CPS Jenga (with Jessica Pryce)

Family Proclamations: Rethinking Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality

Jessica Pryce believed a career at Child Protective Services would be a rewarding way to help keep kids safe. What she learned on the job completely changed her mind, as the system itself kept getting closer and closer to home. Now she's a scholar of the system and works as a public advocate to help change it for the better.

Dr. Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her new book, Broken:
Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker. Pryce earned her Master's of Social Work degree from Florida State University and a PhD from Howard University. She's currently a research professor at Florida State University’s College of Social Work.

Transcript

JESSICA PRYCE: I was very close to the people I worked with. I was in their homes. I was opening up their kitchen cabinets. I was talking to their neighbors. I was very close. But I wasn't engaging them. I didn't really see them. I was investigating them and objectifying them.

BLAIR HODGES: When Jessica Pryce began working for Child Protective Services, she was shocked at some of the living conditions she encountered. She wanted children to be safe, so she worked with the courts and police to figure out who should be taken away from their parents or what parents needed to do to prove their fitness.

It was a tough job, and it got even tougher when people she personally loved got wrapped up in the system. She started to see cracks in the foundation—ways the system harmed families instead of helping them. It set her on a path to advocate for big changes.

In this episode, Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her book, Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services.

There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

FIRST DAY WITH CPS - 01:31

BLAIR HODGES: Jessica Pryce, welcome to Family Proclamations.

JESSICA PRYCE: Thank you so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book starts off right in the thick of things when you were a graduate student in social work. You'd landed this internship with Child Protective Services, CPS—this is a government agency that's tasked with protecting children from neglect and abuse. Take us to your first day in the internship when you visited the home of who you call Naomi Harden.

JESSICA PRYCE: Sure. A big part of writing this book was me trying to make sure the reader understood what happens when you get a CPS case. On my very first day I was going to meet my internship supervisor and didn't really know what to expect. As soon as I got into the office, she had a case so we were thrust out into the field to go meet this mom.

As an intern we're really supposed to observe and ask questions afterwards and take notes if we can. We weren't allowed to do any of the direct interviewing or things like that. It felt overwhelming at the time, but I still said, "Okay, I have my supervisor with me. I'll see what happens," and was bewildered by what we walked into.

BLAIR HODGES: Naomi was a woman in her late twenties. She was Black. She was a mom of three. She'd been reported for an environmental hazard. When you got in the house, how did you feel? Do you remember walking in there and kind of taking it in? What was it like?

JESSICA PRYCE: I do. It's one of those things you could never forget because I hadn't been in a house that looked like that. It looked very—you know, I’m trying to say messy, but it was it was deeper than that.

It was clear that Mom was having some sort of issue around the home because typically, as I learned on that day, environmental hazards are deeper than a messy home. It really depends on the ages of the children, and because there was an infant in the home this became a huge issue for CPS. We know what infants do. They crawl around, they get into things. So I think that was why it was a big red flag for the system to go into the home in that way. Because again, I was shocked that we got called for messy homes, but because the child was so young they wanted us to come and investigate.

BLAIR HODGES: You say you felt things like disgust and righteous indignation. You had an attitude toward the mom of like, "Who is this person? This is disgusting and terrible."

JESSICA PRYCE: I did. I talk about the fact that I didn't grow up in a home like that and I had never seen a home like that. I immediately felt like, why would she do that? Why would she be raising kids in this sort of environment? So yes, absolutely came in thinking this is ridiculous. These kids shouldn't live here. We have to do something. That was my mentality at the time.

ROLES IN THE SYSTEM - 04:07

BLAIR HODGES: It was so different from your upbringing. You grew up in this small town. Everyone cared for each other. It was a clean home. You didn't have to worry about environmental hazards in your house. You had parents who took good care of the home and of you. So this was like walking into an alien planet or something. You're learning quickly how removals of children might work, the type of people who are involved.

Walk us through the roles of all the different people in the system who would be involved in deciding whether or not they needed to remove a child from a home.

JESSICA PRYCE: We typically start with calling the reporter of the abuse. Around the country, there are mandated reporters. They call in a CPS report and we touch base with them on. what are your concerns? Is there anything else you want us to know about before we make contact with the family?

BLAIR HODGES: This could be teachers, doctors, and stuff like that?

JESSICA PRYCE: School social workers. We talk to the school, we talk to collateral contacts—which is sometimes neighbors. Again, these collateral contacts are people that don't live in the home but know the family. We're talking to teachers, school social workers, sometimes knocking on doors around the home to say, "We have this going on with this neighbor and her kids. What are your thoughts about it? Do you have any concerns about it?"

