulnerable this child is, and how the circumstances in the home are affecting this child’s safety and well-being.
Every assessment, every decision, and every safety determination ultimately comes back to the child.
Because the entire purpose of this work is not paperwork, and it is not punishment.
The entire purpose of this work is the child behind the case.
How can a calm, tidy home still be dangerous?
Throughout this book, I have used the words “safety” and “danger” many times.
▸ Key term — Impending danger. A foreseeable threat that is not necessarily occurring in the moment, but is likely to cause serious harm in the near future — identified through patterns and conditions, not a single snapshot.
▤ The evidence. Children on the margin of removal fared worse — including higher adult criminal involvement — when placed than when kept home (Doyle, 2007/2008). Danger must be assessed precisely, not assumed.
These words are at the heart of everything CPS does.
But safety and danger are not vague feelings or personal opinions. In child welfare, danger has a specific meaning, and investigators are trained to identify it through careful assessment.
There are two types of danger that CPS assesses:
Present danger.
Impending danger.
Understanding the difference between the two helps parents understand why the agency responds the way it does, why some situations require immediate action, and why other concerns are addressed through safety planning over time.
♥ For parents. If you are reading this and your home is calm and your children are safe, this chapter is not a warning about you — it is a window into how we think. Knowing what danger actually looks like is one of the best ways to make sure it never takes root in your home.
Before explaining the two types of danger, it is important to understand what actually makes a situation a danger to a child.
Not every problem is a danger.
Not every mistake is a danger.
Not every concern rises to the level of a safety threat.
A true danger to a child generally has several characteristics. Investigators are trained to look for whether a family condition is:
Specific and observable. It is real and identifiable, not just a worry or a feeling. Out of control. The family is not currently able to manage or contain it on their own. Likely to cause serious harm. The potential result is significant injury or harm, not minor. Likely to occur soon. The harm is happening now or is reasonably likely in the near future. Affecting a vulnerable child. The child is unable to protect themselves from it.
When these conditions come together, a child is in danger.
When they do not, the situation may still be a problem that needs attention, but it may not rise to the level of a safety threat that requires protective intervention.
This distinction matters, because CPS is not designed to intervene in every imperfect situation.
CPS is designed to intervene when a child is unsafe.
Present danger is an immediate, significant, and clearly observable threat to a child that is occurring right now or is just about to occur.
Present danger is happening in the moment.
It is obvious.
It requires immediate action.
Examples of present danger may include:
A young child left completely alone without supervision. A caregiver who is severely impaired and unable to care for a child at that moment. A child with a serious untreated injury. A violent altercation occurring in the presence of a child. A home environment that poses an immediate physical threat to a child’s life or health. A caregiver threatening to harm a child.
When present danger exists, the investigator cannot simply gather information and come back later.
The child is unsafe right now.
Immediate protective action must be taken to ensure the child’s safety. This may include developing an immediate safety plan, identifying a safe caregiver, involving law enforcement, or, when no other option will keep the child safe, taking the child into protective custody.
Present danger is the type of danger most people picture when they think of CPS.
But it is not the only type of danger, and in many cases, it is not the most common.
Impending danger is more difficult to see, and it is often misunderstood.
Impending danger is not always obvious in the moment.
It is a threatening family condition that may not be actively occurring during the investigator’s visit but is foreseeable and likely to cause serious harm to a child in the near future.
Impending danger is identified through assessment.
It is understood by looking at patterns, conditions, behaviors, and circumstances within the family rather than by observing a single dramatic moment.
For example, during a home visit, everything may appear calm. The children may be clean, fed, and smiling. The home may be tidy.
But through the assessment, the investigator may learn that:
A caregiver is actively using methamphetamine and routinely cares for the children while impaired. There is a pattern of severe domestic violence that erupts unpredictably. A caregiver has an untreated, serious mental health condition that has previously placed the children at risk. An infant is not receiving necessary medical care for a dangerous condition. A caregiver’s behavior is volatile and out of control in ways that threaten the children.
None of these threats may be visible during a single calm visit.
But that does not mean the children are safe.
Impending danger recognizes that danger is not always happening at the exact moment an investigator is present. Danger can live in the patterns and conditions of a household, waiting to surface.
This is why investigators ask so many questions.
This is why we gather information from multiple sources.
This is why we look at history, behavior, and patterns rather than a single snapshot in time.
A calm moment does not always mean a safe home.
The difference between present danger and impending danger affects how the agency responds.
Present danger requires immediate action because a child is unsafe right now.
Impending danger requires careful assessment and safety planning because, although the danger may not be occurring in the moment, it is reasonably likely to cause serious harm if nothing changes.
In both situations, the goal is the same.
The goal is child safety.
The agency is always working to answer two essential questions:
Is this child safe right now?
Will this child be safe moving forward?
If the answer to either question is no, the agency must determine what needs to happen to create and maintain safety.
I want to remind parents of something important.
Identifying danger is not about labeling a parent as bad.
It is not about punishment.
It is about protection.
When an investigator identifies present or impending danger, they are not saying a parent is a terrible person. They are identifying a condition that places a child at risk of serious harm so that something can be done to address it.
Danger can be managed.
Danger can be reduced.
Danger can be controlled through services, support, safety planning, and behavioral change.
The first step is simply recognizing it.
Because a danger that is identified can be addressed.
And a child who is protected can begin to thrive.
When do domestic violence, substance use, or mental illness actually make a child unsafe?
Throughout my career, three concerns have appeared in cases more often than any others.
♥ For parents. A diagnosis is not a verdict. What matters is whether the condition is being treated and managed so your children are safe. Seeking help is a protective act — not an admission against you.
Domestic violence.
Substance abuse.
Mental health.
These three issues affect families across every background, every income level, every neighborhood, and every walk of life. They do not discriminate.
Individually, each of these concerns can affect a child’s safety. Together, they often overlap, feed one another, and create complex situations for families.
It is important for parents to understand how CPS views these issues, because there are many misconceptions about each one.
Having one of these concerns does not automatically mean a parent is unsafe.
But when these concerns go unaddressed, they can significantly impact a parent’s ability to keep a child safe.
Domestic violence is one of the most misunderstood concerns in child welfare.
Many parents believe that if the violence is between adults, it does not affect the children.
That is not true.
Children are deeply affected by domestic violence, even when they are not the ones being physically harmed.
Children hear it.
Children see it.
Children feel the tension in the home long before and long after an incident occurs.
Children who are exposed to domestic violence may experience fear, anxiety, trauma, behavioral changes, difficulty in school, and emotional harm. Some children try to intervene and are injured in the process. Some children grow up believing that violence is a normal part of relationships.
When CPS becomes involved in a domestic violence situation, the goal is not to blame the parent who is being abused.
The goal is safety.
Investigators assess the pattern of violence, the level of danger, the history, and most importantly, whether the children can be protected.
We look at whether a parent recognizes the danger, takes steps to protect the children, and is willing to engage in services and safety planning.
Leaving an abusive relationship is not simple. It is often the most dangerous time for a victim. We understand that.
But a parent’s ability to protect their children from exposure to violence is an essential protective capacity, and it is something the agency must assess carefully.
Domestic violence services, advocacy, counseling, and safety planning can all help families move toward safety.
Substance abuse is another concern that frequently brings families to the attention of CPS.
One of the most common misunderstandings is the belief that any substance use automatically means a child is unsafe.
That is not exactly how the agency views it.
There is a difference between use, abuse, and impairment that affects parenting.
The central question is not simply whether a parent uses a substance.
The central question is whether that substance use affects the parent’s ability to safely care for their children.
Investigators consider:
Whether a parent is impaired while caring for the children. Whether substance use creates an unsafe environment. Whether children have access to drugs, alcohol, or dangerous paraphernalia. Whether substance use affects supervision, judgment, or the ability to respond to a child’s needs. Whether there is a pattern of substance use that places children at risk.
A parent who is actively impaired cannot supervise a child, cannot respond to an emergency, and cannot make safe decisions.
A child living in a home where dangerous substances are within reach is at risk of accidental ingestion and serious harm.
Substance abuse also rarely exists on its own.
Very often, substance use is a symptom of something deeper, such as untreated trauma, depression, anxiety, grief, or pain that a person has never had the chance to address.
That is why services matter.
Assessments, treatment, recovery support, and random drug testing are not designed to punish parents. They are designed to help parents address the underlying issues and demonstrate that they can safely care for their children.
Many parents overcome substance abuse.
I have seen it happen many times.
Recovery is possible, and recovery brings families back together.
Mental health is the third concern that appears in many cases, and it may be the most misunderstood of all.
Let me say this as clearly as I can.
Having a mental health diagnosis does not make someone an unsafe parent.
Many wonderful, loving, capable parents manage mental health conditions every single day while raising healthy, happy children.
Conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia can be managed with treatment, medication, and support.
The concern is never the diagnosis itself.
The concern arises when symptoms are untreated, unmanaged, or so severe that they significantly impair a parent’s ability to safely care for their children.
Investigators may consider:
Whether a parent has been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Whether the parent is receiving treatment. Whether the parent takes prescribed medication. Whether the parent recognizes when their symptoms are worsening. Whether the symptoms affect the parent’s ability to supervise, protect, and care for the children.
