Child-welfare probes work — saving kids

Are child-welfare investigations traumatic for families? How should we weigh that trauma against learning if children are in danger and ensuring parents change their behavior?

New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services has limited official investigations and diverted more cases into a program offering parents “support” — but doesn’t require them to take it.

The upshot: children left in unsafe homes, not to mention many gruesome child fatalities.

The push to redirect cases away from investigation and enforcement presumes families — and children themselves — suffer from these intrusions into their lives.

But a new study calls that premise into question. 

University of Texas, University of Connecticut and Allegheny County Department of Human Services researchers explore the relationship between child-welfare investigations and child well-being.

Their working paper assesses the short-term impacts of such investigations, finding children in investigated households experience significant health benefits — fewer injuries and more preventative care — over a two-month follow-up.

The researchers used data from Pittsburgh, where child-welfare investigators sift through reports of alleged child abuse or neglect with the help of a predictive risk-assessment tool.

The paper examines cases just above and below the tool-generated threshold score that triggers an automatic investigation.

The findings are astounding.

Children just above the threshold whose cases were investigated were 33% less likely “to have an injury-related Medicaid claim in the 60 days following a referral” than kids just below it — an effect driven by reductions in injuries at home.

Not only did the study find declines in harms, it found increases of 28% and 30% in wellness visits to pediatricians and immunizations respectively, adding to an investigation’s overall protective effect.

Using a host of econometric analyses, the researchers were able to confidently attribute the results primarily to the investigations themselves, not, say, foster-care placements or parental incarceration.

How does this work? In short, incentives matter.

Once families learn they’ve been reported for abuse or neglect and the government is taking note of their actions, some caregivers will clean up their acts.

Maybe they’ll realize their drug use is getting away from them or a live-in boyfriend isn’t treating the children appropriately. The investigation can be a wake-up call.

This is the approach we used to take toward low-level crime.

Rather than ignoring it, we arrested people.

We gave short jail sentences. We punished juvenile offenders. We suspended kids from school. We intervened before things escalated.

That’s an important effect child-welfare investigations are apparently having.

Recent research a Duke University professor led involving high-risk families who needed a more serious wake-up call had similar findings.

With kids on the margin of being removed, the study found children placed in foster care got more long-term benefits than those who weren’t — including lower levels of parental criminal involvement, more educational attainment and a reduced likelihood of future incarceration.

But many reform advocates are unwilling to acknowledge child-protection-system interventions play an important role.

As the new Pittsburgh study notes, “There is a growing movement to reduce investigations, limit CPS involvement in families’ lives and, at the extreme, to abolish CPS entirely.”

New York City and state policies are increasingly driven by this movement’s more radical elements.

The Big Apple’s leading mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, was a proud co-sponsor of three radical pieces of legislation, one of which would have banned routine drug screens for newborn babies and postpartum mothers, as we wrote in these pages this year.

A litany of troubling child fatalities just in the last two years have illustrated the risks such proposals invite.

One-year-old Anthony Casey’s death in Brooklyn was ruled a homicide due to blunt-force trauma.

De’Neil Timberlake, 5, was found dead in The Bronx after ingesting methadone.

Jahmeik Modlin, 4, starved to death in Harlem.

Kyng Davis, 3, was pronounced dead shortly after being left outside a Brooklyn hospital covered in bruises.

And Imani Mitchell, 1, died after a week on life support following a brutal assault in The Bronx, authorities say.

Just this month, NYPD officials released a sketch of Jacob Pritchett, 11, an autistic boy reported missing from the Brooklyn apartment ACS workers had visited just a week earlier.

He resided with his mother, who, sources told The Post, denied having any children.

Proposals to restrict child-welfare services’ ability to investigate allegations or evidence of abuse or neglect does nothing but exacerbate the risks vulnerable children face.

So why do these “reforms” garner so much backing in progressive circles?

Support stems from the belief racial disparities in child-welfare investigations and enforcement reflect bias that exposes children and families to trauma.

But this isn’t right either. Not only do black children experience known risk factors for maltreatment at much higher rates than other children, they’re also statistically overrepresented among child-fatality cases — meaning they may actually be underrepresented in the child-protection system.

One can’t help but notice the parallels between the movements to defang child-welfare systems and defund the police.

Besides fixating on the costs of enforcement while ignoring the benefits, both movements rely heavily on manipulative language games to make their case.

Just as police critics have adopted the term “criminal-legal system” — a defiant refusal to acknowledge the system does justice — many child-welfare-reform advocates have replaced the phrase “child-welfare system” with the polemical “family-policing system.”

The most important things these movements have in common, however, is that they’re both wrong and deeply harmful to the very communities they claim to speak for.

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Naomi Schaefer-Riley is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow.