What happens when a deeply embedded cultural narrative, a story we tell ourselves about unfit parents and unsuitable homes, is codified into federal law? This is the central question that inspired today's episode. Before we can till the soil and reimagine the narratives and policies that may grow from it, we must first understand the ground we are standing on and how history formed its roots. Prudence Beidler Carr, Director of the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, joins us to trace this historical arc that created the modern child welfare system. When I first saw her presentation that she has delivered across the country titled “How Poverty Became Neglect in Federal Law and Policy: A 1961 Magic Trick”, I was both troubled and inspired, so I wanted to bring her on the podcast to explore the narratives and policies that led to the conflation of poverty with neglect and created a legacy of racial disproportionality and systemic harm. Our conversation asks us to confront difficult questions: How did narratives of ‘unfit’ parents move us from a federal government that invested in families’ economic stability to one that conflated poverty with child neglect? What were the consequences of those harmful narratives and policies for Black and poor families? In turn, how have those legal and policy histories shaped dominant historical narratives in our country? And what might it take to challenge a policy framework that was built upon a false narrative? Join us for a deep dive into these questions and the hidden history and narratives that built the child protection system.
Overloaded: Understanding Neglect Season 4
Show Notes: Episode 4
Today's episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
Prudence Beidler Carr — American Bar Association's Center on Children and the Law
Annessa Hartman — Oregon State Representative
Tshaka Barrows — Haywood Burns Institute
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris — ACE Resource Network and Former California Surgeon General
Samantha Mellerson — Haywood Burns Institute
Episode Segments
00:00–04:29 — Luke Waldo
Introduction: What happens when cultural narratives about unfit parents are codified into federal law? Host Luke Waldo introduces Prudence Beidler Carr, Director of the ABA's Center on Children and the Law, to trace the historical arc of the modern child welfare system and her presentation: "How Poverty Became Neglect in Federal Law and Policy: A 1961 Magic Trick".
4:29–6:39 — Prudence Beidler Carr
Overview of the ABA's Center on Children and the Law — a nonprofit within the ABA serving ~300,000 legal professionals with a staff of 20.
6:39–7:00 — Luke Waldo
What inspired Prudence's research and this nationwide presentation?
7:00–10:34 — Prudence Beidler Carr
In summer 2020, the Commission on Youth and Family Justice was examining racial disproportionality in child welfare. Judge Ernestine Gray pushed for substantive research rather than a surface-level statement. Two catalysts: Donna Wilson's finding that very few Black children were in foster care before the 1960s, and Joyce McMillan's quote: "If foster care was a good thing, Black children would only get in through affirmative action."
10:34–12:16 — Luke Waldo
Sets up the historical walk-through of key policy milestones that built today's foster care system.
12:16–15:52 — Prudence Beidler Carr
Three major pre-1961 shifts: (1) Very few Black children in formal foster care; (2) Rare judicial involvement in child removal; (3) No federal foster care funding until 1961 — that infusion of dollars fundamentally reshaped child welfare law.
15:52–21:32 — Luke Waldo & Prudence Beidler Carr
History of Mother's Pensions and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) in the early 20th century. "Suitable home" standards were loosely defined by states and caseworkers — fitness to receive assistance, not fitness to parent.
22:30–29:28 — Prudence Beidler Carr
The second New Deal and the Social Security Act (Title IV) structured children's support through ADC. The NAACP, Urban League, and others challenged discriminatory administration. After Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 23 states tightened suitability rules within 4 years to restrict ADC access — effectively using it to push Black and Native American families out of communities to avoid school integration. Caseworkers began threatening removal, not just loss of benefits.
29:28–33:16 — Luke Waldo & Prudence Beidler Carr
The federal government had given states full discretion over ADC, so had no authority to stop discriminatory administration. In the year Ruby Bridges integrated Louisiana schools, the state cut ~23,000 children (95% nonwhite) from public assistance. HHS Secretary Arthur Flemming issued the Flemming Rule to stop this — but included two exceptions: states could still restrict ADC if they tried to "help" the family, or if they removed the child. The second exception effectively incentivized removal.
33:16–41:22 — Prudence Beidler Carr & Luke Waldo
In 1961, for the first time, Congress provided federal funding for foster care maintenance payments — in response to states requesting authority to remove children from homes deemed unsuitable for ADC. The "1961 magic trick": a few words in statute created an entirely new system that shifted from supporting families to separating them. Flemming likely did not intend to create a massive foster care system.
41:22–52:17 — Prudence Beidler Carr
The Child Welfare League of America pushed for judicial oversight of removals, but judges largely rubber-stamped caseworker decisions. In 1962, Congress codified the standard: states receive federal foster care reimbursement when a judge finds it "contrary to the child's welfare" to remain home. No operational definition was provided. The standard was about poverty, not abuse.
52:33–57:15 — Prudence Beidler Carr
The legal structure was never about protecting children from abuse — it was a generic poverty-based removal standard. Dr. Henry Kempe's 1962 "battered child syndrome" article came after the initial surge in foster care entries. By the mid-1960s, two-thirds of foster care placements stemmed from ADC referrals with limited abuse allegations.
57:15–1:05:35 — Prudence Beidler Carr
Before 1960 very few Black children were in formal foster care. By 1977: 28% of all children in foster care were Black; by ~1999: 40%. Congress repeatedly expanded foster care funding (an uncapped entitlement) rather than increasing ADC, structurally incentivizing removal. Prudence reflects on presenting this history: audiences consistently report feeling relieved to understand the system's roots and recognize it wasn't designed to do what they thought they were entering the field to do.
1:05:35–1:10:21 — Luke Waldo & Prudence Beidler Carr
65 years in, we now have intention — we can no longer call harm an "unintended consequence." This is a call to action: "It's the present and it's ours for the remaking."
1:10:21–1:14:47 — Luke Waldo & Prudence Beidler Carr
Reflection on the 1961-62 fork in the road: federal dollars could have been directed to abuse cases OR toward deeper family support. Instead the system lost focus on child protection from imminent harm. Today, 37% of all American children — and 53% of Black children — will experience a child welfare investigation before age 18. The cost extends to all families, echoing Heather McGhee's "drain the pool" metaphor.
1:33:58–1:35:47 — Luke Waldo & Prudence Beidler Carr
Closing remarks. Check out Prudence at the upcoming Together for Children conference.
1:35:47–End — Luke Waldo
Outro: The next episode explores how these narratives manifest as individual experiences and community harm, featuring Dr. Pegah Faed (Safe and Sound), Valerie Frost (national lived experience expert), Claudia Rowe (National Book Awards finalist, Wards of the State), and others.
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Luke Waldo 00:14
Welcome to season 4 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how stories and narratives shape what we believe and how we act, and how we might tell different stories that change the narrative so that all children and families can thrive.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
What happens when a deeply embedded cultural narrative, a story we tell ourselves about unfit parents and unsuitable homes, is codified into federal law? This is the central question that inspired today's episode. Before we can till the soil and reimagine the narratives and policies that may grow from it, we must first understand the ground we are standing on and how history formed its roots.
Prudence Beidler Carr, Director of the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, joins us to trace this historical arc that created the modern child welfare system. When I first saw her presentation that she has delivered across the country titled “How Poverty Became Neglect in Federal Law and Policy: A 1961 Magic Trick”, I was both troubled and inspired, so I wanted to bring her on the podcast to explore the narratives and policies that led to the conflation of poverty with neglect and created a legacy of racial disproportionality and systemic harm.
Our conversation asks us to confront difficult questions:
How did narratives of ‘unfit’ parents move us from a federal government that invested in families’ economic stability to one that conflated poverty with child neglect?
What were the consequences of those harmful narratives and policies for Black and poor families?
In turn, how have those legal and policy histories shaped dominant historical narratives in our country?
And what might it take to challenge a policy framework that was built upon a false narrative?
Join us for a deep dive into these questions and the hidden history and narratives that built the child protection system.
Prudence Beidler Carr is the Director of the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, where she manages a team of attorneys and core staff who work on children’s law projects throughout the country. Prudence joined the ABA Center in July 2016 and brings a background in government, nonprofit management, and children’s advocacy to her role.
Immediately before joining the ABA, Prudence lived in Mexico City where she partnered with JUCONI, a Mexican organization that helps street-living youth reintegrate with their families. Prudence has also worked at the Department of Homeland Security Office of General Counsel, and began her legal career as a law clerk for District Judge Paul S. Diamond in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Originally from Chicago, Prudence now lives in Washington DC with her husband and children. Welcome, Prudence. It's a pleasure having you today, and I'm excited for our conversation.
Prudence Beidler Carr 03:24
Thank you so much, Luke. I'm thrilled to be here.