A parent who recognizes their condition, follows their treatment, and seeks help when needed is demonstrating exactly the kind of protective capacity the agency hopes to see.
The focus is not the label.
The focus is whether the condition is being managed in a way that keeps children safe.
Domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental health often appear together.
A parent struggling with untreated trauma may turn to substances to cope.
A parent in a violent relationship may experience depression and anxiety.
A parent battling addiction may find themselves in unhealthy and dangerous relationships.
These issues are connected, and they often reinforce one another.
That is why CPS works to identify the root cause rather than simply addressing the surface behavior.
When the underlying issue is identified and treated, families have a far greater chance of lasting change.
If you are a parent reading this and any of these issues are part of your life, I want you to hear something.
You are not alone.
You are not beyond help.
And you are not defined by your worst moment.
Domestic violence can be escaped.
Addiction can be overcome.
Mental health can be managed.
Thousands of parents have faced these very challenges and have gone on to safely raise their children.
The agency’s goal is not to hold these struggles against you forever.
The goal is to help you address them so that your children can be safe, and so that your family can heal.
What has to be true for a child to stay safely at home?
By now, you understand that CPS assesses danger.
▸ Key term — Safety plan. A specific set of actions and arrangements that control an identified danger and keep a child safe — built on the family’s strengths and used in-home whenever it can adequately protect the child.
But identifying danger is only part of the work.
Once a safety threat is identified, the agency must answer a critical question:
What can be done to keep this child safe?
This is where safety planning and protective capacities come together.
The goal is always to protect children using the least intrusive option that will actually keep them safe. Removal is never the first choice. It is the last resort, used only when nothing else can adequately protect the child.
A safety plan is a set of specific actions and arrangements designed to control identified danger and keep a child safe.
A safety plan is not a punishment.
It is a protection.
A good safety plan answers very practical questions:
What is the specific danger that must be controlled? What actions will be taken to control it? Who will carry out those actions? When and how will those actions occur? How will the plan be monitored to make sure it is working?
A safety plan must be immediate, sufficient, and sustainable. It must control the danger right away, it must be strong enough to actually keep the child safe, and it must be able to last for as long as the danger exists.
A vague promise is not a safety plan.
“I’ll do better” is not a safety plan.
A safety plan is concrete, specific, and built around the actual danger that has been identified.
Whenever it is possible to keep a child safely at home, that is what the agency works toward.
An in-home safety plan allows children to remain in their own home while specific actions are put in place to control the danger.
For an in-home safety plan to work, several conditions generally must be present:
The home must be calm enough for a plan to be carried out. At least one caregiver must be willing and able to participate. There must be enough protective capacity within the family or support system to manage the danger. Safe and appropriate people must be available to help. The plan must be able to be monitored.
For example, a relative may agree to stay in the home to supervise. A non-offending parent may agree to ensure a child is never left alone with an impaired caregiver. A safe family member may agree to provide childcare. Services may be put in place to address the underlying concerns.
When these supports come together, many children can remain safely at home while the family works toward lasting change.
♥ For co-parents and separated families. When children move between two homes, safety is a shared job — even when the relationship between the adults is hard. A child is safest when both households know the plan: who supervises, who to call, and what to do if something goes wrong. You do not have to like each other to protect the same child well. If you and your co-parent disagree about what is safe, write the plan down, keep it specific, and keep the child’s needs — not the old argument — at the center.
Sometimes the danger is too great to be controlled within the home.
When an in-home safety plan is not enough to keep a child safe, an out-of-home safety plan may be necessary.
This means the child is cared for outside the home, ideally with relatives or fictive kin, while the safety concerns are addressed.
Removing a child from their home is one of the most serious actions the agency can take. It is never done lightly, and it is never done as a punishment.
It is done when there is no other way to keep the child safe.
Even then, the goal remains the same: to address the danger so the child can safely return home as soon as possible.
If danger is what threatens a child, protective capacities are what protect a child.
Protective capacities are the strengths, abilities, characteristics, and behaviors a caregiver has that allow them to protect their child.
A safety plan works best when it builds on a caregiver’s protective capacities, and the long-term goal of every case is to strengthen those capacities until the family can keep the child safe on their own.
Protective capacities generally fall into three areas.
Behavioral Protective Capacities
These are the things a caregiver does to protect a child.
A caregiver who takes action. A caregiver who follows through. A caregiver who sets aside their own needs to meet the child’s needs. A caregiver who demonstrates self-control. A caregiver who has a history of protecting their children.
Cognitive Protective Capacities
These are the ways a caregiver thinks that allow them to protect a child.
A caregiver who recognizes danger. A caregiver who understands their child’s needs. A caregiver who can plan and problem-solve. A caregiver who understands their role as a protector. A caregiver who accurately perceives reality and the situation around them.
Emotional Protective Capacities
These are the ways a caregiver feels and connects that allow them to protect a child.
A caregiver who is attached to their child. A caregiver who is emotionally able to meet the child’s needs. A caregiver who can manage their emotions. A caregiver who expresses love, empathy, and concern for the child. A caregiver who places the child’s well-being above their own.
When these capacities are strong, danger can often be controlled within the family.
When these capacities are diminished, the agency works with the family to strengthen them through services, support, and behavioral change.
There are times when, despite everyone’s best efforts, a safety plan cannot adequately protect a child.
This may happen when:
The danger is too severe to be controlled. No safe and appropriate caregivers are available. The caregiver is unwilling to participate in a plan. The protective capacities are too diminished to manage the danger. The plan cannot be reliably monitored.
In these situations, the agency may have no choice but to seek protective custody to ensure the child’s immediate safety.
This is the most difficult decision in all of child welfare, and it is never made by an investigator alone. Cases are reviewed and staffed with supervisors and management before such serious action is taken.
When a child does enter protective custody, the case moves into the court process, where a judge reviews the agency’s decision and oversees what happens next.
That is where the next chapter begins.
But I want to leave you with this.
Safety planning exists because the agency would rather keep families together than apart.
Protective capacities exist because the agency believes parents have strengths worth building on.
And every safety plan, every service, and every support is ultimately aimed at one goal:
Helping families become safe enough to stay together.
What happens after removal — court, case plans, and the work of change.
What actually happens in court after a child is removed?
What Happens Immediately After Removal?
♥ For parents. If you cannot afford an attorney, ask the court to appoint one. Read the petition. Keep every appointment and every visit — consistency is what the court is watching for.
▤ The evidence. Parents given high-quality interdisciplinary representation reunified with their children significantly more often and spent about four fewer months in foster care — with no increase in risk (Gerber et al., 2019).
When children are removed from their parents’ care and placed into protective custody, the process does not stop with the removal. In many ways, the removal is just the beginning of the court process.
Within approximately three judicial days of a child entering protective custody, a Preliminary Protective Hearing (PPH) is held. Prior to that hearing, the CPS investigator prepares a Protective Custody Report outlining the evidence gathered during the investigation and the reasons why the children were determined to be unsafe in their parents’ care.
The report may include information obtained through interviews, law enforcement reports, criminal history, CPS history, medical records, collateral contacts, photographs, observations, and any other evidence that helped support the safety decision. If a warrant was obtained to remove the children, that information is also included in the report.
▸ A note on state law. The specific timelines and hearing names in this chapter — such as the three-judicial-day Preliminary Protective Hearing — follow Nevada law. Every state sets its own deadlines and terms within a shared federal framework (notably the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997). If you live outside Nevada, the steps will look similar but the names and clocks may differ. See Appendix E for the Nevada specifics under NRS Chapter 432B, and confirm your state’s process with a local attorney.
The Protective Custody Report is submitted to the court before the hearing, and parents are provided a copy so they can review the allegations and understand why the agency became involved. By the time parents enter the courtroom, they have generally been given an opportunity to read the report and understand the concerns being presented to the judge.
During the hearing, the judge reviews the report and hears information regarding why the children were removed. Parents are present and have an opportunity to address the court. The District Attorney represents the agency, and a Child Advocate Program (CAP) attorney may also be present to represent the children’s interests and provide the court with information regarding the children’s needs and safety.
The judge will often ask parents questions regarding the report, including whether they have read it and whether they understand the allegations. The court may also inquire about Native American heritage to determine whether ICWA applies.
If parents cannot afford an attorney, the court may appoint one to represent them. CPS workers cannot provide legal advice. Parents need someone who can explain the legal process, answer questions, and advocate for them throughout the court proceedings.
One of the judge’s responsibilities during the PPH is determining whether reasonable efforts were made to prevent removal and whether sufficient evidence exists to support keeping the children in protective custody.
For many parents, this is one of the most overwhelming experiences of their lives. Parents often focus on one thing:
“I love my children.”
While that may absolutely be true, the court’s focus is different. The court is focused on safety.
Many parents do not initially recognize the safety concerns that brought the agency into their lives. They are focused on their love for their children, while the court is focused on determining whether the children can safely remain in their care.
During the first few days after removal, the agency is also working to identify the best possible placement for the children. Whenever possible, children are placed with relatives or fictive kin.
Children generally do better when they are placed with people they know. Relatives and fictive kin are familiar with the children’s routines, personalities, medical needs, schools, and support systems.
