By Naomi Schaefer Riley and Rafael A. Mangual

Every year, more than 2,000 children in the U.S. die of maltreatment—and, in most of these cases, the child’s family is known to child welfare or law enforcement before the fatal incidents. Most Americans agree that the main goal of the child welfare system should be to prevent these tragedies—by closing the gaps that lead to children being left in the custody of guardians who abuse and neglect them. Balancing the safety and well-being of children with the rights of parents is no easy feat. A nationally representative poll conducted last year by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) shows that the public is sensitive to this tension: a majority (58%) favored parents’ authority to raise their children as they see fit, over the government’s authority to intervene—but nearly the same percentage of respondents (57%) did not believe that the child welfare system is engaged in government overreach. Alarmingly, a small group of increasingly vocal activists are trying to upset this balance by pushing a radical policy agenda that would all but eliminate the government’s role in child protection. Not only is this agenda wholly incongruous with the broader American public’s views regarding the appropriate scope of child welfare systems; it also undermines the well-being of at-risk children across the country. Illustrative of this broader push to weaken, if not wholly abolish, the child welfare system is a recent report issued by the New York Advisory Committee (NYSAC) to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Examining New York Child Welfare System and Its Impact on Black Children and Families.” One of the coauthors of this brief, Rafael Mangual, resigned from NYSAC in April 2024—after serving nearly four years on the committee—ahead of its final vote to approve its report on child welfare.

The NYSAC report offers a litany of policy recommendations that would make it more difficult for child abuse and neglect to be reported and investigated. The report calls for a “new paradigm of child welfare” that deemphasizes “reporting, investigating, surveillance, and family separation,” and it recommends that “federal, State and Local government offices and agencies” enact “legislation, policies and practices” prohibiting “the conflation of the consequences of poverty [including ‘parental/pregnancy substance use’] with child maltreatment” (emphasis added). The report also calls for federal law to be amended to:

• Eliminate or severely restrict mandatory and anonymous reporting of suspected child abuse or neglect

• Make it easier for convicted felons to become foster parents

Revise the definition of neglect to exclude parental drug abuse (including while pregnant) And for New York State law to be amended to:

• Prohibit routine drug screenings of pregnant women and newborns

• Establish a universal basic income

NYSAC’s proposals are ultimately premised on three false claims about the child welfare system: (1) what is often termed child neglect is often a consequence of poverty, which cannot justify traditional child welfare interventions; (2) parental drug abuse is an inadequate reason for intervention; and (3) racial disparities in child welfare enforcement in NY prove that the system is characterized by unlawful discrimination—particularly against black families. This issue brief provides an overview of the child welfare system’s central role, responds to each of these three claims, and highlights the dangers invited by the recommendations made in the NYSAC report.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2024. 10p.

Edited by Alejandra J Josiowicz, Irasema Coronado 

The Americas are witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility. With their families or unaccompanied, children are part of this immense movement of people. Children Crossing Borders explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children’s struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis.

Unified in their common interest in the well-being of children, the contributors bring an unrivaled breadth of experience and research to offer a transnational, multidimensional, and multilayered look at migrant childhoods in Latin America. Organized around three main themes—educational experiences; literature, art and culture, and media depictions; and the principle of the “best interest of the child”—this work offers both theoretical and practical approaches to the complexity of migrant childhood. The essays discuss family and school lives, children’s experience as wage laborers, and the legislation and policies that affect migrants.

This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. 255p.