After we compile all this information, if we feel there's a danger threat, we then have to call our attorneys, really debrief the case, tell them our concerns, tell them what we found, and they let us know, "Hey, this isn't enough for removal," or "I think we have something here, let's take it to the judge."

That's how removals work. We have to consult with our attorney to see if there's enough to do that.

BLAIR HODGES: You had to do it every time? Sometimes I'm sure you would just know based on the system's rules, you'd be like, "Oh, this is a pretty clear-cut case." But investigators have to call attorneys regardless, and then they would make the call, and then they would call a judge to get an order to remove the child—is that right?

JESSICA PRYCE: What's interesting about that is we remove kids and then see the judge. We do talk to our attorneys to see if we have enough to petition the court, but that happens after the fact. As you read in the book, those children were removed before we ever went to court.

So we do make the removal based on an attorney saying, "I think we have enough to do this. Go ahead and shelter the kids." Then we put the kids elsewhere, and generally the very next day we go before the judge.

I learned very quickly during the early days of my internship that sometimes judges send kids back home. Sometimes judges say, “You know what? This looks like you did the right thing, let's keep them in foster care.” People don't realize we actually take kids away from families and then ask for permission to keep the removal.

BLAIR HODGES: Sometimes police get involved too. That's another element of this, that cops can be involved in the removal process.

JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. Generally, when we're removing kids we're encouraged to call law enforcement. In the book I take folks through my training, and during that training phase we are told if you're going to remove a child, also if you're dealing with family violence around intimate partner violence or domestic violence, we are encouraged to bring law enforcement. They play a big role in removals, because it gets very heated, and we wanted to make sure we had some support.

BLAIR HODES: If I recall correctly, there are also special doctors who are licensed to assess children. They're going to look at a kid and figure out if there's been abuse and things like that, right?

JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. If you're dealing with a case around particularly physical abuse, sexual abuse, and some cases with medical and physical neglect, we have physicians examine the child. That's really something we add to the evidence when we go to the judge.

These are all pieces of the puzzle we're pulling together to take to the judge for a ruling. And sometimes the judge says, "Yes, the child should be removed."

But the consolation prize, as I call it, for some families is, we're not going to remove your kids, but you're going to be monitored by the court for the next year or so. Again, somewhat a success, right? We didn't remove the children, but I think it's also important to know now you have the court system in your home really dissecting everything you're doing for the foreseeable future.

NAOMI’S CASE – 08:28

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so on the surface, Jessica, this seems pretty comprehensive. It seems fairly reasonable when we look at the process at this level. There are mandated reporters, there's investigators, there's attorneys involved, there's judges that make decisions, there's police that provide some protection, there's special doctors that assess the health of children, and it's an ongoing process.

We all want children to be safe. This process seems important. It seems like it could work well. What your book does is show us the gaps in these services, the problems with some of these approaches and how yhe system disproportionately affects some people compared to other people.

You experienced this firsthand. You had a follow up visit with Naomi, the mom you introduce us to at the beginning of the book, and she was told by the court to do certain things. When you went back, you were really troubled because you felt like she wasn't doing everything she could do. You felt like, “If I was a mom, I would be doing everything I could to prove I'm a worthy mom,” and you didn't see that with Naomi.

So you were still bringing this judgment to her and now you had to build a case. Maybe talk about the case building that you had do at that point and the kind of things parents might be expected to do by the court to either prove they were fit to have their children or to get their children back.

JESSICA PRYCE: With Naomi, I remember feeling like, why wouldn't she clean up her home in order to get her kids back? I just felt this was a very simple ask. But what I'm hoping people realize as they read the book, because a lot of these cases are left unresolved in the book—I give them what I experienced and then often I move on to a new case or I move on to the next part of my experience.

And what I want folks to ask themselves, even if they're not in the field—I don't know who will read this book—is that what you would have done? Did that feel like a compassionate way to help a mom that was clearly going through something? If someone is not doing what you would do in a situation, how do we react? Do we react, saying, "You're not trying. You're not doing the right thing. Why are you doing it this way?" We need to ask ourselves, are we putting that judgment on this mom because it's something we would do? Are we projecting our standards on this person? Are we able to drill down into what's really going on?