If no relatives or fictive kin are available, willing, or able to pass background checks and placement requirements, the children may be placed in foster care. Even after children enter foster care, CPS continues searching for appropriate relatives and fictive kin throughout the life of the case.
Placement decisions are always based on child safety first.
There are occasions when children are returned home shortly after removal. This usually occurs when further assessment reveals that the situation was an isolated incident rather than an ongoing safety concern.
The goal of the PPH hearing is not punishment.
The goal is for the court to determine whether children are safe and whether continued protective custody is necessary while the family works toward resolving the issues that brought the case to the agency’s attention.
Legal Decisions vs. Safety Decisions
One of the biggest misconceptions parents have is believing that a court decision and a safety decision are the same thing.
They are not.
A safety decision is made by Child Protective Services based on the information gathered during the assessment. The investigator evaluates present danger threats, impending danger threats, child vulnerability, caregiver protective capacities, and the overall safety of the children.
The question being asked is:
“Are these children safe right now?”
If the answer is no, a safety decision may be made to remove the children and place them into protective custody.
A legal decision is made by the court.
The judge reviews the evidence and determines whether there was just cause for the removal and whether reasonable efforts were made to prevent removal.
In simple terms, CPS makes safety decisions. The court makes legal decisions.
The court is not deciding whether the parents love their children. The court is deciding whether the agency had sufficient evidence to support the removal and whether continued custody is necessary to protect the children.
The Plea Hearing
At the conclusion of the Preliminary Protective Hearing, additional court dates are scheduled.
One of those dates is the Plea Hearing.
Another important date is the Petition Due Date.
If the agency intends to continue court involvement, the CPS investigator must provide the District Attorney with all evidence gathered regarding the family’s safety concerns, underlying issues, and reasons why the children remain unsafe.
The District Attorney then prepares and files the petition.
The petition outlines the concerns that brought the family before the court and identifies the reasons the agency believes the children need continued protection.
Before the Plea Hearing, parents should have had an opportunity to meet with their attorney and review the petition.
At the Plea Hearing, parents generally have two options.
They may enter a plea of No Contest, or they may deny the allegations.
Pleading No Contest
A No Contest plea means the parent is neither admitting nor denying the allegations contained in the petition.
The parent is essentially saying:
“I am not going to contest the petition, and I want to move forward with services and the court process.”
Many parents choose this option because they want to begin working toward reunification as quickly as possible.
When a parent pleads No Contest, the case typically moves to the next phase of court, known as the Disposition Hearing.
Denying the Petition
Some parents choose to deny the allegations contained in the petition.
When this occurs, the matter proceeds to trial.
Parents may deny the petition because they genuinely disagree with the allegations, do not recognize the safety concerns, or believe the agency misunderstood the situation.
Others deny because they are angry, overwhelmed, or feel the removal was personal.
What many parents do not realize is that CPS gathers information from numerous sources, including:
Children Parents Relatives Friends Teachers Medical providers Therapists Law enforcement Criminal history records Prior CPS history Other collateral contacts
The evidence available to the agency often extends far beyond what parents realize.
Additionally, CPS investigators do not make removal decisions alone. Cases are staffed with supervisors and management before major actions are taken.
The Evidentiary Hearing (Trial)
If a parent denies the petition, the case proceeds to trial.
Contrary to what many people believe, CPS does not automatically win.
The agency must present evidence.
Witnesses testify.
Documents are introduced.
Records may be reviewed.
Parents also have the opportunity to present evidence, call witnesses, and challenge the agency’s findings.
The judge reviews all evidence and makes a decision based on facts, testimony, and the law.
Court decisions are evidence-based.
They are not based on emotion, anger, or personal opinions.
The judge’s responsibility is to determine whether the allegations in the petition have been proven and whether continued court involvement is necessary to protect the children.
The Disposition Hearing
Whether a parent pleads No Contest or the petition is later sustained through trial, the case eventually moves to the Disposition Hearing.
This hearing focuses less on what happened and more on what needs to happen next.
By this stage, the family is usually working with a permanency worker or social worker who has taken over the ongoing case.
The permanency worker develops a more in-depth relationship with the family and begins helping parents engage in services.
During this phase, a case plan is created.
The case plan identifies the specific services, interventions, and behavioral changes necessary to address the safety concerns that brought the children into care.
The goal is not simply checking boxes.
The goal is behavioral change.
Case Plans: Why Every Family’s Plan Looks Different
Every case plan is individualized to the family and the specific safety concerns that brought the children into care.
Case plans are developed through extensive conversations between parents, guardians, caregivers, and the permanency worker or social worker assigned to the case.
Workers assess diminished protective capacities, identify the underlying concerns, and determine what services may help address those concerns.
The purpose of a case plan is not punishment.
The purpose is behavioral change.
Two families with the same allegation may have completely different case plans.
Two parents within the same household may have different case plans.
One parent may need substance abuse treatment and random drug testing.
The other parent may need domestic violence services, mental health counseling, parenting education, or other interventions.
Case plans focus on the individual needs of each parent.
The permanency worker gathers information through interviews, assessments, collateral contacts, service providers, and ongoing engagement with the family.
Together, the parent and worker develop a plan designed to address the specific safety threats identified in the case.
If a parent chooses not to participate in developing the case plan, the worker will still complete the plan based on the information available and the safety concerns that need to be addressed.
Visitation
Visitation is one of the most important parts of reunification.
Children love their parents.
Even when children have experienced abuse, neglect, domestic violence, substance abuse, or other difficult circumstances, they often continue to love and miss their parents.
When children are removed, they experience grief, confusion, sadness, and fear.
Many children struggle to understand why they cannot go home.
That is why visitation is so important.
Initially, visits are generally supervised.
Some visits occur in visitation centers.
Some visits are therapeutic visits involving counselors or therapists who help support the parent-child relationship and assist children who have experienced trauma.
Consistency matters.
When a child knows they are going to see their parent on a specific day, they look forward to that visit.
When a parent fails to attend visits, children are often devastated.
Workers are not simply counting attendance.
They are observing commitment.
They are observing consistency.
They are observing whether parents are actively working toward reunification.
As parents engage in services, demonstrate behavioral change, and address safety concerns, visitation often increases.
Visits may become longer.
Parents may receive additional visits.
Supervision requirements may decrease.
The goal is to gradually transition children back into the home safely rather than abruptly returning them without preparation.
Review Hearings
The court does not disappear after removal.
Review hearings occur throughout the life of the case.
These hearings function as check-ins for the court.
The judge receives updates regarding:
The children’s well-being Placement stability Parent participation in services Visitation progress Behavioral changes Safety concerns Reunification efforts
The court wants to know whether progress is being made.
Sometimes review hearings occur because reunification is getting closer.
Other times they occur because parents are not engaging in services or are not making the changes necessary to safely reunify.
Reunification: The Primary Goal
The primary goal in most child welfare cases is reunification.
The agency wants children to safely return home whenever possible.
However, reunification requires more than simply completing services.
It requires behavioral change.
Workers look for evidence that parents have addressed the issues that led to removal.
This may include:
Consistent negative drug tests Participation in treatment Mental health treatment and medication compliance Domestic violence services Stable housing Consistent visitation Positive parenting behaviors Demonstrated protective capacities
There is an important difference between compliance and change.
Compliance means checking boxes.
Change means demonstrating that life is different.
A parent may attend every domestic violence class but continue returning to the same violent relationship.
A parent may complete substance abuse treatment but continue testing positive for drugs.
A parent may attend counseling but fail to implement the skills being taught.
The agency is not looking only at attendance certificates.
The agency is looking at whether the behaviors that created the safety threats have actually changed.
Behavioral change is what brings children home.
Behavioral change is what keeps families together.
Permanency: When Reunification Cannot Occur
The primary goal is reunification.
However, reunification is not always possible.
Sometimes parents are unable or unwilling to make the behavioral changes necessary to safely care for their children.
When reunification cannot occur, the focus shifts to permanency.
Children deserve permanency.
Children deserve stability.
Children deserve consistency.
Children deserve to know where they will sleep at night, who will care for them, who will attend their school functions, and who will be there when they need support.
Children cannot remain in foster care forever.
At some point, a permanent plan must be established.
Permanency may include:
Guardianship Adoption Placement with relatives Placement with fictive kin Interstate placement with approved relatives or caregivers
Every permanency decision is made by considering what is in the child’s best interest.
The focus is ensuring children have a safe, nurturing, and permanent home where they can thrive.
Common Misconceptions About CPS and Court
One of the most common misconceptions is:
“CPS is trying to take my children forever.”
That is not true.
The primary goal is reunification whenever it can be achieved safely.
Investigators, permanency workers, supervisors, attorneys, and judges would much rather see children safely return home than remain in foster care.
We hear the voices of children every day.
We hear children ask when they can go home.
We hear children say they miss their parents.
We hear children hope their parents will get help.
Many children want nothing more than for their family to be healthy and together.
Workers are often some of the biggest supporters parents have during the reunification process.
We celebrate successes.
We encourage parents.
We want families to succeed.
Thousands of children reunify with their parents every year.
Parents overcome addiction.
Parents address mental health concerns.
Parents leave violent relationships.
Parents learn new parenting skills.
Parents make behavioral changes.
When those changes occur and safety can be maintained, children return home.
