What She Had to Do to Keep Her Children
What would you do to keep your children?
Most parents answer without blinking: anything. I have never been able to answer that fast. I grew up in foster care, and I witnessed my mother, over and over, unable to give up drugs. Not for herself. Not for any of her eight kids.
I carried that understanding with me for years.
Then, on a July afternoon, on a Zoom call with the volume turned all the way up, a mother gave an answer I have never recovered from.
The eviction threats had started, she said. She knew what homelessness could mean: in much of America, losing your housing can be recorded as neglect, and neglect is grounds for removing your children. She searched for a place that would take her and her kids together and found exactly one: residential treatment for mothers in active addiction. To qualify, residents had to have used drugs within the past 90 days. Rules like that exist because treatment is rationed by crisis; the beds are saved for people still using. She had been clean longer than that.
Stay clean, and lose the housing, and maybe lose the kids. Or qualify.
She took the drugs. She said it plainly, the way you say a thing you have stopped expecting anyone to understand. It was the only way to keep my kids.
I thought of my own mother. Always relapsing. Never showing up to court to get us back. As a kid I settled on the only story that made sense: she cared more about drugs than she cared about us. Now a mother I had never met was telling me she relapsed because she loved her children.
When the Doris Duke Foundation launched the prevention initiative that became OPT-In for Families, it asked a simple question: can we help families before everything falls apart?
At Think of Us, we refused to design an answer without parents who had lived that question. We had 15 seats. 210 parents from 40 states qualified in four days.
The application was supposed to be a form. Parents treated it as testimony.
They needed groceries. They needed the light bill paid. They needed transportation to work and school, child care, stable housing, and therapy. Seventy-one percent had experienced food insecurity. Nearly half had lived through utility shutoffs or lacked reliable transportation. More than half could not access mental health care.
None of it is extraordinary. And all of it costs less than what we spend instead. Child welfare agencies spend more than $34 billion each year, almost all of it after families have already reached crisis.
Read those numbers again. Each one is a mother deciding which bill becomes this month's emergency.
The average parent was carrying eight different challenges at once. One in five had no friend or family member to lean on. The parents who lost their children reported no more overall hardship than the parents who kept them. What differed was which hardships they carried: unstable housing, no transportation, no family to call. Families lose their children not where suffering is greatest, but where poverty is most visible and no one is coming.
Every year, around 7.8 million children are reported to child protective services. Roughly 4.7 million families are screened out, identified as needing help but offered little or nothing. Between 18.5% and 28% of those families are re-reported within one year, and roughly 60% are re-reported within five years. The system simply decided to wait: until the eviction lands, until the strain breaks something, until the crisis becomes severe enough to trigger what it was built to deliver: court-supervised services or the removal of a child.
We do not have a system that fails to see families in need. We have a system that sees them clearly and waits for them to fail.
When we gathered those parents, they told us why families stop asking for help: the front door to family support in America is a child abuse hotline, and asking for help can look like evidence against you. A mother who needs a security deposit learns to stay quiet until the eviction becomes a report, the report becomes an investigation, and the thing she feared becomes the thing the system was built to do.
None of this is anyone's malice. It is what we inherited: a child protection system built to investigate the worst cases, now serving millions of families whose deepest challenge is poverty. Neglect, not abuse, accounts for 63% of child removals, and housing instability alone affects 16,000 children every year.
That system offered my mother supervision, court dates, and case plans. I do not know that anyone ever asked what she needed to stay clean. Years later, the mother I met on Zoom relapsed too. The system was never built to offer either of them the help they needed. But it could be.
At the first sign of need, instead of an investigator, imagine a trusted community organization showing up with a security deposit, a utility payment, a car repair, child care, or a therapy appointment. That is what parents told us would have changed everything. It is what OPT-In for Families is building today in Oregon, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C., and new federal policies now allow child welfare dollars to pay for these kinds of supports.
We inherited a child protection system. We can build something better: a child and family well-being system that helps families before they reach the edge. One that asks, “What do you need?” before it asks, “What went wrong?”
One that makes it just as normal to help a parent keep the lights on, coordinate housing, facilitate healthcare, and provide economic support for families as it does to investigate a report. One that measures success by whether families stay together, heal, and have the chance to thrive.
So here is what I am asking of you. The next time you hear that a mother lost her children, ask not only what happened, but what opportunities she had before things reached that point. What door did we build for her?
I cannot go back and hand my mother a security deposit, or a treatment bed with room for her babies. Time will tell if there is saving grace for her. But I know there can be one for the mothers who come next.
Somewhere tonight, another mother is reading an eviction notice while her children sleep down the hall. She has been reported before. She has been screened out before. Soon she will go looking for help. Years from now, her children will tell a story about who she was. We are writing that story now. We must change it.
Notes
Parent needs data cited in this essay comes from Think of Us’s Parents for Prevention pre-screener analysis of 250 applications submitted over four days in July 2023. The analysis included 210 qualifying parents from 40 states applying for 15 roundtable seats and documented high rates of food insecurity, housing instability, utility shutoffs, transportation barriers, child care needs and unmet mental health needs.