So she was asked to do several things, one of which was to clean up her home. There were several things I discovered a few weeks after her children were taken, and we realized she had been dealing with domestic violence in the past, that she was dealing with a lot of mental health issues. Her family started to weigh in on it. That she hadn't been the same since the domestic violence incident. She hadn't been the same since the birth of her child. It hit me in that moment, we saw what we saw, and we made—in my opinion, with our knowledge at the time, we made—the decision we thought was best. But what happens with a lot of families is we miss what's truly going on.

As you saw in the book, we placed the children with Grandma, she lived about an hour away. We thought we were fixing a situation, but it created so many other issues with the kids possibly having to move schools, and Grandma being an elderly woman that doesn't drive much anymore. It became this issue of what does the system need to do differently with families? How do we pull the community in to help a family stay together?

Somebody asked me who's read the book, "Why can't we bring in people to help clean the home? And mental health services?" Again, I know we're living in a certain type of world, but that was the point of the book. I wanted people to see what CPS professionals see every day and how they might have done things differently, and what we did in the moment and why we did it.

INTRUDE AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE – 12:07

BLAIR HODGES: I think you made it clear the one person in the entire scenario that didn't get support was Naomi. There were things that could have been done perhaps to help her, instead everything was put on her in a sense of blame and shame and personal responsibility, instead of looking at systems and things around her that were contributing to this. Postpartum depression, and abuse, and mental illness—all of the different things that could be addressed for Naomi, and that's not what the system was doing.

You found that more and more as you were working there, because you didn't just internship there, you became a full-time employee. That's when they took you through a short training. It's so funny when you're talking about how short it is. You're like, compared to what we're doing, it was pretty lightning quick to tell us what to do. [laughter]

I have this quote from the training materials, it says, "CPS intervention should intrude as little as possible into the life of the family, be focused on clearly defined objectives, and take the most parsimonious path to remedy a family's problems."

That's an ideal that you say did not match the reality of what you ended up doing.

JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. I was in that training cohort with other colleagues that had either been in the field or done an internship and we're in training thinking, "Wow, this sounds good." And I do understand what they're asking us to do, but how are we not translating what we're learning into actually what we're doing in the field?

That continues today, where people are trained, and then they come into the field and their supervisors and colleagues say, "I know you just got trained, but let me tell you what we're really going to do." I think that disconnect continues to create confusion and moral conflict with folks that are coming into the field to actually promote child safety.

What we really start to do, as other colleagues of mine have said, if we start to police families and over surveil them—a lot of families are under surveillance and we're really not getting to what's actually going on.

BLAIR HODGES: The idea of “intruding as little as possible,” that's fine to say, but there weren't a lot of actual ways to monitor that. To say, what does it look like to intrude as little as possible? Because a CPS case against a family can really take over a life.

JESSICA PRYCE: Indeed. And someone recently asked me what would that even look like if CPS wasn't intrusive? My only answer to that was, a lot of things would need to change. We would need to partner with families in a different way—as opposed to going in their home, walking through rooms, opening up cabinets—we would actually have to partner with not just that family, but extended family on, what are the needs? Do I need to go in here and do what I just did, or can we actually sit down and talk about, do you have food? Do you have material needs that are not being met? What can we do to support you in that way?

BLAIR HODGES: There would have to be a lot of trust built there too, because as the current system is, people might be reluctant to say whether they needed food or not or anything like that. That's because of stories they hear about how CPS works, and the adversarial relationship you describe between investigators in the system and the families that are undergoing it.

We’re talking today with Jessica Pryce. She's a research professor at Florida State University's College of Social Work. Her book is called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services.

SCOPE AND SYSTEMIC RACISM – 15:23

BLAIR HODGES: Jessica, I wanted to zoom out a little bit and just talk broad scope, give us a general sense—you might not have the exact numbers off the top your head, we're just trying to get an idea of how big the CPS system is. How many investigations are happening, how common it is for kids to get taken into the system? Give us that broad scope of the system.

JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. In a given year, there could be four hundred thousand youth in foster care. I believe in one of the years that I wrote about in the book, there were seven million cases called in across the country. That gives you a sense of how many people are calling in reports.

I believe four million of those calls were actually screened in. I talk about in the book, every call that comes in isn't taken. We were thankful for that. The folks taking these calls try their best to screen out ones that don't seem like abuse is really happening. Then they screen in ones that really meet the protocols and the metrics they have to look for in order to accept a case.

The data is clear in most of the states in this country, Native American children and Black children are experiencing disparate outcomes. They're spending more time in foster care. They're spending more time under court mandated services, meaning they didn't get taken out of their home, but their families are being overrun by the courts for a period of time, usually minimum of one year. And these youth are also moving from place to place more once they're put in the system. And the path to reunification is much longer for Black and Native youth.