The child welfare process is not about punishment.
It is about safety.
It is about stability.
It is about permanency.
Most importantly, it is about helping children grow up in homes where they are protected, loved, and given the opportunity to thrive.
At the end of the day, every decision comes back to one question:
“Is this child safe?”
Why isn’t completing a class the same as actually changing?
One of the most important things parents need to understand about Child Protective Services is that change does not happen overnight.
▸ Key term — Compliance vs. change. Attendance is compliance; demonstrating that life is genuinely different is change. The agency is looking for change — because change, not a certificate, is what brings children home.
Many parents believe that if they complete a class, attend a few counseling sessions, or tell the agency they understand the concerns, their children should immediately return home.
However, behavioral change is a process.
Over the years, I have worked with thousands of families. Some parents changed quickly. Others took months or years. Some never changed at all.
The Stages of Change Model helps explain how people move from not recognizing a problem to making lasting changes in their lives.
Stage 1: Precontemplation – “No, Not Me”
This is often where parents are when CPS first becomes involved.
Parents may say:
“I don’t have a problem.” “Everybody drinks.” “Everybody smokes marijuana.” “The kids were fine.” “My boyfriend would never hurt my children.” “The school overreacted.”
At this stage, the parent does not recognize the need for change.
Many parents focus on the removal of their children rather than the behaviors that led to agency involvement.
They may resist services, deny concerns, blame others, or believe that CPS involvement is unnecessary.
Stage 2: Contemplation – “Well, Maybe”
This stage often begins after conversations with workers, court hearings, reading reports, or spending time away from their children.
Parents begin asking themselves:
“Maybe my drinking is affecting my family.” “Maybe the domestic violence is hurting my children.” “Maybe I need help.” “Maybe there is something I need to work on.”
They are not fully committed to change yet, but they are beginning to consider it.
This stage can last a long time because people often struggle between wanting things to stay the same and realizing that something needs to change.
Stage 3: Preparation – “So, What Do I Do Now?”
At this stage, parents begin making plans.
They may:
Schedule assessments. Contact service providers. Meet with their social worker. Develop goals. Ask questions about their case plan. Begin exploring treatment options.
The parent is preparing for change.
For the first time, they are actively thinking about what steps need to be taken to improve their situation and safely reunify with their children.
Stage 4: Action – “Okay, Let’s Do This”
This is where parents actively begin working on their case plan.
Examples include:
Attending treatment. Participating in therapy. Completing drug testing. Taking medication as prescribed. Attending domestic violence classes. Learning new parenting skills. Following recommendations from service providers.
This stage requires effort, honesty, and consistency.
Parents are no longer talking about change. They are actively working toward it.
Stage 5: Maintenance – “It Is Possible”
This is where lasting change occurs.
Parents are no longer simply completing services.
They are living differently.
Their behaviors, decision-making, relationships, and parenting practices begin reflecting what they have learned.
The changes become part of their daily lives.
This is where healthy habits replace unhealthy behaviors and where long-term safety becomes possible.
Relapse Can Happen
Change is not always a straight line.
Some parents return to old behaviors.
Some stop attending services.
Some return to unhealthy relationships.
Some begin struggling again with substance abuse, mental health concerns, or other challenges.
What matters is what happens next.
A setback does not automatically mean failure.
The goal is to recognize the setback, learn from it, and continue moving forward.
Many successful people experience setbacks before achieving lasting change.
Why the Stages of Change Matter
The child welfare system is not looking for perfect parents.
The system is looking for safe parents.
A parent may complete every class on a case plan and still not demonstrate change.
Another parent may struggle at first but eventually make meaningful changes that improve safety for their children.
The difference is not compliance.
The difference is behavioral change.
As I often tell families:
Safety is not measured by promises.
Safety is not measured by good intentions.
Safety is measured by behavior.
When parents move through the stages of change and demonstrate lasting behavioral change, they increase their ability to safely protect, supervise, and meet the needs of their children.
That is ultimately what reunification is built upon.
The harder truths, and a vision for a safer, more just system.
What does honesty require those of us inside the system to admit about it?
Everything I have written so far is true.
▤ The evidence. An estimated 37.4% of all U.S. children — and 53.0% of Black children — experience a CPS investigation by age 18 (Kim, Wildeman, Jonson-Reid & Drake, 2017). The system does not touch all families equally.
The purpose of this work is safety. The goal is reunification. Most workers care deeply. Most parents love their children. The system is full of people trying to do right by children.
All of that is true.
But it is not the whole truth.
If I ended this book without telling you the rest, I would be giving you comfort instead of honesty, and you deserve honesty.
Loving this work has taught me that the bravest thing an insider can do is tell the truth about the system she serves. Not to tear it down. To make it worthy of the children inside it.
So this is the chapter where I tell you what keeps me up at night.
The majority of child welfare cases are not the dramatic stories people imagine. Across the country, most children found to be victims of maltreatment are cases of neglect, not abuse.2 And neglect, more than any other category, is tangled up with poverty.
An empty refrigerator.
Lights that have been shut off.
A home that is crowded, or unstable, or behind on rent.
A child left alone because a parent could not afford childcare and could not afford to miss the shift.
I have walked into homes where the danger was real and the parent was cruel. But I have walked into far more homes where the danger was real and the parent was simply poor, exhausted, and out of options.
The hard truth is that our systems often respond to a struggling family by investigating the parent rather than relieving the hardship. We are very good at showing up to assess a mother who cannot keep the lights on. We are not nearly as good at making sure the lights stay on in the first place.
A parent who cannot provide is not the same as a parent who will not protect.
One of the most important things an investigator can do is tell the difference. One of the easiest things a system can do is confuse them.
This is the truth I cannot leave out.
Children of color, and especially Black and Native American children, come to the attention of child welfare, and are separated from their parents, at rates far higher than their share of the population.3
Researchers who followed American children over time have estimated that more than a third of all children in this country will experience a child protective services investigation before they turn eighteen, and that for Black children the figure is more than half.4 Native American families carry their own long and painful history, including an era when children were taken from their tribes and sent to boarding schools as a matter of policy. The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978 specifically because of that history.
The legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has spent her career documenting how heavily the system falls on Black families, and she has challenged all of us in this field to reckon with it. The sociologist Kelley Fong has written about how the fear of being reported changes the way poor mothers move through the world, sometimes keeping them from seeking the very help they need.
I do not raise this to accuse the many good people I work beside. Most of us never intend harm. But intentions are not outcomes, and a system can produce unequal results even when the individuals inside it are trying to be fair.
If we cannot say this out loud, we cannot fix it.
And the children deserve to have it fixed.
I want to say something that may surprise you, coming from an investigator.
Removing a child from their home is itself a harm.
Sometimes it is the lesser harm. Sometimes it is the only thing standing between a child and serious injury or death, and in those moments it is exactly the right thing to do. I have made those decisions, and I would make them again.
But even a necessary removal is not a neutral act.
A child who is removed loses their home, their bed, their school, their friends, their pets, their routines, and the parents they love, all at once, often with no warning. Even when we place children with relatives, even when the foster home is loving, the separation leaves a mark.
The research on this is clear, and so is the look on a child’s face. In a now-classic study, the economist Joseph Doyle followed children in Illinois whose cases were effectively assigned to investigators at random. Among children on the margin — those who could have gone either way — the ones who were removed went on to do worse, not better: they were two to three times more likely to enter the adult criminal justice system than similar children who stayed home.5 Removal, even when it feels protective, can carry its own lasting cost.
This is why removal must always be the last resort and never the first reflex. It is why “reasonable efforts” to keep families safely together is not just a legal requirement but a moral one. It is why a system that removes a child should feel the weight of it every single time, and should be working, from the first day, toward the day the child can safely go home.
A system that removes children casually is not protecting them. It is trading one harm for another and calling it safety.
Here is the truth that lives at the center of this work.
We are human, and we are fallible, and the stakes could not be higher.
Sometimes the system fails to protect a child who needed protecting, and that child is gravely hurt. Those tragedies make the news, and they should, because a child was failed.
But sometimes the system removes a child who did not need to be removed, or keeps a family separated longer than safety required, and that harm is just as real, even though it rarely makes the news.
Both kinds of error are failures. Both cost children. A system that only fears one kind of mistake will keep making the other.
I have learned to hold two things at once. I have to be willing to act decisively when a child is truly in danger. And I have to be humble enough to know that I might be wrong, that my assessment is a judgment and not a certainty, and that the power I carry can hurt as well as help.
Anyone in this work who has lost that humility has become dangerous.
For a long time, people in my field worried that talking about these problems would make us look bad, or would help the people who want to tear the system down.
I have come to believe the opposite.
A field that cannot face its own hardest questions cannot earn anyone’s trust. The parents I serve already know these truths, because they have lived them. Pretending otherwise does not protect the work. It only widens the gap between the system and the families it claims to serve.
I love this work. I have given my life to it.
And precisely because I love it, I am willing to say that it must be smaller, fairer, and gentler than it sometimes is. It must intervene less in the lives of families who need help rather than surveillance. It must stop confusing poverty with neglect. It must reckon honestly with who it touches and who it spares. It must treat every removal as the serious wound that it is.
None of that is a betrayal of child safety.
All of it is in service of the children.