Luke Waldo 03:27
I wanted to kind of set the tone for our conversation today. We first met through a national network convened by Casey Family Programs that explores current issues in Child Protective Services and the issues that are impacting Child and Family Well Being across our country. That network has also been exploring the power and potential of narrative change. I've also, like many others across the country, had the pleasure of being a part of or receiving your presentation that we're going to be discussing quite a bit today on kind of the legal and policy history of the child welfare system, and more specifically, kind of this conflation of poverty and neglect.
And so with that, I wanted to really start at the beginning and give you an opportunity to introduce the ABA Center on Children and the Law, and more specifically, why you and the Center began exploring how poverty became neglect in federal law and policy.
Prudence Beidler Carr 04:29
Great. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here and to talk both on sort of the theme of the podcast this season on narrative and who defines narrative, and to be able to lift up some of the work that we've been doing at the ABA, especially looking at the historical context of federal child welfare law.
So to answer the question, the first part of the question of who we are at the ABA Center on Children and the Law. We are essentially a nonprofit that exists within a very large trade association. So the American Bar Association has roughly 300,000 legal professionals who are members across the world, and we within the Center on Children and the Law are a small but mighty staff of 20 people. Almost everyone on staff is an attorney who comes from some kind of direct practice in child welfare, representing children or parents or agencies or tribes, and kind of came to the work realizing that a lot of the things that they were seeing in their day to day cases with clients required much bigger change than just what they were able to do in direct representation.
So the way I like to describe the work that we do day to day now is in collaboration with lots of different partners across the country. We work kind of with the core focus of improving the legal system side of child welfare, right? So a lot of people go into this work, or even in the public, think of it as a social services system, and we'll talk about some of that history and that origin. But what I always say is our kind of main role, from the ABA Center on Children and the Law, is to lift up that this is a legal system right from the moment that you have government investigating a family, involving government resources involuntarily in a family, that's a legal issue, and there's all sorts of rights involved, but then there's also a lot of legal issues with implementation of things like the Every Student Succeeds Act right and ensuring school stability. And so we provide sort of all across the board assistance to really lifting up and implementing the law in its many facets when talking about child welfare.
Luke Waldo 06:39
Great. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. And so when, when you started this journey that has led to this presentation that you've now delivered across the country to, I think, 1000s of people, what was, what was happening at that time in our country, within your team that inspired you to conduct this research and share its history and impacts?
Prudence Beidler Carr 07:00
Yeah, so there's a couple of answers to that, and a couple of different sort of sources of who really pushed me, I'll say, to learn so much more about the history that now we've taken on a responsibility to share with others. As I described, the ABA is a large association of legal professionals, and so in addition to the center's structure, as a staff, we also have something called the commission, used to be called the Commission on Youth At Risk. It's now called the Commission on Youth and Family Justice. And in 2020 right in the summer of 2020 like so many organizations across the country, that commission was debating how to weigh in on sort of a conversation that had been fairly dormant for a while, which was examining disproportionality and examining sort of why we have such higher rates of representation, especially among Black families in child welfare historically. And so that sort of became a part of the impetus for us as a commission and as a larger center to the real call.
We had a chair of the commission at the time who’s very well known. I'm not sure if she's been on this podcast yet, but she should be, named judge Ernestine Gray from Louisiana, and she said to me really bluntly she didn't want to issue a statement, and she didn't want to weigh in with something like really surface level, because it was going to be meaningless five years from then. And she was right, right? Like, here we are six years later, I guess five and a half, and it that kind of thing really, I think wouldn't be worth the words on the paper. But she called us to do a deeper dive into understanding when we talk about things like disproportionality, that's the outcome. But what's the actual impetus for how we got there? Right? Why is it that we have, you know, one in eight children, Black children, should expect to spend time in foster care in the US?
And the sort of other I think, push factor for me were two quotes that I've shared with you before. One was a woman named Donna Wilson, who's a researcher in the child welfare space, had shared with me during that same period of time that if you look historically, there really weren't very many Black children at all in what was formally recognized as foster care before the 1960s. And so this concept of disproportionality is not something that's like always been there. It was really something that developed at a certain period in time.
And then the second quote that I had heard well before 2020 and really resonated for me was something that Joyce McMillan, who's based in New York, also someone who I hope will be on this podcast someday, had said, which I think is a real sort of truth telling of what we think of as disproportionality. And she has this great quote that she's given permission to use, which is, if foster care was a good thing, Black children would only get in through affirmative action, right? And really naming that if we're talking about something in the term disproportionality, it usually means you don't want that, and there's sort of an honesty about that. And so those were sort of the push factors of like, okay, let's dive deeper and examine this, and not just make a statement about what the numbers say now. And that really led to a lot of intensive research where we started to pull a lot of threads together that you know, to get to the core of your question, hold in a lot of analysis related to kind of the history of how we treat poverty in this country and certain families within that framework.
Luke Waldo 10:34
So that's the second time you've shared that Joyce McMillan quote, and it's as big of a gut punch as it was the first time, but I do think it makes it very clear that there was a real need for this sort of research and the really powerful presentation that you have done again across the country to bring deeper awareness to what I think most people, even those that work within he system, don't have a clear understanding of which is that the disproportionality that we see today with Black families in CPS or in the foster care system was not always the reality, right? And in fact, there's a very clear kind of moment in time where we go from essentially no Black families in the foster care system to what we see is now a significant disproportionate rate.
And so I absolutely encourage everyone to find a way to see an upcoming presentation of your research. We are not going to go through it exhaustively today, because it's a visual presentation that we can't accomplish on this podcast. But I do want us to hit some of the really critical kind of milestones, right decisions, and as we set the context at the beginning of this conversation, I do really want to explore the language, the narratives that are kind of built into the legal decisions, the policy decisions, of course, that start to build out this foster care system as we know it today. And so I'm going to turn it back to you to start kind of at the beginning,
Prudence Beidler Carr 12:16
Sure, and, you know, I appreciate the shout out for the larger presentation. Just to give everyone a little insight into that there's a couple of different variations of the history of race and child welfare law. Or, I think the one that you saw was titled “How Poverty Became Neglect in Federal Law and Policy: A 1961 Magic Trick”. And I think that's a good orientation for listeners as to sort of some of the way that the material is laid out, which is really trying to zero in on, kind of building on that message that I shared from Donna as well, and as you just echoed right, like, why is this that we went from structure of foster care that was largely designed through religious organizations, through local, you know, orphanages and other social services, caregiving structures, and was often exclusionary of either children who didn't come from that same religious background, or children who came from different races, different ethnicities. How did we suddenly shift so dramatically, at least in terms of numbers, into a system that really became something that people try to avoid at all costs, whether it's a you know, from a youth perspective, often not always for sure, and certainly from a parent perspective?
And so that 1961 feature, I think is a really great place for us to start. Obviously, for anyone who's seen the presentation, you know that we start way earlier than that in order to explain 1961 but for the purposes of this, I think that's a good place to start, because there's sort of three variables that all shifted in that exact same year.
And the first, right, to keep with our theme so far is that we went from having very few Black children in foster care to all of a sudden, from 1961 onward, an incredibly steep increase in family separation through government intervention.
The second variable that shifted a lot is before 1961 very few families had you know of any race or background, very few families had judicial involvement actually removing a child from the home based on the legal finding of neglect. There were certainly cases of children being removed from homes before that period based on abuse, based on concerns of how they were at risk of severe harm and abuse. But very rarely was there anything in the law that that led to a physical government-imposed separation between child and parent based on determinations of neglect. And we see that shift dramatically as well. Such that, you know, today the majority of cases, and there's a lot of nuances, so I don't mean to state that these are all cases that shouldn't go into the system, but today we see neglect as the majority sort of source of entries into foster care.
And then that third factor that really happened in 1961 and is probably the crux of all of it, if we’re being honest, is that federal funding in foster care didn't exist until 1961 and that infusion of federal dollars, I think, shifted the landscape and definitely shaped the way that the law is structured in a really, really significant way. So those are sort of three features that all really changed in 1961 and I think laid kind of the groundwork for the legal system that we operate in today.
Luke Waldo 15:52
Prudence, can you, understanding that, as you pointed out, the presentation that I've seen really starts in the early 20th century, right, and starts with real efforts, kind of almost systemic level efforts, right, to invest in families, to support families. And then that clearly shifts in early the early 1960s to what you've just described. Can you give us just a kind of a brief background as to what that looked like, what the approach to supporting families was in kind of the first half of the 20th century? What the mechanisms were behind that? And then what was really underlying that shift that we see in 1961?