So that's a little bit of the data around disproportionality, disparity, and the broad strokes of how many cases the system is seeing each year.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's look a little more at the racism here, because some people might hear what you just said and say, "Oh, well I guess Black parents and indigenous folks need to be better parents. It's on them. Of course, they would have more because XYZ."

How do you educate people against that kind of racism and bias?

JESSICA PRYCE: A lot of people feel that way. They really look at the fact that these families are who they are and they have a certain mindset toward these families. They say, "Well, of course that makes sense. They're abusing their children more."

But there's actually data and scientific studies that have been done that actually have evidence against that notion. That Black and Brown families don't abuse their children more, but they're reported more and have their children taken more. So I try to educate people on what's happening and not the narrative, and also not the narrative we have in our minds around certain family.

There's also a big discussion right now, that in my opinion, continues to happen around the conflation of neglect and poverty. At this point we're at 76% of the cases that come into child welfare nationwide have a maltreatment code of neglect. Often neglect is parents not meeting needs. That's the definition. They're not getting enough food to their kids. Kids are going to school and stealing lunches. These parents may not be taking their children to get medical care. These parents may not have a place to live. This broad idea of neglect is driving families into the system.

When you think about the fact that indigenous families and Black families are overrepresented in the impoverished population, you start to realize there is this connection between poverty, systemic racism, and the long journey of social and racial disadvantage for families.

ERICA’S CASE – 19:05

BLAIR HODGES: So it usually affects people in poverty, more often than not. Sometimes people aren't in poverty when they get trapped into the system. I think one of the most arresting parts of your book is the personal stories you tell, because things got personal for you really fast when you started working for the system. I'm thinking about your friend Erica.

Tell us a little bit about Erica and how she got tangled up into your experience as a caseworker.

JESSICA PRYCE: I'm so grateful I was able to share that story because that was really pivotal for my development. When people ask, "You thought a certain way in the system, and then you started to shift," I said, "Yeah, because I started to see people in my familial and social networks become entangled in the system." That's what brought me to sharing the story of Erica. And I appreciate her walking alongside me as I wrote this book.

Essentially, I was in my full-time position at the Department of Children and Families, doing CPS investigations. One day there was a case that came in and a colleague took that case, and it was on my friend Erica. I was very shocked. I knew Erica had been providing caregiving duties for her godchild at the time. She had been going through a lot. She was a college student and trying to figure out how to take her courses, take care of this four-year-old, and the child's parents were in many different ways just unavailable, unreachable, and not helping at the time. Stress got to her in a situation where she did corporal punishment as a consequence for behavior. And she was reported to CPS for physical abuse.

As I share in the book, everything that happened after was insane, in my opinion. I was caught in the middle of it because I understood on the system side, we have a four-year-old with evidence of abuse, based on what we call abuse and what the policies say about physical abuse, and we have a person who is not her biological mother. We need to shelter this child right away. I understood that in theory, but having the close connection I had with Erica, knowing that at that time there was possibly no other person on the earth that cared about that child as much as she did, it was really a tough situation to walk through.

BLAIR HODGES: Erica is caring for this young girl. The girl's parents are experiencing poverty. Mom went back to New York, believed they would leave the girl with Erica for a certain time.

And you describe the corporal punishment thing, because technically corporal punishment is legal. That's a big question about whether that should be the case, but it was. And it was something Erica seemed reluctant about herself, but felt backed into a corner, just didn't have the parenting tools and the skills and the support as a parent to deal with a child who was experiencing real trauma. That trauma was coming out in bad behavior and causing problems for Erica's life. So that's when she started spanking and doing this, and at one point leaves bruises on the child.

In the meantime, the child's mom who's experiencing poverty was seeking public assistance, and that's how CPS got involved on her side of things—not to find out how to help but to assess her. She went to get help, and instead of, "How can we help?" it was like, "What's wrong with this person. We need to evaluate this person."

Again, the system has this adversarial approach, even when people try to seek help it can start to cause problems. This little girl, her mom on one side and Erica on the other, were both going to get sucked into the system. As you said, you knew Erica as a wonderful person. She's your best grad school friend. What a shock it must have been.

You describe the scene where the girl, who you knew, shows up in your office. You have no idea what's going on. All of a sudden, she's right there behind your chair, excited to see you because she knew you.