Because the goal was never to have a powerful system.
The goal was always to have safe, whole, thriving children — and families strong enough to raise them.
That is the truth that leads to the next, and final, question of this book.
If this is where we are, where do we go from here?
If this is where we are, where do we go from here?
I have spent more than twenty years responding to crises after they happen.
▤ The evidence. A roughly $1,000 increase in a low-income family’s income via the Earned Income Tax Credit is associated with measurably less neglect and 8–10% lower CPS involvement (Berger et al., 2017). Prevention is protection.
I have come to believe that the most important work in child welfare is the work that keeps the crisis from happening at all.
If the last chapter was about telling the truth, this chapter is about what we do with it. Because naming a problem is only worth something if it points us toward a better way.
I do not have every answer. No one does. But I have seen enough to know the direction we need to walk, and I want to share it with you.
Most of the harm I respond to does not come out of nowhere.
It grows in soil we could have changed: untreated trauma, untreated addiction, untreated mental illness, isolation, violence, and the grinding stress of poverty. By the time a report reaches my desk, the conditions that produced it have often been building for years.
What if we met families before the crisis instead of after?
A parent who can find affordable childcare does not have to leave a child alone. A parent who can get into treatment does not have to parent while impaired. A family that can keep the lights on does not become a neglect investigation. A mother who is not afraid of being reported is free to ask for help while the problem is still small.
The research increasingly points the same way: when families have economic stability and real support, child maltreatment goes down. Studies of the Earned Income Tax Credit have found that a relatively modest increase in a family’s income — about a thousand dollars — is associated with measurably less neglect and notably fewer reports to child protective services among low-income families.6 The effect is not a cure-all, and researchers continue to debate its size, but the direction is consistent. Helping families is not separate from protecting children. It is how you protect children.
The earlier we help, the fewer children we have to rescue.
For most of its history, this field has been organized around what is wrong with families.
The most promising work being done today is organized around what is strong in them.
Researchers and practitioners have identified a set of protective factors that help families weather hardship without harm: parental resilience, social connections, knowledge of parenting and child development, concrete support in times of need, and the social and emotional competence of children.7 These are not luxuries. They are the things that keep ordinary families safe through extraordinary stress.
A system that asks only “What is the danger here?” will always be a system of removal.
A system that also asks “What is the strength here, and how do we build on it?” can become a system of support.
Both questions matter. We have spent a century asking the first one. It is time to get just as good at the second.
When a child cannot safely stay with a parent, the next best thing is almost always family.
Children do better when they are placed with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the people they already know and love.8 Keeping a child connected to their family, their culture, and their community softens the blow of removal and shortens the road home. A kin-first approach should be the rule, not the exception.
And families navigating the court process deserve real help. When parents are given high-quality, interdisciplinary legal representation early — a lawyer, a social worker, and a parent advocate working together — the results are striking. A large study of this model in New York found that children spent roughly four fewer months in foster care, were reunified with their families significantly more often in the first year, and were released to relatives far more frequently — all without any increase in abuse or neglect. Children left care sooner and just as safely.9 Good representation for parents is not the enemy of child safety. It is one of its quiet allies.
Protecting children and respecting families are not opposites.
Done right, they are the same work.
For too long, the people most affected by this system — parents who have been investigated, young people who grew up in foster care, kinship caregivers — have been treated as the subjects of the work rather than partners in it.
That is changing, and it must change faster.
The parent who has been through the process and come out the other side knows things no training can teach. The young person who aged out of care can tell us what helped and what only hurt. When we build these voices into how the system is designed, not just how it is studied, we make better decisions.
The experts are not only in the offices and the courtrooms.
Many of them are the people we once had a case on.
Here is the future I believe in.
I believe in a child welfare system that is smaller — not because we have stopped caring about children, but because fewer families have reached the point of crisis.
I believe in a system that intervenes less in the lives of families who need a hand, and reserves its hardest powers for the situations that truly require them.
I believe in a system that treats poverty as a problem to be solved, not a parenting failure to be punished.
I believe in a system that reckons honestly with whom it has burdened, and changes.
I believe in a system that feels the weight of every separation and works from the first day toward reunion.
And I believe in a system humble enough to know that the goal was never the system at all.
The goal was always the child.
Social work was born, more than a century ago, out of a belief that the way to protect the vulnerable was to change the conditions that made them vulnerable. One of its pioneers, Jane Addams, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for that conviction.10 Somewhere along the way, much of the field drifted from helping families toward investigating them. The work ahead is to find our way back.
We will not get there in my career. Maybe not in my lifetime.
But every parent who gets help before the crisis, every child who stays safely home, every family kept whole, every separation we manage to prevent, moves us one step closer.
That is the direction.
And it is worth walking, one family at a time.
As a CPS investigator, I have spent more than two decades listening to children, parents, relatives, foster parents, teachers, doctors, therapists, law enforcement officers, attorneys, and judges.
I have seen families at their very worst moments.
I have seen children who were scared, hurt, confused, neglected, abused, and forgotten.
I have also seen families heal.
I have seen parents overcome addiction.
I have seen parents leave violent relationships.
I have seen parents address their mental health concerns.
I have seen parents reunify with their children after doing the difficult work necessary to create change.
If there is one thing I want every parent to understand, it is this:
Children did not choose the circumstances they were born into.
Children come into this world as blank slates.
They do not get to choose their parents.
They do not get to choose whether their parents struggle with substance abuse, domestic violence, mental health concerns, criminal involvement, poverty, trauma, or unhealthy relationships.
They do not get to choose whether there is food in the refrigerator, whether the lights are on, whether they have clean clothes, whether they feel safe in their home, or whether their emotional needs are being met.
Children simply arrive.
Then they rely on the adults in their lives to teach them everything they know.
As parents, we teach our children what relationships look like.
We teach them how to communicate.
We teach them how to solve problems.
We teach them how to love.
We teach them how to cope.
We teach them how to respond to stress.
Whether we realize it or not, our children are always watching.
Many of the families that come to the attention of Child Protective Services are not bad people.
Many are people who have experienced significant trauma in their own childhoods.
Some were abused.
Some were neglected.
Some were exposed to domestic violence.
Some grew up around addiction.
Some never received the help they needed when they were children.
As adults, those unresolved experiences often continue to affect their lives, their relationships, and their parenting.
Pain that is not addressed has a way of showing up later.
Trauma does not simply disappear because someone becomes an adult.
Many parents are carrying wounds they never healed from.
Unfortunately, those wounds sometimes impact their ability to safely parent their own children.
That is why change is so important.
It is okay to make mistakes.
It is okay to struggle.
It is okay to ask for help.
What matters is recognizing the problem and being willing to do something about it.
Children do not deserve abuse.
Children do not deserve neglect.
Children do not deserve to be hungry.
Children do not deserve to witness violence.
Children do not deserve to be exposed to substance abuse.
Children do not deserve to be left without protection.
Children deserve safety.
Children deserve stability.
Children deserve love.
Children deserve consistency.
Children deserve adults who are willing to put their needs first.
My hope is that this book helps families better understand Child Protective Services and the decisions that are made throughout the process.
My hope is that parents gain a better understanding of safety, protective capacities, accountability, and change.
My hope is that children grow up in homes where they are safe, supported, encouraged, and loved.
I also want parents to know something important:
The people who work in child welfare are people too.
We are mothers.
We are fathers.
We are grandparents.
We are aunts.
We are uncles.
We are cousins.
We are friends.
We are human beings who care deeply about children and families.
The work is not always easy.
The decisions are not always easy.
But the goal has always been the same:
To protect children while helping families heal.
I believe families can change.
I believe people can grow.
I believe cycles can be broken.
I believe healing is possible.
And I believe every child deserves the opportunity to grow up feeling safe, valued, protected, and loved.
That is why I do this work.
And that is why I wrote this book.
— Tarsha Stewart
Throughout my career as a Child Protective Services Investigator, children have given me hundreds of drawings, coloring pages, handmade cards, and notes.
Some were created during visits.
Some were given to me after difficult conversations.
Some were handed to me with a smile.
Others were quietly placed in my hand before a child walked away.
Over the years, I saved them.
What started as a few pictures tucked away in a desk drawer eventually became a collection of memories that followed me throughout my career.
When people ask me why I have stayed in this profession for more than two decades, these drawings are part of the answer.
As investigators, we spend countless hours interviewing families, gathering information, attending court hearings, writing reports, and making difficult decisions. Much of our work is documented in case files that are eventually closed and archived.
But these drawings tell a different story.
They remind me of the children.
They remind me of the conversations, the laughter, the visits, and the relationships that developed during some of the most challenging times in a child’s life.
Every picture in this section was given to me by a child.
To someone else, they may simply look like coloring pages or drawings.
To me, they represent trust.
They represent connection.
They represent moments that mattered.
Years later, I may not remember every report I wrote or every court date I attended, but I remember the children who gave me these pictures.
The following pages contain a small collection of artwork that I have kept throughout the years.
These drawings remind me why this work has always been about more than investigations, court hearings, and paperwork.
It has always been about the children.
And I will never forget them.
