I’m not looking for legal advice, more like legal confirmation because I can’t find anything on my own.
A co-worker’s 14-year-old wants to get the cartilage in her ear pierced. Co-worker was in favor of it until she was told that, under Michigan law, if a child under 16 (I think that’s the age she said) comes to school with a piercing anywhere but the earlobe, the school can contact child services for suspected child abuse. 
This seems odd to me. Is this an interpretation of a vaguely worded law? I can see how a ban on tattoos for children could mention needles puncturing the skin and someone saying, “By that definition piercings are outlawed, too!”
If it is actually the law, how’s a piercing in the earlobe any better than, say the cartilage or eyebrow?
Why not contact child services and ask them?
Well, I can CONTACT child services for anything I want, right? Like if I think that Suzie’s hair ribbons don’t match the rest of her outfit, I can report her parents to CPS for having no little-girl fashion sense. Now, whether or not they will do anything is a totally different matter.
Total bullshit. Here is the Michigan state handbook for mandated reporting of child abuse. It includes lists of indicators of abuse. The closest any of them come is “puncture wounds that resemble distinctive objects”, which IMO isn’t even in the same neighborhood.
robert_columbia is correct in one sense however. Someone, anyone really, can report suspected child abuse for pretty much any crazy reason they come up with.
Anyone can contact CPS about anything. Whether CPS accepts the report for investigation is another matter, and even then, cases are evaluated on a case by case basis- if there’s no food in the house because today is payday and shopping day, that’s a very different situation than one in which there is no food in the hose and the kids haven’t eaten in three days.
In any case, Michigan and every other state has an easy way to regulate the piecing of tattooing of minors - they pass an actual law on the subject. This is what I found for Michigan’s Public Health code
There are one or two states that restrict piercing for minors to the ears ( not the earlobes) I don’t know why.
Of course there may be a school principal somewhere in Michigan that decided to contact CPS once when a 7-year old walked into 2nd grade with a hole in her nose that looked like it had been made with a power drill and told the teacher “my mom pierced it for me.”
That’s a long way away from what you’re asking, but that’s the way these things get started.
Sure sounds like bs to me, and IAAL (though not in michigan). Like someone else said, anyone can “contact” social services. Doesn’t mean anything will happen. Worst case just say your religion requires you to allow your daughter to pierce her ears. If they’re not going to get you in trouble for chopping off penis parts for religious purposes they’re not going to get you in trouble for a minor ear piercing the girl herself wanted, asked for, and consented to. They may not let her wear it to school, though… and i’m sure that is the only reason she wants it.
Generally the piercing/tattoo operation is up to date on the laws…my tattoo artist once told me of a mother who brought in a 6-month old baby and want to have its social security number tattoo’d on it. He, of course, ran her off…
There you go. It would be flat out crazy for a state to allow something to be done to a child with permission from a parent, and also say that the thing allowed by the state constitutes evidence of child abuse.
Is there an actual law against doing something like that to your child? It sounds like painful abuse to me (not to mention a bad idea in general, like the kind of thing the Lifelock guy would do), but is it illegal (and if so, in which states)?
A tattoo seems pretty dam mild compared to slicing off part of a penis during circumcision.
It’s not entirely uncommon for parents of multiples to have tiny colored dots tattooed on them somewhere inconspicuous so there’s no chance of mixing them up. Some doctors will do it for them, so there’s less worry of infection or less than sterile technique.
Alaska, California, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin prohibit tattooing children, with no exceptions for parental consent - except, in some cases, for doctors in the course of their professional practice. This is probably meant to apply to tattooing for radiation treatments for cancer (tattoos are placed so that they know where to line up the machinery to irradiate the tumor(s)), but a good lawyer may be able to argue other cases, like differentiating multiples. But I can’t think of a medical reason why a social security number would need to be tattooed on an infant.
A tattoo artist, of course, is free to decline any tattoo for any reason that’s not discriminatory against a protected class.