JESSICA PRYCE: Yeah, and children don't come into the office unless they're on their way into foster care. When I saw her I knew something has gone terribly wrong. I did not know what had happened at that point. I had been working the entire day on my own cases and realized pretty quickly that Erica was about to be under a lot of scrutiny and was about to go through a situation and a process I take a lot of parents through. But watching how it affected her really made me reluctant to do that to other parents.

To your point, Erica is on this side of the situation, and then Didi—which is the pseudonym I gave Madisen's biological mom in the book—Madisen is the little girl—is on the other side of this trying to get herself together in a very difficult, in my opinion, place to live in this country. It's super expensive. Trying to rebuild her life. Meanwhile, this chaotic exchange has happened in Florida around corporal punishment, which a lot of people have feelings about.

I could have written, "There was a corporal punishment situation," but I wanted people to think about their reactions to that scene in the book. Because I know people are going to react to, “That should never have happened, this is completely inappropriate.” But I think that is a snapshot of a much larger picture that I knew of at the time, but others didn't.

I realized when I go to meet a mom on a case I am seeing a snapshot and this person has an entire life and existence that is worth trying to figure out.

BLAIR HODGES: I was shocked by the numbers you report. Anywhere between forty and seventy percent of parents have reported spanking at some point. That's huge. That's a lot of people. When does it cross the line from legal corporal punishment to abuse that the system would intervene about?

JESSICA PRYCE: This is a discussion that's been going on for quite a while, but I can say when it comes to CPS if there are marks or bruises—and often these marks or bruises are left unintentional, and I know that might sound strange to people because they think, "Well, if you hit a child, you're intentionally causing that”—There are a lot of people that spank their kids and there are never any marks. So I don't think most parents intend to leave marks on their children when they are trying to provide a consequence to certain behaviors.

For CPS, the line is crossed if there's evidence of marks and bruises on the child. But again, even when that happens I'm hoping the system continues to evolve into, what do we do at this point and what should be our next steps? Because the immediate ejection of a child because of that isn't working very well for the system. There are a lot of issues going on—not enough foster parents, not enough placements, too many kids in the system.

So how can we tease that out and find some nuances. Like okay, maybe there is stress, maybe this parent made this decision and it went further than they thought it would go. But is that an immediate ejection? Is that an opportunity for the system to say, Hey, we see this happen. We don't like it. We don't think it was the best thing to do. But how do we partner toward a future where this doesn't have to happen and this mom actually gets the help, and what you said earlier, the parenting tools she needs?

BLAIR HODGES: Erica felt up against the wall. She's a student. She had to start working to afford daycare and other expenses. That made her spend even less time with Madisen. She's desperate to find a way to get Madisen's behavior to change because daycare is saying maybe we can't have Madisen here.

She's desperate. She's trying to find anything. Again, it comes down to whether she had enough money to keep this going, whether she could be supportive, whether she could learn parenting tools different than corporal punishment. None of that was happening. Instead, the bruises happened and then the system comes in to say, "Did this person harm the child? We need to protect the child and possibly prosecute the caregiver." In fact, Erica was later arrested for this, and you describe the case in the book.

RACHEL’S CASE – 27:12

BLAIR HODGES: Now, if that was all you had encountered as a caseworker, in terms of it touching your personal life, that would have been a lot. But that wasn't the only way your personal life got tangled up. This next part really shocked me. I have to say, Jessica, it shocked me because I'm thinking about Rachel, this is your sister. You actually yourself reported her to CPS while you're working for the system.

What was it like to include this really personal story in the book?

JESSICA PRYCE: Essentially, I will say it was not easy to include it because it talks about culpability and the way I used to think and what I thought in that moment. I really appreciate that my sister to this day talks about how the system intends to help but often they exacerbate already very fraught situations. I appreciate her willingness to continue to advocate for change, specifically relating to domestic violence and child welfare.

Although it wasn't easy, I wanted to include it because this continues today. When there is a domestic violence situation, we're trying to figure out which victim we're going to actually come in and try to help, and who gets protected in a situation like that.

At the time I felt very much like CPS and law enforcement was the best route to take when I made the call. But I realized perhaps I was naive. What happened after that with my sister, I realized her life all of a sudden became even more stressful than it was before. Again I, at that moment, maybe being a little bit naive, called it in because she was experiencing domestic violence, but realized after that her stress levels were increased and services and support weren't there the way I thought they would be.