[ Artwork to be inserted here. ]
This section is designed to hold a small gallery of the real children’s drawings, cards, and coloring pages Tarsha saved over her career. Those original images were not among the photos recovered from her phone (they may be in her physical collection or stored elsewhere). When she provides them, each can be placed on its own page in this section. Faces, names, and any identifying details should be removed or avoided, and the drawings used only with appropriate permission, in keeping with the confidentiality commitment stated at the front of this book.
Statistics help us see the shape of a system that most people only meet one family at a time. The figures below describe child welfare in the United States in recent years. They are drawn from federal data sources, principally the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ annual Child Maltreatment report and the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS).
A note on the figures: The numbers below are drawn from the most recent federal reports — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Child Maltreatment 2024 (released January 16, 2026) and recent-year AFCARS foster-care data — and have been verified against those primary sources.
Scale - In federal fiscal year 2024, 532,228 children were determined to be victims of abuse or neglect — a rate of 7.2 per 1,000 children.11 - An estimated 1,773 children died from abuse or neglect that year (2.41 per 100,000).12 - The number of children in foster care has fallen for several years, to roughly 330,000 in recent years, down from about 407,000 in 2020.13
What the cases are - Neglect is by far the most common finding. In FFY 2024, 63.3% of victims suffered neglect alone — compared with 11.4% physical abuse and 6.9% sexual abuse; another 11.3% experienced more than one type of maltreatment.14 - The youngest children are the most vulnerable: infants under one year old have the highest victimization rate of any age group, 20.1 per 1,000.15
What happens to families - Reunification is the single most common outcome for children leaving foster care — though it remains under half (about 45%) of exits. Others achieve permanency through guardianship or adoption, frequently with relatives.16 - Kinship care is rising: the share of children entering foster care placed with relatives grew from 26% (2007) to 35% (2021).17
Disproportionality - A landmark longitudinal analysis estimated that 37.4% of all U.S. children — and 53.0% of Black children — experience a child protective services investigation by age 18.18 - Black and Native American children are over-represented in investigations and in foster care relative to their share of the child population — the disproportionality that prompted the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
Numbers can feel abstract until they describe your own community. The figures below come from Nevada and from the Clark County Department of Family Services — the agency where I have spent my career.
Clark County (calendar year 2024): - The agency received 30,484 reports of abuse and neglect and answered roughly 48,000 intake calls on its community and emergency lines.19 - It conducted 12,087 CPS investigations, of which 3,017 were substantiated — about one in four.20 - At the end of 2024, more children were living with relatives (1,225) than in traditional foster care (651) — a real-world picture of the kin-first approach described in Chapters 8 and 12. Another 300 children remained safely in their parents’ care under agency supervision.21 - 528 adoptions were finalized that year.22
Child Haven — the county’s emergency children’s shelter, where I began my child-welfare career — held an average of about 73 children a day, who stayed an average of fewer than 14 days before moving to a family placement.23
Disproportionality, close to home: African American children made up 34.3% of all children in Clark County placement at the end of 2024 — more than double their share of the county’s children. The national pattern described in Chapter 11 is visible in our own backyard.24
Statewide: Nevada received roughly 41,921 reports of child abuse and neglect in 2022.25 Between FFY 2019 and FFY 2023, Nevada’s identified victims rose about 32% — the largest increase of any state in that period — even as the national number of identified victims fell.26 The newest federal report tempers that picture: Child Maltreatment 2024 shows Nevada’s count easing back to about 14,900 victims in FFY 2024 — near its 2020 level — which suggests the earlier spike reflected changing screening and substantiation practice (and an unusually low 2019 baseline) as much as a true rise in abuse. It remains a trend worth watching.27
See the References and Further Reading section for full source information.
A plain-language guide to the words parents and students will encounter in child welfare. Definitions are written for understanding; legal definitions vary by state and should be confirmed with an attorney or local statute.
Adult functioning — How a person manages the responsibilities of adulthood, viewed through behavioral, cognitive, and emotional functioning.
ASFA (Adoption and Safe Families Act, 1997) — Federal law emphasizing child safety and timely permanency, including timelines for permanency decisions.
Case plan — An individualized plan identifying the services and behavioral changes needed to address the safety concerns that brought a family into the system.
Child Advocate Program (CAP) attorney — An attorney who represents the interests of the children in a dependency court case.
Collateral contact — A person outside the immediate family (teacher, doctor, relative, neighbor) who can provide information relevant to an assessment.
Differential (or alternative) response — An approach that lets agencies respond to lower-risk reports with services and support rather than a formal investigation. It is available in many states but not all, and the rules vary by jurisdiction.
Disposition hearing — The court hearing that focuses on what should happen next, including approval of the case plan.
Fictive kin — A person who is not related by blood or marriage but has a family-like bond with the child (a godparent, a close family friend).
ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act, 1978) — Federal law establishing protections for Native American children and tribes in child welfare proceedings, enacted in response to the historic removal of Native children from their families and tribes.
Impending danger — A foreseeable threat to a child that is not necessarily occurring in the moment but is likely to cause serious harm in the near future; identified through assessment of family conditions and patterns.
Kinship care — Placement of a child with relatives when they cannot safely remain with a parent.
Mandated reporter — A professional legally required to report suspected child abuse or neglect (teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists, law enforcement, and others).
Maltreatment — An umbrella term for abuse and neglect of a child.
Neglect — Failure to provide for a child’s basic needs (supervision, food, shelter, medical care, safety); the most common category of maltreatment, and the one most entangled with poverty.
No contest plea — A plea in which a parent neither admits nor denies the allegations and agrees to move forward with the case.
Permanency — A safe, stable, lasting home for a child, achieved through reunification, guardianship, adoption, or placement with kin.
Petition — The legal document filed by the District Attorney outlining the concerns that bring a family before the court.
Plea hearing — The hearing at which a parent responds to the petition, typically by entering a no-contest plea or denying the allegations.
Preliminary Protective Hearing (PPH) — The first court hearing after a child is taken into protective custody, generally held within a few judicial days.
Present danger — An immediate, obvious, and significant threat to a child that is occurring now or is about to occur, requiring immediate protective action.
Protective capacities — The behavioral, cognitive, and emotional strengths a caregiver has that allow them to protect a child.
Protective custody — The temporary placement of a child outside the home when no safety plan can adequately keep the child safe at home.
Reasonable efforts — The legal requirement that agencies make genuine efforts to prevent removal and, after removal, to reunify the family.
Reunification — The return of a child to their parent or primary caregiver; the primary goal in most cases.
Safety plan — A specific set of actions and arrangements designed to control identified danger and keep a child safe, in-home whenever possible.
Stages of Change — A model (drawn from the work of Prochaska and DiClemente) describing how people move from not recognizing a problem to making lasting change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.
Substantiation / finding — The conclusion of an investigation as to whether maltreatment occurred.
Vulnerability — How susceptible a child is to harm and how dependent they are on others for protection, based on age, development, health, and ability to self-protect.
These questions are offered for parents reading on their own, for support and parenting groups, and for use in classrooms and professional training — social work and education programs, CASA and foster- parent training, and new-investigator academies. There are no right answers. The goal is reflection.
Chapter 1 — The Day CPS Knocked on Your Door 1. Why might a parent’s first reaction to an investigator shape the course of an investigation? What would help a frightened parent in that moment? 2. Why is the identity of the reporter kept confidential? What are the benefits and the costs of that confidentiality?
Chapter 2 — Good Parent vs. Safe Parent 1. In your own words, what is the difference between a “good parent” and a “safe parent”? Can someone be one and not the other? 2. Where is the line between discipline and abuse? How might that line look different across families, cultures, and generations?
Chapter 3 — Adult Functioning 1. How can a person’s behavioral, cognitive, and emotional functioning affect their ability to parent? 2. Why does the chapter emphasize looking for the root cause beneath a visible behavior?
Chapter 4 — Parenting Functioning 1. Why might a parent who loves their child deeply still struggle to meet that child’s needs? 2. What does it mean to “articulate a plan of protection,” and why does it matter?
Chapter 5 — Child Functioning 1. Why is it important to assess each child individually, even within the same family? 2. The chapter says children often love and protect parents who have harmed them. How should that change the way we interpret what a child says?
Chapter 6 — Present and Impending Danger 1. What is the difference between a problem and a safety threat? 2. Why can a calm, tidy home still contain impending danger?
Chapter 7 — Domestic Violence, Substance Abuse, and Mental Health 1. Why does the chapter insist that a diagnosis alone does not make someone an unsafe parent? 2. How are these three concerns connected, and why does identifying the root cause matter?
Chapter 8 — Safety Planning and Protective Capacities 1. What conditions have to be present for a child to stay safely at home under a safety plan? 2. How can a safety plan build on a family’s strengths rather than only its deficits?
Chapter 9 — Court, Removal, Reunification, and Case Plans 1. What is the difference between a safety decision and a legal decision? 2. The chapter distinguishes compliance from change. Why is that distinction so important to reunification?
Chapter 10 — The Stages of Change 1. Which stage of change do you think is the hardest to move through, and why? 2. How should a setback or relapse be understood within this model?
Chapter 11 — The Harder Truths 1. The author argues that most “neglect” is entangled with poverty. What should a just system do differently in response? 2. Why does the author insist that “removal is never free,” even when it is necessary? 3. What does it mean to “get it wrong in both directions,” and how should a system guard against both kinds of error?