Prudence Beidler Carr 16:38
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so as any listeners who have a background in social work, I think are probably very familiar with, there was a lot of effort in the early 1900s to recognize that children do well when they are supported in their family of origin, but that unfortunately, that isn't always the most secure and stable place for kids, and so there was a convening at the White House in 1910 focused on the care of dependent children. And I always like to zero in on that term dependent, because the concept wasn't the way that we think of it today, as dependent, right, like in foster care. It was the care of dependent children, meaning they were dependent on some additional resources outside of just their family environment. And the takeaway, the sort of big mantra message from this convening on the care of dependent children in 1910 was to focus on the importance of recognizing that poverty should not be a reason for removing children from their families, and that services and supports should be put in place to ensure that children can remain in their families whenever it's safe to do so.
So very similar right messages to what we talked about today, and what ended up happening shortly after that convening was the implementation of a lot of structures of Mother's Pensions at a state level. So again, this is when there really weren't federal resources being provided for this kind of thing. But I believe Illinois was the first state to implement a mother's pension, and there's a direct connection with the court system, because really interestingly, the mother's pensions were structured so that a family would be sort of presented as a candidate for receiving assistance, but the mother typically had to be someone who had been married and was widowed, and that's why she needed support, right. It’s that she no longer had a breadwinner who could support her and her children, and she had to go before a court to demonstrate that she was a suitable enough mother that it it made sense for the community to invest in her, and a court would determine if she was worthy of receiving that public support, and every six months, she would have to go back and demonstrate that she continued to be a suitable caregiver for her kids. And a court could determine if they didn't like what they heard from witnesses like neighbors or clergy or educators in the area, the court did again, familiar, right? The court could determine that she was no longer fit to receive public assistance. That would not determine that she was unfit to be a parent, right? It just would determine that she was sort of not meeting the standards of expectations to be eligible to receive public assistance. So that's kind of an interesting framework of how much of the court involvement in child dependency began.
Luke Waldo 19:32
Right. So, yeah. I mean, I think it's really important that you've set this right. You've kind of set these conditions already, these legal conditions that are in many ways dependent upon a single word, or words, right? So you use the word suitable, and you use the word fit. I'm curious if in the early 1900s when we're talking about being a suitable parent, or a fit parent, to receive that sort of financial or economic support, did that have was there any kind of operational definition for suitable? Were there conditions that had to be demonstrated or met that would make somebody fit or unfit?
Prudence Beidler Carr 20:15
Yeah, I mean, it was really these were determined by states and really governed depending on the discretion and the budget that a state or locality even had available. Most of the definitions were pretty loose and up to kind of caseworkers, initially to determine as they worked with a family, and then subsequently up to a judge to decide whether someone met sort of like the expectations of societal norms of good child rearing, of a clean house. Again, these were not determinations of fitness to parent, but of fitness to receive additional assistance.
And in some cases, it was thought of as a badge of honor, right to be thought of as like I've been judged to be worthy enough and good enough as a parent that I'm now receiving this public assistance. So, but there were also entire classifications of people who were ineligible, right? So anyone who had had children out of wedlock was typically not eligible. Anyone who was not white was typically not eligible, right out of the gate. We're talking early 1900s so actually only several decades after the abolition of slavery. So it was very, sort of exclusive in terms of who was thought of as eligible, off the bat.
Luke Waldo 21:32
So we're already, as you just pointed out, we're already conflating fitness with racial identity. So you're not, you're not even eligible or fit to receive these dollars because you are nonwhite, or because you have not met, as you pointed out, kind of these societal norms, right? So you've had a child out of wedlock and and so on.
But we've set the conditions now for kind of funding to be funneled to a certain group of people, determined by fitness, right? How does that start to play into this transition into the early 1960s and what, again, is kind of underlying, as you pointed out, because you've kind of foreshadowed right, that right now we're talking about fitness to receive this funding, not fitness to be a parent of your child. How does that transition happen? And what, again, is kind of motivating that transition?
Prudence Beidler Carr 22:30
Yeah, I'm going to break it down into maybe three steps. The first being, we talked about the design of mother's pensions, which were really at that state level, and that ended up being complemented and accelerated a little bit in during the Great Depression in 1935 with the second New Deal, when FDR and Congress agreed that, you know, the answer to the depression wasn't just investing in worker programs and the security of banks, but they also, through The Social Security Act, needed to invest in older adults and children and parents, primarily mothers.
And so the structure of sort of how that was done for children was through the Aid to Dependent Children provisions of the Social Security Act. All of which is in Title IV, which is really relevant to kind of when we again foreshadow to where we are today. This is all in Title IV of the Social Security Act, where we still see the majority of child welfare financial structure.
But so what ended up happening is that they designed this sort of aid to defendant children to be a complement to mother's pensions. But the sort of final version of the bill that got passed had very little federal oversight, and so it essentially just ended up being federal dollars that were able to be used for those mother's pensions. So that it wasn't just state dollars that states still had a lot of discretion on how to use those federal dollars based on who they determined were fit or suitable to receive public benefits.
There was a little bit of a transition. There was a lot of advocacy from groups like the NAACP, Urban League, etc, on challenging the discriminatory administration of those programs, right? And sort of saying it isn't fair to only be providing federal public dollars to to, you know, people based on racial classifications, etc. And there was some, there was some growth during the 1940s in sort of eligibility and who was able to start receiving public assistance, and there, and there was substantial growth, actually, across quite a few states in the country. During World War Two, increasing the number of eligible families to expand to more Native American families and more black families who were eligible to receive Aid to Dependent Children, which again, was a federal funding stream to support families. It's what we I recently listened to the Claire Anderson podcast that you had where you guys were reflecting on that TANF language, right, that the whole purpose of TANF is to support children. And in their homes with their caregivers. This was ADC. ADC was what TANF is. Now. That's the entire structure of of ADC was, was the basis of that.
So in the 1940s it expands more children are included. Other things that were happening at that time, obviously, things that we're all familiar with are a lot of advocacy around integration, integration of public schools, integration of public facilities, integration of all sorts of, you know, public goods across the country and in 1954 you know, we have a very celebrated, very important legal decision, Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, where the Supreme Court made clear, right, separate but equal is inherently unequal, and sort of forbid schools to continue public, public schools to continue to be segregated.
What happened? Right? As everyone knows, there was Brown II several years later, because really there were very few jurisdictions, if any, that were prepared to start integrating schools. As you mentioned in my introduction, I'm from Chicago, right. Nowhere in the Midwest, has a great record of having been ready and raring to go on integration of public schools. Nowhere in the east coast, where I've gone to schools and lived for many years, nowhere on the West Coast, like if you look at sort of what happened after Brown there's often a story told about all of the horrors of integration in the south, but the truth is, integration was poorly handled most places across this country, which I think is an important acknowledgement of the sort of shared history that we're about to talk about in terms of how it plays into child welfare.
So this is also, you know, as you know well, Luke in the presentation, I often sort of have this moment where I start asking people in the audience, have they ever heard of Brown versus Board of Education? And everyone's hands goes up, and then I ask, have they ever heard of Brown versus Board of Education in a child welfare presentation? And very few people raise their hands. And I think one of the keys to this, to this piece of the puzzle of understanding the history of child welfare law and poverty and neglect, is understanding how very, very critical Brown versus Board of Education was in setting the stage of what came next. So just sort of to quickly play into that sort of second part with Brown versus Board.
Once all these communities had to move forward on integrating schools, they realized that one way to avoid integration would be to push people out of their communities, primarily black and Native American families, so that there would be no one to integrate, right and one of the ways to really use a local tool to push people out of the community was to start making access to Aid to Dependent Children much more restrictive. And so we start seeing laws right after 1954 literally months after Brown versus Board, all these jurisdictions may not have been ready to integrate schools, but they were ready to change their suitability determinations and their laws on who was eligible for ADC.
And why is that? Because they figured that if they could make it really difficult to continue to receive support that now, as we talked about had become more expansive, they could encourage people to leave that community and move somewhere else. So we have, like, explicit, you know, statements from lawmakers saying, you know, when the cutting starts, like when we start cutting people from Aid to Dependent Children assistance, they'll move to Chicago, they'll move to Michigan, they'll move out of our jurisdiction so that we don't have to integrate the schools, because there will be no one here.
The other sort of reason why they used the suitability determinations in this way to push people out of the community was because there started to be an encouragement for caseworkers who were determining if someone was fit enough to receive public assistance or suitable enough to receive public assistance. Caseworkers in certain states started being trained to tell parents, not only are we finding you unfit to receive assistance, but we may now need to take your child and have them live with a relative, as we don't want you know that child to be in an unsuitable home. And that's where you start to see it kind of become a tool for really scaring people into not seeking public assistance altogether in that community.