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about the double bind your sister was in, and that a lot of women are in. She was abused by her partner. She was abused. When the system got involved, she also becomes a suspect of the system because they want to know if she is a perpetrator for not protecting the children from domestic violence, or even perhaps just witnessing domestic violence. Now she's gone from being a victim to being a suspect.

JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely, and I think states are moving away from the term "failure to protect." There was a time where that was the buzzword, that this mom is failing to protect her children. Although we're moving away from that term, there are still ways in which we come on the scene and there is a mom victim, and we're trying to ask questions here and there about, "We see this is happening, what are you going to do next to protect these kids? What are you going to do next to protect your home from this perpetrator?"

This is a tough situation to talk about. I think people who read the book might have certain thoughts and feelings about it. And I welcome that. I welcome folks to say, "Well, a mother should protect her kids." And “She must do this, and she must do that.” And what I'm hoping they also stop and think is what it feels like to be a victim of domestic violence, because that's an entirely other phenomenon we need to really consider.

Again, I don't know if CPS is prepared to understand the dynamics associated with that sort of abuse.

BLAIR HODGES: There are all kinds of reasons why someone like your sister might not call. They might have some mental health issues because of the abuse that would lead them to want to cling tight to the relationship out of trying to be protective. Or maybe there are financial reasons. They're trying to protect the circumstances they're currently in and if they left, they wouldn't have resources to care for their kids. There's a ton of different reasons why.

And again, the system is not coming in and saying, "How can we support this person who's been abused and their kids and get them out of the situation?" It's trying to figure out if they have culpability in some way.

JESSICA PRYCE: Yeah, and they come with a lot of, "We want you to go do this, we want you to go do that. We want you to go and take care of this." It becomes this rat race of a mom trying to do these things, because now you're under surveillance and one wrong step, or one thing you don't do, are you going to lose your kids today? And I think that was the fear she had.

A lot of parents I talk to have that same fear. I'm going to go do what they told me to do, even though it doesn't feel relevant. It's not helpful. It's not genuinely something I need. But if I don't, what are going to be the repercussions for me? Again it’s policing and pushing families into experiencing certain services, when we didn't do the due diligence to actually see what they really needed.

MORAL INJURY – 31:57

BLAIR HODGES: They might be telling them to go take some classes or do things that further burden. Maybe they already don't have time for stuff and now they have to do a bunch more. Like you said, it's not meeting the immediate need. It's adding more needs.

You describe this time, and again it's not just the people who are being investigated that the system can harm, you also talk about the dangers of the system on the employees themselves. You experienced a lot of work-related stress, and double binds, and difficulties that affected your own mental health and your own sense of wellbeing.

“Moral injury” is a term that comes up in this context. I wondered about your thoughts about moral injury and the impact on employees themselves. Because you saw burnout. You saw people working and then leaving. So many people came in, worked, and then got out of there. You yourself did that. Talk about the moral injury side of things.

JESSICA PRYCE: I didn't want to write this book and not mention this, because if I'm anything, I am going to speak truth about the system, but I'm also going to say the professionals on the front lines doing this work, it's far bigger than them. I think there are systemic issues, systemic racism, systemic dysfunction, and we are on the front lines trying to do the work to the best of our ability.

Some people start to really experience that moral conflict, this idea of, "I'm making decisions, I'm doing certain behaviors to protect myself or protect the system. But am I really helping these families?" I started to feel that big time with what happened to my friend, what happened to my family, and then how that impacted the moms I started to interface with throughout my career.

I also realized that, as it related to me and law enforcement, I think I put in the book that people don't know who's there to help. I arrive with law enforcement and I'm there trying to investigate child abuse, but these parents are looking like, “Are you here to arrest me? Are you here to help me? What is actually going on?”

That conflict started to manifest in me as well. I call law enforcement because I feel safer. But what is that creating with this interaction? What is that actually doing to this interaction for the next few moments? And as you said, I started to experience a lot of anxiety. Ultimately, that impacted my departure from the system. The anxiety got to the point where I really couldn't manage anymore, and the stem of that anxiety was just the feelings of moral distress and moral injury I was perpetuating on families.

ABOVE THE FRAY OR ON THE FRONT LINE – 34:43

BLAIR HODGES: That's Jessica Pryce. For the past fifteen years, she has been working in child welfare from multiple angles—directing casework, and then researching, teaching and training, and policy development. She's provided training to over two hundred child welfare organizations now, and we're talking about her book Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services.

Jessica, you left the system, but you couldn't leave it alone, so to say. You wanted to know more about it. You went to Howard University to study it. A lot of people think universities are disconnected from life. There's a stereotype that if you become a researcher or go to university, you're in the ivory tower. You're away from real life so you're not able to grasp it.

