We are beyond ourselves right now, we just had a visit from child protective services, alleging drugs and hitting of our 3 year old son.
We’re in New Jersey, I shouldn’t have signed anything, but we did, he’s on his way to talk to our son at his school.
Our neighbor is saying it’s illegal for him to do that? We’re calling the preschool now. They also want us to do a drug screening. We don’t do drugs, but what are our rights?
We love our child, we would never harm him, he’s a bit hyper active and after starting school he’s been occasionally hitting us when he gets angry. So we try to make it clear to him that that’s not acceptable.
Sometimes we yell, because he’s behaving badly, but this is normal. He’s been very close to his mom and going to school for him, a shy boy has been tough.
We don’t know what to do, how do we contact a lawyer? What kind of lawyer?
Any help would be appreciated. We’re just in tears right now.
I’m a shouter, and I have been investigated by CPS.
My approach was to be open and friendly and helpful. They wanted drug screenings? No problem! In the early part of this very emotional investigation, we were actually only allowed to talk to the kids while under supervision, and as much as it sucked, I went along.
In the end, my wife and I were apologized to, because we obviously were not any sort of issue to be worried about.
The entire thing was started because of lies told by the kids’ grandmother on their bio-dad’s side (after his wife got into a drunk driving accident with them in the car, and he tried to cover everything up by pretending he was the drunk driver, and sending her driving home (still very drunk, .31 BAC) with the kids).
This was all done in South Dakota, though, so things might be very different, just from a cultural standpoint.
Very tough situation. The DYFS people have enormous power, in part because judges tend to defer to their judgment. And they’re also somewhat understaffed, and sometimes err on the side of caution.
I’m not an expert, though I do know (mostly second-hand from my wife) people who’ve gotten into this situation. Your best bet is to work with them. Don’t be confrontational or make it into a power struggle. If I were you I would do the drug testing, which would satisfy them that you’re clean and also show that you have nothing to hide.
Hopefully the school staff will be on your side, which would be helpful.
Based on what you describe, it’s unlikely that they’ll take your kid away. More likely they’ll either do nothing or make some sort of probation-type agreement.
But I’m not an expert on this. Perhaps those with more expertise will chime in. I believe there are some people on this board who actually work for CPS (though in other states).
Were going to the screening now, but we told the school not to let him see our son. We’re trying to get in touch with a lawyer first. This is just the worst day fo my life.
I am a big believer in having legal representation, because otherwise you are unlikely to know your rights, and may inadvertently say or do the wrong thing. As far as finding such a person, I found my son’s advocate through his psychiatrist. You might try asking his pediatrician if they are aware of any attorneys with an expertise in family law. Other sources of referrals would be family, pastors, good friends, or even looking through Angie’s list, or using Google to find Family law associations and trying to sort through those.
ETA: Find an attorney who can help guide you through this and take it step by step. Focus on the fact that everyone wants what is best for your child. I know it’s scary, but you will get through this.
ETA2: Anyone you know who has gone through a divorce will know a family law attorney, who can either help you or may be able to refer you in the right direction.
I agree. I would not trust the government to not screw it up and cause severe headaches for me and my family. If I could keep my wits about me, as well as my temper, I would say very little other than “I will not sign anything, I will not give you permission to do anything, and I am calling our lawyer”. Hopefully, I would not let the stress and implied/articulated threats interfere with that plan.
Good luck to the OP.
For those in the know, is it true that law enforcement is not allowed to interrogate minors without a parent’s permission? Do child welfare workers have the same constraints?
As indicated above, I (vehemently) disagree with this.
You can think having a lawyer is some sort of magic shield, but it’s not. Having a lawyer can certainly help, but more important is the state of the law and who has how much power and influence over the actual process. If the DYFS people become convinced that you’re a danger to your child you might find out that your lawyer can’t do much to help you. And if there’s one thing that will make the DYFS people think you’re a danger to your kids it’s taking a hostile attitude to them.
To the OP: if you’re going to get a lawyer anyway, this - i.e. what attitude to take with DYFS people - might be one of the first questions to ask them.
This, a thousand times this. I used to work with DYFS as a social work intern. The idea that you won’t let the social services worker talk to your kid is making me cringe all over. That will be seen as a HUGE red flag. If I were you I would apologize immediately, explain that the whole ordeal is scaring the shit out of you, be 100% cooperative and kiss these people’s asses all over the place. By placing yourself in an adversarial position you are effectively establishing yourself as untrustworthy in their eyes. This isn’t the same thing as being accused of a crime. There will be no court to find you guilty or not guilty, just some undertrained staffer (most likely) who has her own professional biases and ideas about the right way to raise a child. That person is your judge, jury and executioner.