Luke Waldo 29:28
Right. Yeah. Can I interrupt you real quick, Prudence? I because I don't recall if you covered this in the presentation, or if, if you have of this information from your research, what? What did they have at that point, the legal authority to make those threats right. It's one thing we already have kind of established that being unfit to receive financial support is not terribly well defined, although, again, eligibility is fairly well defined as to who was excluded from from those benefits. Benefits, but unfit, right, is a fairly subjective term, and I'm sure was enforced subjectively in many cases. But was there legal authority when these initial threats start, where they are threatening to potentially take their children from their home?
Prudence Beidler Carr 30:19
Yeah, I appreciate the question so much. Unfortunately, I think the answer is that there was legal authority, both in the sense that the way that aid to dependent children had been passed, allowed pretty much ultimate discretion for all states in terms of how to administer it and how to set their thresholds. So there was a lot of concern within the Children's Bureau at that time and within broader HHS at that time about how states were kind of manipulating this federal resource to resist integration of schools. But there was also a full on realization that there was no authority for the federal government to basically tell them to stop because they had given full discretion to administer this program without any restrictions.
And then in terms of sort of the more micro facet of your question, right? It's like, does a case worker have authority to threaten a parent seeking public assistance that we might take your child. There were laws on the books right that allowed a judge to determine that a parent was abusive or was harmful to a child, and so there was sort of a basis for referring so that so the threats would come in the form of, if we find you unfit for these benefits, we can refer you to a judge who can then determine that you are a negligent parent and that that is causing harm to your child.
So there was sort of like a framework, but as we talked about in the beginning of the podcast, there were almost no cases at that point that had ever gone before judges based on, you know, removals for neglect or for poverty, because that was sort of antithetical to what the structure of the system was supposed to be about.
Luke Waldo 32:14
Right. So in 1954, in kind of the fallout of Brown versus Board, we see the really, the weaponization of of this, this kind of legal term unfit, and it's now being used to target predominantly black families, is my understanding, right? Because this is really a question of continuing the status quo as it pertains to schools and its segregation of the races. How does that then become a broader conflation of not just unfit because you are a black parent, but also unfit because you are a poor parent? And or does it? Or is it real, or does it stay really a weapon against black families again, to keep families separate in the school system? I'm curious kind of how that evolves as we get into the beginning of this kind of growing system in the early 1960s
Prudence Beidler Carr 33:16
Yeah, no, exactly. So a moment ago, when I had said there were sort of three parts to the answer to your question, and the first was like the government, the federal government's creation of Aid to Dependent Children. The second part was Brown versus Board of Education. That third part comes into play in 1961 right, which is the sort of crux year of when we launched a federal system of foster care, and what happened to your to your question about, you know, fitness and the language and how that all sort of shifted. What ended up happening is the federal government realized when they saw all of these laws going into effect, and I should say again, this is not uniquely one portion of the country by 1960 such as four years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board, in 1960 there were 23 states across the country that had enacted new suitable home, new suitability determinations in order to make it more and more restrictive to provide public benefits and public assistance in their jurisdictions, with pretty much the clear goal of restricting who was living in those communities. And most states that everyone right would think of as progressive and things like that too are included in that list.
So what happened is the federal government, I think, realized that their own funding right, which is supposed to be support to families, was being used in this really almost terrorizing way, right as a tool to scare people out of living someplace. And so what they did was that they tried to challenge is the application of the state Suitable Home Determinations they challenged, in particular the state of Louisiana. So the year, I think a lot of people are familiar with Ruby Bridges who integrated the public schools in Louisiana. I always like to remind people like that first year when she integrated the schools, there were no white children who attended the school. They actually refused to go. So it was just Ruby Bridges and one white teacher and a white therapist and a lot of National Guard troops. But it wasn't like sort of a beautiful scene of integration and kumbaya in any stretch of the imagination. She was essentially the only pupil at that school, in that classroom at least.
And so that same year that Ruby Bridges formally integrated the public schools in Louisiana, the state cut about 23,000 children from public assistance, from federal public assistance, and 95% of those children were nonwhite. And it was sort of this massive cut an effect to families that got a lot of attention internationally. And so that's when the federal government stepped in and tried to challenge it, and tried to say, we're not going to provide you with reimbursement through Social Security Act Title IV for administration of this program, because you're doing it in a really discriminatory way. Louisiana pushed back and said, well, actually, we just don't have enough resources, so we have to decide, you know, we have to determine, like, who's the most worthy and this is just how the chips fell.
And the public kind of pushed back and said, like, well, that doesn't make sense, because if you're really finding these homes unsuitable for public benefits, how can they be suitable for kids like you kind of can't have it both ways, but the federal government ultimately signed off on Louisiana's administration of their federal dollars, and that's when they sort of had one more thing that they could do, which, for those of us who live for seeing, you know, movement in outside of Congress, sometimes what ended up happening was that the executive branch under President Eisenhower stepped in and said, you know what, we're going to add a layer of oversight to administration of age independent children that hasn't existed before. And it was someone named Arthur Flemming who was the head of what's now HHS, and he issued this really important sort of rulemaking. It wasn't officially a regulation, but that said states can no longer use suitability determinations when administering federal dollars through Aid to Dependent Children.
[Luke says “The Flemming the Flemming rule”], the Flemming rule, right, which unfortunately, when I ask in the presentations, how many people have heard of the Flemming rule? There's not nearly as many hands as there should be. So he issues this rule to try and sort of put a stop to this use of public federal dollars to discriminate against families, to prevent school integration, except he includes these two exceptions to the rule by basically saying you can no longer distribute Aid to Dependent Children in a way that restricts the distribution based on a state determination that a family is unsuitable, unless you try to help that family address whatever made them unsuitable. Sounds fine, right? That's pretty good, or unless you care for that child through some of their means, essentially indicating that you can continue to discriminate against a family based on their unworthiness for public support as long as you remove that child from the home. It's like the music stops.
Luke Waldo 38:54
Did he have any idea that that would be the lever that, in many ways, would be used to kind of create this, now multi-billion dollar system? It's just, it's, it's such an important moment in child welfare history that I'm just really curious about the kind of intention behind it.
Prudence Beidler Carr 39:15
I get that question a lot, and I don't know Arthur Flemming, I was not alive in 1961. I don't think so. I'd like I truly and I don't think anyone had the intent of what came next. I think it's really important, actually, that we not ascribe too much intent, because I think that it's very difficult to untangle everything that sort of evolved, if this was totally deliberate, but I do think I'll pause instead of explain it. I think the intentionality continued to be to discriminate in the distribution of public benefits and to continue to give states a lot of leeway. But I don't think that anyone had an intention to create a massive federal infusion of foster care funding as a result of that clause.
Luke Waldo 40:09
Yeah, and I appreciate that answer, and I don't, I don't know at the end of the day if it's all that important as to what Arthur Flemming's intent was or not, right, but it does shine, I think, some light on the power of even just, in this case, a few words, a single sentence, right, that can then be interpreted in a way that then creates an entire new system that now goes from essentially supporting families to now intervening in families lives, and ultimately separating children from their parents.
And so let's, let's continue on, kind of on, on this journey. Because I'm, you know, I obviously want to explore the impacts of this particular moment, right? And you know, we've, we've talked now, up until this moment, about a very fractured foster care system in which very few black families in particular are found to 1961 and the kind of creation of the early federal foster care system, and that reality changes literally almost overnight for black families in particular.
Prudence Beidler Carr 41:22
Yeah, and let me put a little bit more meat on the bones of kind of what happened then, because I think it's important. There's also maybe a personal reflection I can share, which is, I learned about the Flemming role well before 2020 and I did learn about the impact. And I was really nervous to lift it up, because I was like, Wait, this can't be right, right. Like this has got to be, I must be misunderstanding the data, or misunderstanding my interpretation or and so I just want to own that too, because we're going to go into some some pieces of this that are that are really disconcerting when we realize and reflect on how much that 1961 decision laid the groundwork for things that we still implement today, and I still struggle with a lot of that.
But sort of to put a little bit more meat on the bones of what happened and where it led. You know, remember when I mentioned that calling the bluff of Louisiana and saying like, well, if you're finding all these homes unsuitable for public assistance, how can they be suitable for kids? I think that might have been part of the goal, with this exception, was to kind of say, like, if you're going to go so far as to find a home unsuitable to receive Aid to Dependent Children, right, federal dollars, then you're also basically saying that that home is unsuitable and you need to care for the child some other way.
So, so it's possible that the intention was to, kind of like call the bluff of the states too, but the states very quickly, and this part is not in Flemming's control, right, that he was in the executive branch, the states very quickly said, well, we don't have the wherewithal to care for these kids in some other way, so we need assistance from Congress to support federal foster care, like when children are removed from their families. We need federal dollars to support that structure of foster care. And up until this period in time, right foster care had existed for decades, and there had been a lot of organizations that had actually actively sought federal support for foster care.