Chapter 12 — Toward a Safer, More Just System 1. What would it mean to measure success by the crises a system prevents rather than the ones it responds to? 2. Why might a healthier child welfare system actually be a smaller one? 3. How could the voices of parents and former foster youth change the way the system is designed?
For the whole book 1. How did this book change, confirm, or complicate what you believed about Child Protective Services? 2. If you could change one thing about how the system treats families, what would it be?
Knowing your rights can lower fear and help you participate meaningfully in an investigation and, if it comes to it, a court case.
Important: Specific legal rights vary by state and by the stage of a case, and only a licensed attorney can advise you about your situation. CPS workers cannot give legal advice. The list below is a general, plain-language guide — not legal counsel. When in doubt, ask for the worker’s name and contact information, and consult an attorney.
The court process described in Chapter 9 follows the same general shape across the country, but the specific names and deadlines are set by each state’s law. Because most readers of this book are Nevada families, this appendix maps that process onto Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) Chapter 432B, the law that governs the protection of children from abuse and neglect in our state.
This is general information, not legal advice. Statutes change, deadlines can be extended for good cause, and every case is different. CPS workers cannot give legal advice. For advice about your situation, consult an attorney. Citations below should be confirmed against the current statute.
1. Protective custody. A child may be placed in protective custody when necessary for the child’s safety (NRS 432B.390). Parents must be given notice — orally and by written notice mailed to their last known address — generally within 24 hours.28
2. The 72-hour hearing. A child placed in protective custody must be given a hearing before a judge or master within 72 hours — excluding weekends and holidays — to decide whether the child should remain in custody. This is the hearing Chapter 9 calls the Preliminary Protective Hearing.29
3. The petition (within 10 days). After the protective custody hearing, the agency has 10 days to either file a petition initiating the case in court or recommend against further court action.30
4. Adjudicatory hearing (within 30 days of the petition). The court holds an adjudicatory hearing within 30 days after the petition is filed (absent good cause or a continuance). The court decides, by a preponderance of the evidence, whether the child was in need of protection.31
5. Dispositional hearing (immediately or within 15 working days). After adjudication, the court makes its disposition — approving the case plan and placement — either immediately or within 15 working days.32
6. Permanency hearing (within 12 months) and review hearings. The court reviews the permanency plan within 12 months of removal and at least annually thereafter, and determines whether the agency has made reasonable efforts to finalize permanency. (The permanency clock generally starts at the earlier of adjudication or 60 days after removal.)33
7. The “14 of 22 months” rule. If a child has been in foster care for 14 or more of the most recent 22 months, the agency must generally include termination of parental rights in the permanency plan — unless the child is placed with a relative, the agency did not provide reunification services consistently, or there are compelling documented reasons that termination would not be in the child’s best interest.34
In plain terms: in Nevada, the system moves quickly at the start — a hearing within roughly three court days, a petition within about two weeks, a trial-type hearing within a month — and then settles into a longer rhythm of services, visits, and reviews aimed at one question the law keeps asking: can this child safely go home, and if not, where will this child find permanency?
A serious book does not pretend the field speaks with one voice. This appendix maps the major empirical and normative debates that bear on the argument of this book, presenting the strongest version of each position. It is written for readers who want to go past consensus statements and into the genuine disputes that occupy child-welfare scholarship.
There is little serious dispute that poverty is the most powerful correlate of child-welfare involvement. The association is old, large, and replicated (Pelton, 1989; Drake & Jonson-Reid, 2014; Slack et al.). The harder question is causal: does material hardship cause the conditions the system labels neglect, or are poverty and maltreatment both downstream of some third factor (parental mental health, substance use, intergenerational disadvantage)?
The recent evidence has moved the field toward a causal reading. Quasi-experimental and natural- experiment designs — exploiting variation in the Earned Income Tax Credit (Berger et al., 2017), the timing of tax-credit payments (Kovski et al., 2022), minimum-wage changes, and income shocks — generally find that exogenous increases in family income reduce maltreatment reports and CPS involvement. This is the strongest basis for the prevention argument in Chapter 12. It is not airtight: effect sizes vary, “neglect” is a heterogeneous outcome, and some scholars (and critics at think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute) caution that the cash-prevention literature is suggestive rather than settled. The honest position is that the causal arrow from poverty to neglect is now well supported but not beyond debate.
This is the most consequential disagreement in child welfare, and it is worth stating both sides precisely.
The structural-racism position. Roberts (2002, 2022) and scholars such as Dettlaff argue that the child-welfare system functions as a mechanism of racialized surveillance and control of Black and Native families — “family policing” — and that the over-representation of these children reflects bias and structural racism operating at every decision point, not merely underlying need. On this view, the disparity is a feature of how the system works, and the remedy is structural, up to and including abolition.
The risk/exposure position. A second body of work — most associated with Drake, Jonson-Reid, and colleagues (e.g., “Racial Bias in Child Protection?”, Pediatrics, 2011) and with quantitative scholars including Putnam-Hornstein — argues that once one accounts for poverty and concrete risk exposure, much (though not all) of the racial disparity in substantiation and placement reflects differences in underlying need rather than differential treatment by caseworkers. On this view, “racial disproportionality” is real but is substantially a downstream expression of economic inequality; fighting it means fighting poverty, not primarily re-training caseworkers.
These positions are often presented as irreconcilable, but they share more than the rhetoric suggests: both locate the deepest driver in structural disadvantage. They diverge on the locus of bias (in the system’s decisions vs. in the conditions it responds to) and on the remedy (transformation/abolition vs. anti-poverty investment and procedural reform). This book’s stance — that the disparity is real, morally intolerable, and most powerfully addressed by attacking the poverty beneath it while also reckoning honestly with bias — is a deliberately integrative one, and reasonable scholars will place it too far toward one pole or the other.
Several jurisdictions now use actuarial and machine-learning tools to help screen reports — most famously the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (developed with Vaithianathan and Putnam-Hornstein). The promise is consistency and better-than-clinician prediction; the peril, documented by Eubanks (Automating Inequality, 2018) and analyzed by Chouldechova and colleagues, is that models trained on historically biased data may reproduce or launder that bias, and that “risk” scores can become self-fulfilling. The fairness literature shows that competing definitions of algorithmic fairness cannot all be satisfied at once. This debate — accuracy versus equity, prediction versus due process — is among the most active in the field and is essential context for any contemporary discussion of how screening decisions are made.
The field has long swung between an emphasis on keeping families together and an emphasis on protecting children even at the cost of separation. Each pole has its scholarly champions: Gelles (The Book of David, 1996) argued that family-preservation ideology had cost children their lives; advocates such as Wexler (and the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform) argue the opposite — that needless removal is the more common and less visible harm. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 tilted the system toward expedited permanency; the Family First Act of 2018 tilted it back toward prevention. This book sits on the prevention side of the pendulum but takes the safety pole seriously: it insists that some removals are necessary and that a system blind to genuine danger fails children as surely as one that removes too readily.
The strongest causal evidence on removal comes from Doyle (2007, 2008), who used the effectively random assignment of cases to investigators in Illinois to estimate the effect of placement on children at the margin. He found worse outcomes — including higher adult criminal involvement — for marginal children who were placed versus those who remained home. The design is widely respected; its limits are equally important to state. It estimates a local effect for marginal cases (those that could have gone either way), not for clear-cut cases of severe abuse, and its generalizability across eras and jurisdictions is debated. It is powerful evidence that removal is not costless and should be reserved for cases of genuine danger — not evidence that removal is never warranted.
Finally, scholars across these debates agree on one methodological point that the public rarely hears: the field’s core constructs are noisy. “Maltreatment,” and especially “neglect,” are heterogeneous categories; “substantiation” is a weak and inconsistent proxy for whether a child was actually harmed (Kohl, Jonson-Reid & Drake); and administrative data reflect system contact as much as underlying behavior. Much of the apparent disagreement in the literature is, at bottom, disagreement about what is being measured. Readers should hold every statistic in this book — including the ones marshaled in its favor — with appropriate epistemic humility.
This appendix is intended to demonstrate command of the debates, not to resolve them. Full citations appear in the References. Scholars are encouraged to read the primary sources and reach their own conclusions; that, after all, is the point.
If this book has a thesis — that child safety and family integrity are more often allies than adversaries, and that prevention outperforms reaction — then it also implies a set of questions that remain genuinely open. The following are offered not as rhetorical flourishes but as researchable problems, several of which would make worthy dissertations.
On causation and prevention. - What is the magnitude and durability of the effect of unconditional income support (e.g., guaranteed income, expanded child tax credits) on substantiated neglect, and for which families is the effect largest? The post-2021 Child Tax Credit expansion and its lapse offer a natural experiment still being analyzed. - Which specific concrete supports — child care, housing assistance, transportation, treatment access — yield the greatest reduction in system involvement per dollar?
On removal and its alternatives. - Do Doyle’s marginal-placement findings replicate in other states, other eras, and under current practice? Where are the boundaries of the effect? - For which case profiles does in-home safety planning produce equivalent safety to removal, and how can those profiles be identified prospectively without reproducing bias?