You brought your own personal experiences of being on the ground to the university and say in some ways it gave you an even closer perspective than you had before. You could really zoom in on the history of it. What did you learn about the history of CPS when you went to Howard University?

JESSICA PRYCE: I often talk about the importance of proximity to families you're serving. When I first read a book called Just Mercy years ago, Bryan Stevenson talked about how you really need to be in close proximity to folks you're trying to help. It dawned on me I was very close to the people I worked with. I was in their homes. I was opening up their kitchen cabinets. I was talking to their neighbors. I was very close. But I wasn't engaging them. I didn't really see them. I was investigating them and objectifying them.

When I zoomed out, when I left the system, I did go to the ivory tower but then I was able to look at the history of child welfare—something I never knew about, something that wasn't taught in training, which of course it wouldn't be—and realized that at the onset of child welfare, Black families weren't even allowed to be serviced by the system. They had to go a completely different route, because they were seen as inferior. And as I tracked child welfare over time, I started to realize those remnants of systemic exclusion and systemic racism were still around in many facets of the system today.

That's when I went down the path of looking at disparity, disproportionality—looking at Black professionals and how they viewed the system. Also looking at leadership changes and how that impacts policy.

So it was huge for me to go—I think it took about five years—to really look at the system, write a dissertation, do some research. But I felt closer to the system at that point than I did when I was actually working with families. Because again, I was too close. And I think when I zoomed out I was able to get to the bottom of a lot of things. It really ignited this advocacy that I wanted to do something to help child welfare professionals, and by helping them create more ethics and create more compassionate services, ultimately to help families.

WHEN INDIVIDUAL BLAME GOT BAKED IN – 37:36

BLAIR HODGES: I think laying out the history matters so much. You show how in 1974 the United States passed this law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. It was informed by a group called Mothers Anonymous, then called Parents Anonymous. A woman who went by Jolly K. was abusing children. She came to see the error of her ways, changed, and then became this huge advocate for preventing child abuse or addressing child abuse in the United States. This law gets passed.

Then you point out something really important here we've talked about all along the way, that it was a very individualist ideology here. The idea was to identify parents as the perpetrators and to not really, at all, look at systems around the parents. Don't look at the economy. Don't look at jobs. Don't look at parental leave. Don't look at anything else other than, “If you harm a child, you're a bad person, and you made that individual choice, you bear all the blame.”

So that Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was intended to help kids. It created this reporting system and then, to this day, laws direct money to programs that investigate parents based on this individualist approach, instead of putting funds into better mental health services, into better affordable housing services, into schools and programs that can help parents and children have better relationships and help alleviate the stresses that can lead to abuses, that can lead to neglect.

Rooted in how these laws came together, you show clearly how society is focusing on individual blame, not systemic change. When you learned that at Howard, I'm just interested in your own process there because like you said, you were so close to the system. What was it like for you personally to learn that history and start to have to digest it?

JESSICA PRYCE: It was bewildering and it was overwhelming, but it also created this motivation to make sure that I'm educating others, and to make sure I am always challenging people to look at how we perpetuate harm, how we perpetuate the very harmful parts of history in modern times. So it has created in me this idea that I'm not going to shy away from saying to child welfare professionals, “I used to be you. It's really hard. You're overwhelmed. You're overtaxed, and you're possibly dealing with burnout and moral injury, but families deserve a person that is going to do everything we can ethically to consider the full picture.”

I appreciate you bringing up Parents Anonymous, because that was really eye-opening for me when I started to look at that, and look at congressional testimony around Jolly K. I think her story captivated America during that time because she was accepting accountability, some would say, that she was abusing her child. But she was very vocal that nothing was impacting her doing that.

Now later, we found out that Jolly K. experienced so much mental illness, that she herself had been abused, and there were so many things that were going on with her that people didn't really pay much attention to. But again, I think that time in history created for child welfare, a microscope on the mom or a microscope on the dad, and what are you doing? Why can't you be better?

BLAIR HODGES: You had seen that microscope come into the lives of people you loved. Erica, as I mentioned, your friend, was arrested. She does eventually get out of jail, and somehow is able to make it through the system. She adopts Madisen. People might say that seems like a happy ending then because it all worked out. But first of all, you invite us to remember all the things Erica had to go through, and Madisen, the child. But you also want us to say hold on, what happened to Madisen's mom? To Didi? There was no help there for her.