Foster care, as we talked about, was primarily run through local organizations, through religious institutions, and the federal government had always rejected it. Congress had always said, Nope, that's a state issue, like child custody, child law, that's all state. But it was at this juncture when there's that exception of you can continue to find families unsuitable if you care for that child outside of their family, that all of a sudden States said, Well, give us some money and we can do just that, right? And I think again, intentionality was not that anyone wanted a lot of money to go into foster care, it was that they wanted the tools to continue to kind of threaten families. Like, if you stay here and you try to integrate the schools, we're going to make it really hard for you, like, we're going to make it really scary and really hard, because we now do have the ability to remove your kids from your care.
So it wasn't with the goal of creating foster care, but it was with the goal of creating the threat of family separation. And so Congress responds to that state request and says, Okay, for the first time in history, in 1961 on a temporary basis, we, Congress, are providing money for you states to use to offset the cost of a foster care maintenance payment. Again. Insight, this is Title IV of the Social Security Act, we launched the structure of the federal foster care maintenance payment in response to a finding that a child could not live in a family where the parents had sought financial support but were determined to be unfit for financial support.
Okay, so the reason that I go back to that unfit for financial support is exactly what I think you were zeroing in on earlier, Luke, which is all of a sudden, we've essentially created a mechanism for determining that a child who was living in a home where the parents were found unfit for receiving public support. All of a sudden, those parents, through the Flemming rule and through this infusion of federal dollars, can be found unfit to care for their kid, not because they've abused their child, not because there's an imminent risk of harm, not because that child has experienced a safety issue, but because the parents sought help, were rejected from that help and were found unfit to receive public assistance and now unfit to care for their child, so their child is removed from their care, and the federal government is going to pay for that.
Luke Waldo 46:10
So you have just very eloquently and very powerfully laid out this kind of, in my mind, very clear confusion and conflation between poverty and neglect. And I don't know that we're using that language yet in 1961, I don't know if we're talking about child neglect as part of this kind of unfit right, the fact that this parent is unfit because they are unfit to receive the financial benefits that would allow them to provide for their child. And this is the challenge that we explore all the time within our initiative and within this podcast, right, is like the state of Wisconsin excludes poverty as a reason for removal in the definition of neglect, and yet it's followed that that statement is literally followed by the inability to provide shelter, food, clothing, etc, etc. Oftentimes that's related very clearly to the fact that somebody is living in poverty.
Part of the exploration of the season is how on one end, narratives, dominant historical narratives, can be the impetus of or the kind of the motivation behind the creation of systems or practices. It's also true on the other end, right? And we've now got the creation of this system that is targeting, not excluding, but targeting certain families who are now considered by many to be unfit in our society. And as you pointed out, many in society consider them unfit, not necessarily because they're unfit parents, but because they are black and trying to get into their schools.
How does that system then reinforce those old narratives, and what sort of new kind of narratives come out of that that then, of course, take. we haven't talked about it yet, but we're talking about in the first year in 1961 we're talking about 1000s of children and families, and then, of course, that number grows exponentially, kind of year after year. I'm curious how you see that that system now reinforcing and creating new harmful narratives when it comes to poor and particularly black families,?
Prudence Beidler Carr 48:20
Yeah, Luke, I was gonna start by just going back to the beginning of your question, which was about that language of neglect, and where do we see that come in? And when Congress provided, for the first time in history, right, federal foster care funding, they said in the articulation of that law that it was to care for children whose parents had been found immoral or negligent. So not neglect, but immoral or negligent, nothing again about abuse or harmful or safety, all the things that we think we're solving for as a priority of child protection. And so that's where you start to see that sort of language really coming in as like, what we're paying for, as you know, the federal system that we've launched, what we're paying for is the removal of children from a negligent parent who sought assistance.
And then I think where we see a really interesting piece of that question you asked about narrative of like, who's defining this, who's creating the solutions I always like thinking about, you know, when we're looking at how to solve problems like child protection and how to keep children safe from harm, right, there's a lot of fundamental starting points that we miss. Like we don't actually ask parents to help us create the right structure to keep children safe from harm. And in this instance, I think it's a perfect example where we actually do have a lot of people on the ground who saw immediately what the fallout was from this combination of the Flemming rule and federal funding. One example is the Child Welfare League of America, which had been advocating again for foster care funding to assist families caring for children who needed temporary support, advocated vehemently for an end to the Flemming rule, and as an alternative, advocated for judicial oversight, so that when a caseworker removed a child from a home based on finding that parent unfit for public assistance, the idea was that a judge should, at a minimum, have to sign off on that, that it couldn't just be a caseworker removal.
And the reason I think that's a really important piece of the narrative is like, I'm a lawyer, and I believe deeply in judges and deeply in judicial oversight, and I'm more than happy to go on record saying that was the wrong solution. Because what ended up happening is you had judges essentially just signing off on, stamping their approval on all these removals that had already happened and were continuing to happen. And then it became even harder for parents to get their kids back, because they had to challenge the agency decision, and then they had to challenge a judicial decision, and they had no counsel for the parents, no attorney for the child, rarely even an attorney for the agency. And yet, we now have codified in law, as Congress put this in statute in 1962, that states can receive federal foster care maintenance payment dollars as long as a judge has found that it is contrary to that child's welfare to be in their home of origin, that's the standard.
Luke Waldo 51:46
Can you say that again, contrary to the child's welfare?
Prudence Beidler Carr 51:49
So the so the law that Congress put as a check right on unfair removals, the law that Congress put into place in 1962 says states can receive federal foster care maintenance payment reimbursement as long as a judge has found that it's contrary to the welfare of that child to remain in their home of origin. In 1980 they added language about reasonable efforts, but that's basically the same law we have today.
Luke Waldo 52:17
Right. And was there any again, was there any set of guidelines, operational definitions of what contrary to the child's welfare was, or what kind of standards had to be met to demonstrate that?
Prudence Beidler Carr 52:33
Nothing, right? And again, I think it's really important, because we think of the structure of what we do as being about child protection, and it's so frustrating sometimes to realize that often it doesn't feel like it's about protecting children from safety issues, from harm, from abuse, but but that makes sense, because the actual legal structure and financing structure that we put into place at the national level had nothing to do with any of those things, right? If you listen to that language “contrary to the welfare of the child”, that's a really generic removal standard.
Your rights as a parent, my rights as a parent are theoretically constitutionally protected. But if all someone needs to show is that it's contrary to my kids’ welfare, they could go live with my parents, right? Like they might have a better life there. So it's like really, really strange that that narrative that got put in place was like a narrative of we can solve this problem, not by stopping what we've already put in place, but by sort of doubling down on another layer of oversight. And I think that's where, again, we kind of the more that we solve things by removing ourselves from the people who are affected, the more that we often solve the wrong problem again and again.
And then the final narrative piece that I'll just really quickly weigh in answer to the question that you were asking about, sort of the shape of where this went. Next is in 1962 Dr. Henry Kempe, who I know others have talked about on these podcasts as well. He did issue a really important article where he, as a pediatrician, described what was sort of then considered a new diagnosis, which was the battered child syndrome.
And that's especially important in this history that I'm sharing, because for decades and decades and decades, when people look back, no matter what your viewpoint is, right, conservative, liberal, progressive, etc, everyone looks back and says, oh yeah. In the early 1960s there was a huge increase of children going into foster care, but 99% of the time, I've heard people describe the reason for that increase was Dr Henry Kempe’s diagnosis of the battered child syndrome. And that narrative has been really, really sticky. I believed it too, like that was what I was taught, he’s like this, he was the father of child welfare. He was the modern-day architect of the child welfare system we have today.
And it's actually totally not true, because his article came out after the initial increase in entries into care. And even more compelling is that by the mid-1960s about two thirds of all the kids who were in foster care at that time were there from referrals from aid to dependent children and had nothing to do with allegations of battered child syndrome against their parents, no allegations of harm by their parents or other caregivers. They were just in foster care based on that, “contrary to the welfare of the child” poverty standard.
Luke Waldo 55:49
Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that, because the narrative around the battered child syndrome has been a sticky one, right, and one that I think most people use as justification for not just the the establishment of the child protective services that exist today, but also the rapid expansion of its implementation and reach. And so we could spend all day going deeper and deeper into the certainly the history. But I would like us to as you've established now we have this we have this system that's now established. It's you've provided very compelling evidence that it's really rooted in and tied to the changes in laws around segregation, the kind of weaponization of financial benefits, and therefore the weaponization of of poverty, or families that are living in poverty, and therefore they're they're being seen as unfit to be the parents to their children. How does that, then, with the tying federal funding into this system, how do those narratives accelerate the funding, the growth in funding over the coming years, that leads to even greater disproportionality of not just black families, but also poor families in the child welfare system?