It’s not fair, but that doesn’t matter. Do you want to stand on principle, or do you want to maximize the chances that the claims will be ruled unfounded? Try to put yourself in their shoes. They don’t know you at all. This isn’t personal. They are just doing their jobs. Your responsibilities are both to your child. But if one of them gets a bug up their ass about you, it can quickly become a personal vendetta. And FWIW, the vast majority (and I mean a HUGE percentage) of child abuse investigations are ruled unfounded. Nosy people mostly waste everyone’s time. These people aren’t even expecting to find anything because in most cases they don’t.
I get that this is an emotional issue, but you need to see this as objectively as possible. If you were not you, if you had a suspicion that a child was being abused and were responsible for making that determination, what kind of behavior would you want to see from the parent?
Please do feel free to vent, bitch, moan, yell, cry, be outraged with all of us, with your friends and loved ones, just keep the drama away from DYFS.
ETA: It’s actually really super hard for a parent to lose custody of a child over stuff like this. Even if you were found to be drug addicted the kids probably wouldn’t be removed from your home unless it could be demonstrated that you refused to participate in treatment and your addiction was endangering your child. Even if you were beating your child on a regular basis you’d still get chances. I interned in a partial hospital setting (in New Jersey) with people who abused and neglected their children. It was all about teaching them to quit neglecting and abusing their kids. They had been in the system for years and still hadn’t lost their kids, this was like their last chance to straighten up (they usually didn’t, and lost their kids.) Parents get like a zillion chances to not lose their kids in the majority of cases. One of our cases finally lost her child when she burned her, refused her medical treatment and tried to hide the injury from us. It takes something really extreme.
I actually studied child welfare policy, once. It’s all kinds of fucked up, and it doesn’t err on the side of persecuting good people, it errs on the side of shitty parents getting away with abusing their children. DYFS, in particular, embraces a family preservation philosophy.
I know someone who was in this situation. There was no way they harmed their baby boy. An over-excited doc decided a minor brain bleed–not uncommon with babies with his condition–meant he’d been abused and called CPS. The parents were very cooperative, and eventually CPS cleared them, but in the meantime, they couldn’t be alone with their baby, as in 24/7: a relative had to be with them every minute. And as you’ve learned, it’s shocking and humiliating to get charged. It was sheer hell for about 3 months. The rules vary from state to state, though, so your situation may be much swifter and smoother.
So yes, be cooperative, polite, even pleasant. And contacting an attorney is never a bad idea. Hang on. And please let us know the outcome.
Anecdotal, but in our case, this didn’t even cross my mind.
I’ve always found that being open and helpful has NEVER worked against me. DFS got access to whatever they needed, when they needed it, and in the end everything worked out. We were apologized to very sincerely by the investigators who realized what a disruptive waste of time the whole thing was, and thanked for our efforts in moving things along quickly and without any hassles.
My aunt and uncle were foster parents. There is a real lack of places to put kids. Aside from a general bias to keep families together, because research shows it’s best for kids in the long run, those precious spots in foster care and group homes are saved for kids who are being sexually abused, or who have broken arms.
Judging from people I know who have had this happen (and I know a lot, because I used to work with disabled people, and neighbors are always reporting disabled people as unfit parents), the worst that will happen is that you get told to take parenting classes, and you get regular visits during a probationary period.
And it still could be completely dismissed.
You could also be told to take your son to a therapist, if his hitting you was mistaken for you hitting him.
But losing custody of him, I very seriously doubt is even on the table, unless, as others have said, you seriously piss someone off. You don’t want to become some social workers special project.
At one time, and locally, visits from Child Protective Services were “weaponized” – people would call CPS anonymously to settle scores with other people. Even strangers.
Someone cuts you off in traffic? You see they have kids in the car? Get a plate number, get to a pay phone, and tell CPS that you saw a parent in that car hitting their child with a hairbrush.
You’re a teacher, and a parent has been a pain in your side about their kids grades or something, and it’s gotten personal? They’ve gotten you called to the carpet in front of the principal or school board? Get to a payphone, call CPS on that parent.
Someone slept with your spouse? That someone has kids? Call CPS.
The word was that CPS commonly (if not invariably) removed the kids from the household for 30 days first – before any investigation or discussion. It could look and feel like a pristine sitcom household when the CPS investigator arrived – it was said that the kids would summarily be removed for 30 days. Further, the word was that CPS then proceeded with a overwhelmingly strong assumption of guilt on the parent’s side. It was akin to getting one’s identity stolen, or being a wrong-place-wrong-time-matching-name felony suspect. Generally, if nothing was truly amiss, things would get back to normal after a few months.
Meanwhile, if a recent CPS-visit home had a suspicion about who might have called CPS on them – and that whistleblower has kids – CPS would be getting yet another anonymous call in retaliation.
And on and on it went. Maybe this wasn’t a well that disgruntled folks could use too often – but often once was enough to put a family through some pain.
Not sure if things are better today. My info is about 20-30 years old, and information processing is a lot more advanced today. Anonymous phone calls are harder to execute short of burner phones or something.
