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Opinion | Michigan’s children deserve more than an investigation
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In late 2023, deputies in Monroe County found two young children living in a tent behind a house. It was November. The tent was covered with a tarp, heated by a small space heater and sat on the cold ground. The children’s mother was battling serious health problems. Their grandfather, who lived with them, tried to keep them fed with occasional help from the mother’s ex-boyfriend. The kids weren’t in school.
Over the next 18 months, the sheriff’s office would encounter the family twice more, once in the same tent and later living in a car. On that last encounter, one child couldn’t remember her last shower, and she sometimes relieved herself in her clothes because she had nowhere else to go.
Each time, deputies called Children’s Protective Services. And each time, they were told there was little the agency could do. There was food. There was heat. The situation, in the agency’s view, did not meet the definition of abuse or neglect. And if the children weren’t being abused or neglected by their parents, there was little the agency was going to do.
This is the hard truth about our “child welfare” system – it is not designed to address the welfare of children or help families meet their concrete needs. At its core, CPS is an investigative agency. It investigates families, looking for parental wrongdoing. If it doesn’t find any, it often closes its case. It is not a child welfare agency because “child welfare” means more than the absence of abuse. It means addressing the actual needs of struggling families.
I understand why CPS worries about conflating poverty with neglect. Too often, children are unnecessarily removed from parents simply because they are poor. In this case, CPS made the right call by not needlessly separating these children from their family. But somewhere along the way, we’ve taken the right lesson — that poverty is not neglect — and twisted it into an excuse for inaction. When a family is living in a car, the fact that they are not “neglectful” under the law does not mean they are okay.
In the Monroe case, it took a church, not the state, to finally get the family into temporary housing. By then, the children had endured nearly two years of housing instability, missed school and untreated medical needs. These are harms every bit as real as those caused by intentional abuse.
What if, instead of calling an investigative agency, deputies could have called a Family Support Unit — staffed with housing specialists, social workers, health care navigators and community members — whose job was to keep families together by meeting their needs? What if those workers had flexible funds to pay for a motel room that first cold night, enroll the children in school and connect the mother to medical care? What if communities were given real resources to partner with state workers to keep families stable before crises escalated?
This is not an impossible vision. In pilot projects in other parts of the country, family resource centers, community-based navigators and dedicated housing funds have kept thousands of children out of foster care by addressing the root causes of instability. Yet these programs, all across the country, are the exception, not the norm. We fund agencies to investigate parents while denying resources to families in deep poverty.
Imagine if, back in November 2023, the Monroe family’s first contact with authorities triggered this kind of coordinated response. The tent could have been replaced with warm, safe housing. The children could have been in school within a week. The mother’s health care needs could have been addressed. The grandfather could have had support caring for the children. We would not be reading about this family 18 months later, because they might never have reached that level of crisis again. This reality is within our reach if we can muster the courage and political will to make it happen.
Right now, CPS workers are asked to do the wrong job with the wrong tools. They investigate harm. They can’t provide the kind of help that prevents harm in the first place. The result is what happened in Monroe — children living in dangerous conditions, not because no one cared, but because no one other than a sheriff thought it was his job.
Michigan lawmakers should take this moment to separate the functions of child protection and child welfare. Let CPS investigate serious abuse and neglect. But create a parallel, well-funded infrastructure whose sole mission is to stabilize families, address poverty and keep children safe without separating them from their parents.
No child should wait for 18 months, three police visits and a church’s intervention to get help. If we truly believe in “child welfare,” we must build a system that actually delivers it.
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