Prudence Beidler Carr 57:15
Yeah, and I like the way that you framed that as accelerate, because I think that's a really good that's a really good verb to highlight kind of what we saw from that moment on, and to maybe lead with the data, so that people have that as an anchor, as we talked about at the beginning of the podcast. Before 1960 very few black children were in anything formally recognized as foster care, and not no black children, but very few. By 1977, so just 16 years after the Flemming rule and federal funding, 28% of all children in foster care were black, and by just I think it was 1999, 1998, 40% of all children in foster care were black. That's an incredible incline.
Luke Waldo 58:06
And I'm and I'm I'm guessing Prudence, that that's compared to black children and black families being 10 to 12% of the US population, exactly.
Prudence Beidler Carr 58:17
I think it was roughly 13 around those times. And I think there's that question, right? Of like, oh, so we look at it as disproportionality, 28% in foster care versus 13 in the population, or 40% in foster care versus whatever it was then 12 in population. But I think the thing I really want people to zero in on is that roughly zero, right? And then in 16 years, you go from roughly zero to 28% and then another 20 years later, you're at 40% and you got to go back to that Joyce quote on that one to me of like, if foster care was a good thing, black children would only get in through affirmative action.
Those numbers are not representative of, somehow, some great service being geared toward caring more for black children. And so, you know, I think when we look at what were the ingredients that led to the acceleration, right? And this goes to your questions earlier about intentionality, I again, don't think anyone wanted to create a massive federal infrastructure, or now it's mostly a state infrastructure, right, which our current Assistant Secretary knows all too well. States are definitely paying more for foster care now than the federal government. I don't think that the goal was that any state wanted to create a massive system of foster care or that, you know, that was the larger goal of the federal government. But once you created this incentive and additional funding for removals, right, it became very hard to turn that off.
And what happened very shortly after Congress opened that funding up is rather than expand and increase Aid to Dependent Children, right, which was going to families. Congress, subsequently, roughly every five years, massively expanded the structure of foster care funding, and as we know it today, right, it's an entitlement fund where it isn't capped, right? And so we do have a bit of a structure of incentivizing removal still, at least in terms of the original sort of funding streams.
The only other thing I'll say on that is people often ask like, well, when they put this in place in 1961 how could there have possibly been enough foster families available to care for so many new children going into care, especially if the infrastructure up until that point had often been somewhat restrictive into who would care for what kid?. And the answer is there weren't nearly enough families right to absorb, you know, the 100,000 additional children over the span of the next couple of years. And so in 1962 Congress amended their federal funding provision and said states could use Aid to Dependent Children to support children in foster care, either in a family or in a child care institution, which were usually child detention facilities that were already part of holding children who were in delinquency proceedings.
So it became an infusion of dollars into existing state infrastructure for children in, you know, the sort of criminal side of the system. And so we look at that as another problem today, where it's like, why are children going into these detention facilities when they're in foster care? But we designed that into the system with the federal funding in 1962.
Luke Waldo 1:01:45
So we talked about this as we were preparing for this conversation, that narrative can, and language, single words can have an impact on how we perceive the world, how we see families, how we see our communities, how we see our systems function. You've been presenting an alternative narrative, rooted in in history, in evidence, you know, for a while now, with with everything you've shared thus far. And I'm curious how your audiences, who I suspect many in your audience are working within these systems. I'm curious how they have reacted to this, this shift in in narrative, right? This, this shift in perspective and how to see the history of this system and how it was created, starting with single descriptive words like unfit. What has been the reaction of the audience and what has surprised you most?
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:02:52
Yeah, I get scared before I present this material every single time, whether it's a room full of judges or social workers or agency leaders, lawyers, lived experience experts. I always get nervous because I worry that it's gonna, that it's gonna trigger something in someone in a whole variety of ways, right? This is really unpleasant history, and it's scary to realize that most of us, all of us, right, went into this work for the sake of helping people, and then when we learn some of these pieces of harm, it's really hard to sit with that.
But I will tell you, no matter how scared I get every time, I'm always really taken aback by the feedback I get from a lot of unexpected partners, right? I get a lot of messages, whether it's from a judge or someone with their own direct personal impact saying, I'd always wondered how these dots connected. I just never understood it like I felt it in my gut, but I never understood, right, because when judges are taught how to do this job, they're not taught the history of where that “contrary to welfare of the child” standard comes from. They're just taught that they have to apply it.
But knowing that it comes from this sort of like resistance to Brown versus Board is really illuminating. Same thing with I had a conversation with a social worker recently who said, and she invited me to come deliver the presentation a second time, and she said for her, it helped to explain why she feels like the job that she wants to do is so different than the job that she's allowed to do within the law. And similarly, I think it helps to hold space for why sometimes caseworkers or agencies think it's okay to enter someone's home, even if they haven't consented, because you're there thinking that you're providing support. But the reality is, once you have the power to take someone's children, that is a policing function, right, you're no longer that social worker who's there to provide assistance and so so I I've been hearing sort of a lot of feedback that it almost takes a weight off people to realize, like, okay, it isn't my fault as a judge, it isn't my fault as a lawyer, it isn't my fault as a social worker that I feel tangled in a system that actually wasn't designed to do the things I thought I was going into this work to do. So that's been really satisfying to feel like part of it is that we're all learning this together, and we we kind of owe it to ourselves to be allowed to learn it, because it helps explain the struggle and the mismatch.
Luke Waldo 1:05:35
Yeah, yeah, no, and it's what excited me about the opportunity to speak with you for this season of the podcast is that, you know, while we're exploring narrative change, right? Narrative, narrative change comes in a lot of different forms. You know one is just excavating and exposing and presenting a different history, a different set of facts that have oftentimes been buried and and that in it, in and of itself, can shift the narrative. And so you have, you provide a really a foundational understanding of this system's history, of how families have been, in many ways, harmed by its history, and where there's an opportunity for us to change course. And so 65 years after the creation of of the child welfare system, we are still living with the legacy of those narrative, legal, policy, and funding changes that that occurred in 1961 what do you believe is still holding that legacy in place? And where do you see opportunities for real change?
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:06:50
Yeah, no, so, Luke, I really appreciate your question about kind of what's holding this legacy in place? Like, why? Why are we still implementing the same law today, 65 years later. And I'll go back to describing something that happened with us as a commission when we started to explore this history, because it was a really powerful moment for me. And it goes to your question about Arthur Flemming a little bit too, right? And and it was a recognition that even if we didn't have intention, that was bad when some of these things were put into place. Once we see the outcome and the impact and we know that it isn't what we meant to design, we know that there is harmful impact in the way this is playing out and that it's affecting a lot of people, it becomes intention, because we know it, and so we can't hide behind anymore, like, oh, but there wasn't intentionality. So it's just, you know, it's one of these things. It's an unintended consequence. It's like no. 65 years in, we now are the ones with intention, if we allow this to continue to be structured this way.
And so I it's sort of more of a call to action of, like, taking ownership that this is no longer history. It's the present and it's it's ours for the remaking. And I think the reflection on what makes that hard to do like, why is this legacy? Why does it feel so deeply rooted? I think a lot of it, frankly, is the funding. I think, you know, I'd always questioned this idea of, like, Dr Kempe's article revolutionizing the whole approach to child welfare, because I read that article, and it's powerful, and there's a lot of important substance there. But at the end of the day, not to be crass, money matters, and money is a much bigger influencer on narrative change, culture change, system change, than anything else. And there's a lot of money that is infused into this system and this structure that is very hard for people to let go of, even if they know that it's not going to the things that they believe in.
And that's where, you know, we have interesting leadership in office right now. I do think, from a financing perspective, the states, if they take a step back and look at how much they are now shouldering the costs of foster care in relationship to what it was originally when this system was designed with such a low standard of entry. There's a lot from a state budgetary perspective that frankly, does raise questions of why we would continue to structure this the way that we do, if we could serve children and their families in a lot less resource intensive and a lot less traumatic ways upstream, that doesn't mean that we should do away with child protection and the really important investments in taking care of children who can't be safely in their homes.
But I think again, what this history reveals is that that's not what we structured this system around. That's not what we structured the financing around. It's not what we structured the legal standards around, and we're never going to tweak ourselves out of that structure without a pretty substantial overhaul in the financing and the law.
Luke Waldo 1:10:21
Yeah, I do wonder, after first watching your presentation and considering you know the work that we've been doing with with this podcast and with our our statewide initiative over the last four years, that there's this interesting kind of fork in the road potential in 1961-62 in particular, with the battered child syndrome report. What if, in that moment, the federal funding that has been given very broadly, in many ways to this child welfare system that we know today, if those dollars were directed specifically to the children described in that report, so children that were experiencing physical, sexual abuse, and the other fork in the road is a deeper investment in those families that had, up until that time, received financial assistance to support them, to provide opportunities and pathways out of poverty. How different our system might look today. Because you and I have had this conversation, we have very intentionally focused on the issue of neglect for many of the reasons that you've described today, but there's this belief that there are too many families today in the child welfare system who are nurturing parents who are just struggling with the fallout of poverty, right? Or the overload of stress that comes with the many consequences of poverty that make it very difficult at times to parent the way that they would like to parent, but are not harming their children. They're not maltreating their children, right?