One of the things we studied (and this was actually a pretty controversial way to look at child welfare policy) was mandated reporting. In this case I would blame the law, not the doctor. The doc didn’t ‘‘decide’’ the child had been abused, his professional ass was on the line if he didn’t report what he realized was probably no big deal. The way the law is phrased, it’s not even a preponderance of evidence judgment, literally if there is any chance whatsoever that a child might have been abused or neglected, you are legally required to report it even if you are 99% sure it’s bullshit.
Mandated reporting, as I understand it, ties up the system with countless unfounded reports that take time and energy away from the more serious cases. This was years ago but the stat I remember is that 95-98% of mandated reports turn out to be unfounded. The strain on the system has resulted in a lot more kids falling through the cracks. We should probably also dispense with the notion that parents being investigated are being ‘‘charged’’ with anything. When evidence for egregious criminal behavior exists, charges may be filed, but in most cases, it’s really more about figuring out if the child is in danger. CPS investigations often result in nothing.
I’m not saying I’d be calm about it if it were my head on the chopping block, but these are the facts. The most comparable experience I’ve had, which is not exactly the same thing, is experiencing a significant delay in my approval for adoption because my name turned up in the CPS system. Any time you have any contact with CPS, including to file a report of suspected abuse, your name shows up, without any indication why it’s there. My name was in the system for having been abused as a child, not for being a perpetrator of abuse, but it was stressful as hell anyway. The county in which it had occurred was not returning their phone calls. I bent over backward to get them the information they wanted, though. It helped that I had been upfront with my adoption agency about my own abuse history, so they weren’t terribly unsurprised to see my name pop up there, but they were nonetheless required to confirm the details. I was just as cooperative as humanly possible until it blew over.
I’ve never trusted CPS. When my Grandfather was a boy, CPS took him from his family (both parents were alive and at home) and put him in an orphanage. The reason? Because he wasn’t getting fed properly.
Now, this SEEMS like a reasonable action. But it wasn’t. You see, this was during the Depression! At least half the country had trouble feeding their children! It was a very traumatic experience for my Grandfather. The worthless idiots at CPS traumatized a family for no good reason.
I am a lawyer, licensed in NJ (but not at all active in NJ and not at all anybody’s lawyer in this thread) and I have dealt with Children & Youth /CPS/CPP/DYFS/whatever in lots of cases. The above is very good advice. This isn’t criminal law. Your rights are not the same, the evidentiary standards are not the same, which means the degree to which you can be inconvenienced for no good reason is very much not the same.
I agree that for your average parent with average parenting issues, removal of the child is not on the table, so unless there are some really seriously unusual facts here that would change the equation, the negative outcome isn’t losing the kid; it’s just continued involvement with the agency. It’s gonna turn out OK (absent those kinds of facts); it’s just a question of how much reason you give them to continue to make your life difficult until it turns out OK. When a report comes in, they must investigate it, so it works to everyone’s benefit if a report turns out to be nothing and they can check the boxes and close it out.
Second:
Nah, for the obvious reason: an abuser isn’t going to grant that permission, and it would be even more absurd than the already-absurd state of child protection laws if the state had to just say “shucks” every time an abusive parent (who otherwise controls essentially every vector of information in and out of the child’s life) shut down an investigation. It’s a very very different set of considerations from a criminal investigation, and the sort of thinking that can be very reasonable for the “accused” when dealing with police doesn’t really apply here. What I always told my clients – generally, at least – was: you’re the most helpful person in the world for CYS, you have infinite patience for their bullshit, it’s totally reasonable that they show up with no notice and want to check to see if there are toys on the floor or any expired food in the fridge, you would love to pee in a cup for them, of course tomorrow afternoon five minutes after you get out of work would be a perfect time for a follow-up, and so on. Because in this context, if they go back to a judge and call you uncooperative, that’s going to end up being way more annoying for you than if you just got them in and out of your life.
Thanks for the advice and help everyone. We contacted a lawyer just to be on the safe side, but were happy to talk to the agents and cooperate as much as possible.
When we got to their office for the drug screen there was a child there screaming bloody murder for her mom. My wife just broke down, and I started shaking. But aside from that everything went pretty smoothly. The agents were nice, My son was his usual shy self, but I think it’s clear to them that there’s nothign to worry about there.
What a day. i missed an interview, we’re both behind on work.
Another thing we studied was how often the people in charge of evaluating abuse and neglect allegations use factors such as poverty and cleanliness of home in their evaluations when they have no statistical validity as predictors of child endangerment. My professor showed us a statistical model that was much better at predicting child welfare outcomes than human beings. Human beings get it right about as often as random chance.
As you might imagine, my professor was not a popular person in the school of social work. His data pissed all over decades of certainty about the value of ‘‘practice wisdom.’’ People hate being told they don’t know what they’re doing.