On disproportionality. - After fully accounting for exposure and poverty, how much racial disparity in decision-making remains at each decision point (report, screen-in, substantiation, removal, reunification, termination), and what interventions measurably reduce it? - What are the downstream effects of “blind removal” and other bias-reduction protocols that have been piloted in several jurisdictions?
On prediction and due process. - Can predictive screening tools be designed and governed so that gains in accuracy do not come at the cost of equity or due process — and who should decide the trade-offs? - What is the effect of guaranteed, early, interdisciplinary legal representation for parents when brought to national scale, and does the New York finding generalize?
On the construct itself. - Can the field develop measures of child safety and well-being that are less noisy than substantiation and less driven by system contact — and would adopting them change what we think we know?
On the workforce. - What is the effect of investigator caseload, tenure, and secondary traumatic stress on the quality and equity of safety decisions? The knowledge embedded in experienced practitioners — the kind this book draws on — is rarely studied as data in its own right.
The honest conclusion of two decades of practice is not certainty. It is a sharper sense of which questions matter most. These are mine.
This book is written primarily from experience, but the practice of child welfare rests on a body of research, law, and established frameworks. These notes credit the ideas behind several chapters and point readers toward the original sources. Full citations appear in the References section.
Chapter 6 (Present and Impending Danger). The distinction between present danger and impending danger, the concept of the “danger threshold,” child vulnerability, and caregiver protective capacities are drawn from the safety-assessment frameworks widely used in American child welfare, including the model developed by Action for Child Protection and the Structured Decision Making (SDM) system developed by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency / Children’s Research Center.
Chapter 7 (Domestic Violence, Substance Abuse, and Mental Health). The discussion of how early adversity affects long-term health and development reflects the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) research of Felitti, Anda, and colleagues (1998) and the broader trauma literature, including the work of Bessel van der Kolk and Bruce Perry.
Chapter 8 (Safety Planning and Protective Capacities). The strengths-based view of protective capacities aligns with the Protective Factors Framework developed through the Center for the Study of Social Policy’s Strengthening Families initiative.
Chapter 10 (The Stages of Change). The Stages of Change model — precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance — comes from the Transtheoretical Model of behavior change developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente.
Chapter 11 (The Harder Truths). The figures on the reach of the child welfare system draw on federal data and on the longitudinal analysis by Kim, Wildeman, Jonson-Reid, and Drake (2017). The analysis of racial disproportionality and the critique of “family policing” engage the work of the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts and the sociologist Kelley Fong. The history of Native family separation is the context for the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
Chapter 12 (Toward a Safer, More Just System). The emphasis on prevention, economic support, kin- first placement, and high-quality family defense reflects a growing evidence base, including research associated with Casey Family Programs and studies of interdisciplinary parent-representation models. The Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 marks a federal shift toward prevention.
This book is grounded in both experience and evidence. The works below informed the frameworks discussed in these pages and are offered for readers — parents, students, and professionals — who wish to go deeper. They represent a range of perspectives, including some that challenge the system from the outside; that range is intentional.
Sources are presented in APA style. The federal statistics throughout this book were verified against the primary reports — the U.S. Children’s Bureau’s Child Maltreatment series (most recently Child Maltreatment 2024), AFCARS, and the Clark County DFS Statistical Overview.
Draft scaffold — for the author to personalize. Bracketed prompts are suggestions, not text to keep.
This book exists because of the people who shaped the work and the life behind it.
To the children I have been privileged to know throughout my career — thank you for your courage, your honesty, and your trust. You are the reason for every page.
To my colleagues in child welfare — the investigators, caseworkers, supervisors, support staff, and administrators [names or units, if desired] — thank you for carrying work that is heavier than most people will ever know.
To the families who allowed me into the hardest moments of their lives — thank you for teaching me what love, resilience, and second chances really look like.
To my teachers and mentors [names, if desired], who believed in me before I believed in myself.
To my family — [your children, your partner, your parents, and any others you wish to name here] — thank you for your patience through the long hours, the late nights, and the cases I carried home in my heart. [A personal line here will mean more than anything I could draft.]
And to everyone working to make the system smaller, fairer, and gentler for the next family — thank you. The work continues.
Tarsha’s idea for the follow-up volume:
The next book…..📕 Before You Make the Call
A CPS Investigator’s Guide for Mandated Reporters
That book could include:
What is a mandated reporter? Do’s and don’ts Reasonable suspicion Documentation What to ask What not to ask Common mistakes Physical abuse Sexual abuse Neglect Domestic violence What happens after the report Real scenarios Frequently asked questions
That could easily be a 100-page standalone guide.
His obituary records that he “worked at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in Southern California for NASA” (Kings Funeral Home, Jennings, Louisiana, 2023). McDonnell Douglas’s Southern California space division, at Huntington Beach, built the S-IVB — the third stage of the Saturn V, whose engine fired in orbit to send the Apollo missions to the Moon.↩︎
In the most recent federal data, neglect was the most common finding by far — about two-thirds of victims (63.3%) suffered neglect alone, far more than physical or sexual abuse. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Child Maltreatment 2024 (released January 16, 2026).↩︎
On the lifetime risk of foster-care placement and its racial disparities, see Wildeman, C., & Emanuel, N. (2014). “Cumulative Risks of Foster Care Placement by Age 18 for U.S. Children.” PLOS ONE, 9(3), e92785; on investigation prevalence, see Kim et al. (2017), cited below. Scholars disagree about how much of this disparity reflects bias versus underlying need and exposure; I lay out both sides honestly in Appendix F.↩︎
Kim, H., Wildeman, C., Jonson-Reid, M., & Drake, B. (2017). “Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among US Children.” American Journal of Public Health, 107(2), 274–280 — estimating 37.4% of all children and 53.0% of Black children.↩︎
Doyle, J. J. (2007). “Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care.” American Economic Review, 97(5); and (2008) “Child Protection and Adult Crime.” Journal of Political Economy, 116(4).↩︎
Berger, L. M., Font, S. A., Slack, K. S., & Waldfogel, J. (2017). “Income and Child Maltreatment in Unmarried Families: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit.” Review of Economics of the Household — finding a $1,000 income increase associated with a 3–4% decrease in neglect and an 8–10% decrease in CPS involvement; see also Kovski et al., Pediatrics (2022). For a more skeptical reading of how much cash transfers alone reduce maltreatment, see American Enterprise Institute (2023).↩︎
These are the five protective factors of the Center for the Study of Social Policy’s Strengthening Families framework, now used in prevention programs across the country.↩︎
A Cochrane systematic review found that children in kinship care tended to have fewer behavioral problems and greater placement stability than those in non-relative foster care, while noting that such comparisons are affected by selection differences between the two groups. Winokur, M., Holtan, A., & Batchelder, K. (2014). “Kinship care for the safety, permanency, and well-being of children removed from the home for maltreatment.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 1, Art. No. CD006546.↩︎
Gerber, L. A., Pang, Y. C., Ross, T., Guggenheim, M., Pecora, P. J., & Miller, J. (2019). “Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach to Parental Representation in Child Welfare.” Children and Youth Services Review, 102, 42–55 — finding children spent roughly 118 fewer days (about four months) in foster care and were reunified significantly more often, with no increase in maltreatment.↩︎
Jane Addams (1860–1935), co-founder of Hull House and a founder of the American social-work profession, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.↩︎
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Child Maltreatment 2024 (released January 16, 2026). This is the most recent federal report; the prior year (FFY 2023) recorded 546,159 victims at 7.4 per 1,000.↩︎
Child Maltreatment 2024.↩︎
Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), FY2023–FY2025 reports.↩︎
Child Maltreatment 2024. These are counted as mutually exclusive categories; counting neglect either alone or in combination with another type brings the share to 79.3%.↩︎
Child Maltreatment 2024.↩︎
AFCARS, recent fiscal years (FY2023–FY2024).↩︎
AFCARS, entry-cohort comparison.↩︎
Kim, H., Wildeman, C., Jonson-Reid, M., & Drake, B. (2017). “Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among US Children.” American Journal of Public Health, 107(2), 274–280.↩︎
Clark County Department of Family Services, Family Services Statistical Overview Report, December 2024 (data as of January 12, 2025).↩︎
Clark County DFS, Statistical Overview, December 2024.↩︎
Clark County DFS, Statistical Overview, December 2024.↩︎
Clark County DFS, Statistical Overview, December 2024.↩︎
Clark County DFS, Statistical Overview, December 2024.↩︎
Clark County DFS, Statistical Overview, December 2024 (Demographics of Children in Placement).↩︎
Child Welfare League of America, Nevada State Fact Sheet; Nevada Division of Child and Family Services.↩︎
U.S. HHS, Child Maltreatment 2023, which reports each state’s change in victims from FFY2019 to FFY2023; Nevada’s +32% was the largest state increase that year. See also the analysis in Child Welfare Monitor (January 2025).↩︎
U.S. HHS, Child Maltreatment 2024 (released January 16, 2026), state victim counts, FFY2020–FFY2024.↩︎
NRS 432B.470.↩︎
NRS 432B.470 and 432B.480.↩︎
NRS 432B.490.↩︎
NRS 432B.530; see also 432B.513.↩︎
NRS 432B.530.↩︎
NRS 432B.590; 432B.553.↩︎
NRS 432B.553; termination itself proceeds under NRS Chapter 128.↩︎