And so it's such a fascinating history, because if in 1962 we take those two paths and even spend the same dollars that we're spending today on those two paths, we might have a very different set of outcomes for a lot of families, and as we're going to explore in some clips here, how families trust or mistrust many of our systems, which we you know, we will get into briefly here, but that's a whole nother set of consequences, right that have come from now this legacy of this very intrusive and at times harmful system. So before we listen to a few clips to get some of your reactions, is there anything Prudence that you wanted to share that we haven't shared yet.
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:12:43
Yeah, I might react for just a quick second to to what you just said, because I think it's a really important framing of the costs and where they've been born. I think sometimes people hear all of this material and think like the only like black families are obviously the most acute and clear individuals who and communities that have borne the harm right from this structure. But I think there's two other parts of cost that are really important that you just laid out, which is one, Luke, I think this is also a moment in time where we lost our way on child protection, and we started focusing so much more on this sort of contrary to the welfare stuff, that we lost the focus on keeping children safe from imminent risk of harm, keeping children safe from abuse.
And it's almost like because we claimed that that's what we were doing through these large numbers of entries into the system, we sort of didn't realize that we were actually not doing that. And we've we've increased that side of things so much that we haven't done a very good job. Still today are not doing as good a job as we should on the child protection side. And then that third cost, I think, is all families in America, where it's kind of like the Heather McGhee, right when you drain the pool so that you didn't integrate the pool everybody for that cost today, you know, people often share that statistic, that 53% of all black children will experience a child welfare investigation before they're 18, but 37% of all children in America will experience a foster a child welfare investigation. The cost of this system on all families is really, really large, and I don't think as a larger public we ever really accepted that or wanted that. And I think that there's sort of a really important cost we haven't addressed that everybody is bearing the weight of as a result of this turn of events in the 1960s.
Luke Waldo 1:14:47
Yeah, it's really well put. I'm going to have us now kind of transition to sharing some clips from some of our speakers throughout this season that I thought really spoke to some of your research and some of the kind of challenges and opportunities that come from your research. And I just wanted us to kind of both listen to them, and then I have a couple of questions that I would love for us to discuss.
So with that, I would like to start with a clip from Oregon State Representative Annessa Hartman, who shares a bit about kind of Native people's mistrust of the child welfare system because of this legacy, which we haven't talked about specifically today, but I'll give you that opportunity to talk more specifically about it in a moment. So with that, we'll listen to that clip and then talk about it.
Annessa Hartman 1:15:43
I think put it this way, if I had my way, I would just want to blow up the whole system, and we could just start over. Because I think if we're talking about, like child welfare, or, you know, these programs, right, and and the history, and I'm going to speak from like a native lens, the history of to my people very much that you're not great, you're not a good parent, and so we're going to take your child away, and we want to assimilate them into white culture. That, to me and many other cultures, is how we see child welfare. They're not there for the family by any means. They're not there to help.
That very much is still alive today. You are not going to get a CPS worker going to someone's door thinking you're going to help me with my kid. So when I say that, like blowing up the system and recreating something from the ground up, I would love to do that, because that trust is not going to be there, especially within like lower income and like communities of color, because that is the history that just our parents grew up with. You know, we had the “60’s scoop”, you know, for for Native families, where they just come and take children, and these native kids don't even know where they came from, and so they're still searching for their lineage, right? And so that is, like, sort of at the core, least for me, and how we fix things.
Luke Waldo 1:16:57
So it's a really powerful clip, but has a lot of resonance and kind of parallels to your research and what you shared today, and so first and foremost, any kind of initial reactions that you wanted to share?
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:17:11
Yeah, no, I appreciate the clip. And I mean, one thing that stands out to me is her reference to the “1960s scoop”, right? That's all born from the same changes in law that were put into place in 1961 and the Federal financial incentives that were put into place at that time. That being said, I do think what she raises is really significant as a parallel history, but not exactly the same history. A lot of times we sort of merge different cultures who have been harmed into one group. And I think one of the things that we've tried to be really careful about within the commission is to recognize, like the way that we examined how the law was structured around black families and the discriminatory approaches to investment, under investment and over surveillance of black families, and especially Brown versus Board reactions, is complementary in its harmfulness, but very distinct from so much of the target that was put onto Native American families and reasons for unfairly forcing assimilation, etc. So sort of both of those are histories that breed mistrust, but they're they're not all the same thing, and I think that's important for people to understand and spend time with too.
Luke Waldo 1:18:40
Yeah. And so when we're speaking of the mistrust, and we alluded to it a bit right before these clips, when you think of the mistrust, right, that has grown over these many decades now, in particular communities, first and foremost, how do you think about that mistrust, and where do you kind of seen opportunities to start to take that mistrust head on, to again, kind of build a new pathway forward, both in our systems and how they engage with with our communities?
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:19:11
Yeah, I'll answer the question by tying it to something else that she said in her clip, which was that idea of the CPS worker going to my door, right? No one's going to trust that in her community. And I, I have an anecdote that I think helps illustrate again, where we lost our way on that. When I was delivering this presentation a couple of years ago to a number of different audiences in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to get together with a with a friend who I hadn't seen in a long time, who I used to know in some work I did in California. And we went out to dinner, and we had a great time catching up. And I told her about what I was presenting on, and I gave her, you know, the Cliff Notes version, but, but, but enough. And she got very quiet. And she and she sort of absorbed it all, and was really interested. And then in the car, when she was driving me back to my hotel, she said, you know, I remember when a caseworker came to my house when I was a kid. And my friend is originally her family is from Mexico. She's a citizen who grew up in Los Angeles community, but her parents were originally from Mexico, and she said my mother was caring for me and my siblings, and one of my siblings had some pretty severe disabilities, and my mother needed help, and so she reached out to social services to seek assistance. And a caseworker came to our house, and my friend sitting in her car telling me the story, says I was so little, but I remember the banging of the drawers, opening and closing our cupboards and making sure that our house was clean and everything was right. And I remember my mother sobbing and and she says to me, but I was the only one who could speak English. So the caseworker comes over to me and says, Tell your mother to stop crying. Don't be so upset, because we think she's a good mother, and we're going to be able to help her.
And so my friend, right is like trying to figure this out, and whatever age she was, I think, five or six. And I said, what year was that? And she pauses, and she looks at me, and she says, 1961. And we both got chills, because we both realized, right, had it been like two years later, one year later, the chances of that caseworker being able to provide help versus finding some reason not to provide help to this family really, really switched.
And it was really jarring for me to realize, and then to hear in that clip, right, that idea that people don't want a caseworker to come to their house, but that used to be what you had someone do in order to provide you with assistance and help.
And so there's this one other reflection that I'll share on that, which is there's a professional in this space named Tremell Mitchell who's wonderful, and I hope lots of people on the podcast have had a chance to work with him before he's based in South Carolina and does a lot of work around dads and elevating the role of dads. And he gave this presentation with me one time, and he shared this idea that, rather than us thinking of the knock at the door as like this terrifying thing for a parent, why don't we flip the script? And maybe this ties in with kind of that change in narratives, right? Flip the script and think of like, couldn't we create a system where the knock at the door is the parent going to social services, seeking help, and that's an okay knock at the door, right? You are choosing to seek something that's going to provide assistance to you in your role as a parent, and there's not all these ancillary threats of what you're giving up and what you're at risk of losing when seeking help. So, I just think that that's kind of as we visualize, like, what does real help look like? Real help looks like the thing we're seeking, not the thing that comes in a scary way with huge power over who we are as a family.
Luke Waldo 1:23:23
No, yeah. Those stories gave me chills. So thank you for sharing them. And I think they very, very powerfully illustrate how the design in and kind of intention of systems, and therefore the extension of those systems, the people that are working in those systems, right? That they can look very different based on, again, a slight change in language, directive, narrative, between helping and suspecting, for example. So I appreciate those, those illustrations.
I do want to kind of work off of that with another clip from Tshaka Barrows, who's a Co-executive Director at the Haywood Burns Institute, who I think gives a really powerful metaphor on the design of systems and the potential for systems innovation, which I think is something that we're kind of setting up here in this conversation today. So with that, we're going to play that clip, and would love to hear your reaction to that,
Tshaka Barrows 1:24:24
But it takes, you know, sometimes really convincing people. I like to give examples. I often ask people to think about, you know, our railroad tracks and the system that moves all of the cargo across this country. People every day are on these railroad tracks, the width of them. Was it based on study? Is it the most advanced width, you know, that we could come up with, or is it based on the horse and buggy that they use to build that first set of tracks? And are we still limited by that? Absolutely, that's infrastructure. You know, that's what we're trying to think about it in terms of human services. And this opportunity to reimagine.
Luke Waldo 1:25:03
So there's two questions he ends with, of course, the opportunity to reimagine. And I do want to talk a little bit about that, but it does make me think when he talks about how, how the railroad tracks were designed, were they designed in an evidence-based manner? You and I talked about this recently. So I would love to start with, first and foremost, kind of, how we've designed this system, and then where there's an opportunity to kind of reimagine that system, and what, what you, what you've seen kind of in your research that might give you some hope for the reimagining of this system?
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:25:41
Yeah, no, I love, I love the quote. I love the comparison to the horse and buggy and the railroad tracks, and the kind of how we use infrastructure and sometimes how we let go of it. I think the evidence based touchstone that I like to reflect on, and I think this is what you're getting at, Luke, is that I've heard both Dr. David Sanders from Casey Family Programs and Bryan Samuels from Chapin Hall talk about right in all of these efforts to identify what is evidence based, you know, for the clearing house or for all sorts of investments of public funds, we never required that foster care be evidence based as an intervention, right?
When we look back to that exception in the Flemming rule of like, you can no longer determine someone's unsuitable to receive public benefits, but you can do so if you then take their child from them and put them in foster care like no one had asked for that there's no additional history that I'm hiding from people that was like, oh, no, wait, there was all this evidence and this research demonstrating that the solution to child poverty was not Aid to Dependent Children being less discriminatory. The real solution that people had totally researched and evaluated and proposed was to take children out of those homes. There's literally no hidden history that says that there were no advocates asking for that. There was no evidence base on this huge infusion of federal support to remove children from their homes based on parents seeking public assistance.
And so I think the railroad tracks that are in place for us are really weirdly designed railroad tracks, right? Like it's not even like these had some kind of human centered input from the get-go, and I don't think that many conductors running those trains on those tracks are very satisfied with how it's running today. So I think we have kind of many different inputs of dissatisfaction with the structure. And I would echo the quote that it's a great time for us to be reimagining what a system, a system, frankly, designed around child protection, should look like that's really focused on child protection. And then separately, what a system designed around supporting families and supporting families and parents caring for their children should look like, and those are different things.
Luke Waldo 1:28:11
So the reimagining of this system, right, is going to take vision. It's going to take kind of some collective momentum and courage to really challenge and again, reimagine a system that's been essentially in place for 65 years with with little to no significant changes in it.
I'm going to play two clips, or I'm going to play a clip from Dr Nadine Burke Harris on kind of this, the fact that fear can in many ways be a barrier to vision. And then we're going to play a clip from Samantha Mellerson, who's the Co-Executive Director at the Haywood Burns Institute with Tshaka Barrows on kind of the conflict aversion that we oftentimes have that really holds the status quo in place, and I would love for us to just kind of talk through these barriers to meaningful kind of reimagining or systems change.
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris 1:29:15
One of the things that a panelist mentioned is that the opposite of vision is fear, right? And that and so I can understand if there's fear there, but then I think that there's this incredible opportunity for us to come together, even if there is fear and concerns around solutions, so we don't let that fear get in the way of families getting the access to the services that they need.
Samantha Mellerson 1:29:52
Somehow we've become so conflict averse that we dare not present an idea that's different or that may be perceived as against the norm of what's happening, right?
Luke Waldo 1:30:11
I wanted to play, um, I wanted to play that clip from Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. I wanted to play that clip from Samantha Mellor because I think it takes a lot of courage to present the work that you've presented over the last couple years. As you mentioned earlier, you oftentimes go into some of these presentations really scared about how the audience may react to this very difficult, oftentimes tragic, history, but also history that really challenges people's kind of, the work that people do each every day.
And as you pointed out, right, we go into this work because we believe we are helping people. Right? Helping families, helping children. And yet, oftentimes, are caught in these systems that have, in fact, done the opposite. And so presenting what you have done has taken a lot of courage. And so I want first for you to just react to what you just heard. But secondarily, to talk a little bit about where there are opportunities for people to step into, right, this courage, to overcome some of the fear, and recognize that conflict is going to be a part of progress.
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:31:19
Yeah, I mean, I think, on the one hand, some of the presentation takes courage, and on the other hand, like, it's tiny in comparison to every impacted professional I've ever worked with, who has the courage to share that they have a personal and professional connection to this work, and that is so hard, and so painful. All the time. And it's a risk all the time. And so, for me, it's interesting, that quote about, you know, the opposite of vision, is fear. I think,I'm all about vision, and I support big visions and change. But to me, the answer of, like, how we untangle ourselves from this history is so obvious, which is that we have to follow the lead of those who've been most directly impacted by this history. And my way of doing that is that I have, I have been encouraged to keep sharing this information because it is a burden for a lot of other people to have to carry it forward on their own, too.
And it's important sometimes that it's not just people who would be the more, um, expected voice on some of this. But that proximity, like, everything that I do, I try and make sure has some kind of check in my own personal and professional space, back with someone who is really proximate to these issues and these impacts, who can tell me, like, okay, Prudence, like, you really lost your way. We don't want you to do this, or can tell me, like, here's the message that we want you to help continue to convey, because these are the solutions that make sense, and it's exhausting to have to always lift those up.
And so, to me, that's sort of, like, the opposite of vision is fear. It's also, like, the opposite of progress, is our failure to dig deep on being proximate to people, and I do see a lot of fear there that I think there are lots of social services organizations, there are lots of legal services organizations, there are lots of judges, there are lots of agencies that are nervous to be called out by the clients who they are purporting to serve, because they know that they're not going to get good feedback. And to me, that's, like, why are we continuing to deliver social services or legal services if we know that the clients we're serving are unhappy with it? We have to be braver and more courageous about seeking that feedback and being willing to do things differently based on being directed by those we purport to serve.
Luke Waldo 1:33:58
Well, that's an incredible place to stop. I don't I don't know that we could have wrapped it anymore eloquently, and you know, there's a clear call to action there, and you, again, have lived this. I've really appreciated, you know, working with you and anticipate a really powerful presentation at the Together for Children Conference in April, where you will be presenting on this history alongside a mother who was impacted by the child welfare system to share her experience as it relates to this presentation and to this history.
So, I can't thank you enough, Prudence. This has been a really remarkable and powerful history lesson, but also exploration of this really complex relationship and intersection between the power of narrative, the power of words, and kind of legal and political and funding history that, uh, has created the system that we're really trying to improve, right, so that children and families can benefit from it in different ways. So thank you again for being a partner in this work, and for taking the time today to share this story.
Prudence Beidler Carr 1:35:19
Yeah, it's been a pleasure to be here, Luke, and I look forward to continuing working closely with you going forward.
Luke Waldo 1:35:47
The journey Prudence Beidler Carr took us on today was a masterclass in historical analysis. She meticulously traced the legal and policy landscape from early Mothers’ Pensions to the devastatingly transformational Flemming Rule - the ‘magic trick’ of 1961 - created a clear financial pathway cloaked in biased, targeted narratives to officially conflate poverty with child neglect. We learned that the rapid expansion of the modern system wasn't initially driven by the 'battered child syndrome' narrative as many were led to believe, but by the intentional policy choice to marginalize and punish Black and poor families receiving public assistance. The system was built on efforts to reinforce segregation and amplify harmful narratives about 'unfit' parents and “unsuitable” homes, cementing a legacy of racial disproportionality that began almost overnight.
Prudence and her team’s exhaustive research offer us a clear understanding of the mechanics of how this system was built. But that leads us to some vital, urgent questions for our next episode:
What does this legacy of policy and narrative feel like on the ground today?
How do these dominant, decades-old narratives manifest as individual experiences, community harm, and professional bias? And how might we dismantle the narratives of 'unfit' parents or “unsuitable” homes that have been used to justify the marginalization of families for decades?”
How might we stop operating within and reimagine a policy framework that was explicitly designed to confuse social need with individual moral failure?
In our next episode, we will explore those questions. We’ll be speaking with a powerful panel including Dr. Pegah Faed, CEO of Safe and Sound, Valerie Frost, a national lived experience systems expert, and Claudia Rowe, National Book Awards finalist for her book Wards of the State, amongst other powerful voices, who will share firsthand accounts and insights into how this history and system impact the lives of individuals and families right now. Join us for a critical look at how this history lands in real life.
Closing Credits
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also, leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people.
This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Nathan Fink, who is responsible for our technical production. I can't express my gratitude enough to Nathan. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children’s Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast.
Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you, and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families.
I'm Luke Waldo, your Host and Executive Editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.