So a happy ending is really complicated here.

JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. And in the first iteration of this book, Didi's perspective wasn't included and the publisher said, "Is there any way you can get some interviews with her?" And I took a long shot. I said, "I really don't want to write this without your story." So I appreciated being able to interview her because again, in one way, it was a happy ending—we had a permanent placement between a child and a person where they were bonded and loved, and this wasn't a stranger she was being adopted by, this is somebody she really cared about.

But I want the reader and folks that are considering adoption to stop and think: What world do we need to build where Didi would have had the help, the services, the support, to bring her child back in her home? Because again, I think people are going to have mixed feelings and thoughts around Didi and her behavior if you focus on the actual behavior and decisions she's making without looking at the systemic barriers she was also experiencing.

WRITING AS AN ADVOCATE -

BLAIR HODGES: You say this wasn't necessarily the book you set out to write. Your publisher helped with that. You talk about in the book that originally you conducted research with Black women in particular who were in the system. You wrote in a third person voice as a researcher, an intellectual book, and the publisher and your editor challenged you to dig deeper and said, "You know, I think you can reach more people if you make this a personal story."

That was intimidating for you. Talk about that, because there's a big shift. You were a CPS agent, an academic researcher, and this book is written more in the voice of a public activist. That's a different role altogether.

JESSICA PRYCE: I was overwhelmed and a little bit scared about switching gears. As I sit here today, I'm extremely grateful I was challenged and pushed in this direction because I want child welfare professionals to read the book, maybe they feel certain things about the book, maybe they feel like, "Oh, I'm pinched here. I'm jabbed here. But I'm supported there and validated there."

Because there are nuances to doing this work that I don't want people to miss. I don't want people to assume all child welfare professionals are evil creatures that are snatching kids. I don't want that. But I also don't want them to assume they're all benevolent. So how do we bring this together in a balanced way to say this is a very difficult job, and I was able to show that, I hope, in the pages, because it was very difficult for me when I started in that work.

But how do we push ourselves as a workforce and challenge ourselves to do things differently, not just better, because we can get better and better because in many ways we have, but things haven't changed. There's not a difference in how we're approaching the families we're supposed to be serving.

JATOIA’S CASE – 44:31

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, that reminds me of Jatoia Potts. This is a mom who lost her children because of no fault of her own, it turns out. This is a story of grave injustice. Maybe take a second to tell us about Jatoia Potts' story.

The follow-up question I have for it is whether it ever feels completely overwhelming. You're facing such difficult odds and change seems to be slow. Tell us about Jatoia's experience and then how it affects you personally now that you're an activist. Is there activist burnout? Is there activist fear?

JESSICA PRYCE: As you read the book, you see I'm taking folks back to when I first started in the field, but I also wanted them to see these things are still happening. So you have stories that happened in 2008 and 2009, which feels like a long time ago, so you could read the book and say, "Oh, that's over. Why has she taken us through all that?"

But then you see a story that happened in 2021, 2022, and 2023. That's where Jatoia came in. She was at the other end of my career, where I'm moving into the academic space. I'm speaking, I'm training, and I'm also doing quite a bit of expert testimony in TPR trials—TPR is the “Termination of Parental Rights.” If folks don't know what that means, it's when a court says legally you are no longer the parent to this child, and that clears children for adoption.

When I became connected to Jatoia, I became an expert witness in her TPR trial. Again, this was someone who started to suffer at the intersections of all the things we've been talking about: systemic racism, systemic dysfunction, and this narrow view of, “What did this mom do? Did she react the way we wanted her to react? Did she make decisions the way we would have made a decision? Surely she's done something wrong.”

There was this mindset toward her, as folks will read, that she can't be exonerated. She certainly did something that hurt this child. And I'm so grateful Jatoia shared her story throughout this book. I think her placement in this book was huge because I don't want people to think the early cases of me when I was a twenty-two-year-old investigator are a thing of the past. These things continue to harm mothers to this day and it often results in literally severing the ties between a mom and her children.

BLAIR HODGES: Someone like Jatoia becomes connected to you and is willing to use her voice to speak out about these issues. So some moms will turn into activists about the system, but not many of them either, and you also understand that. Talk about that, the fact that some moms and dads even can step forward and advocate, but a lot of others can't. Talk about those dynamics.

JESSICA PRYCE: I'm always amazed when parents turn this sort of pain into purpose. That is a really good example for Jatoia and another mom in the book that I was able to highlight.

To them, they want to do all they can to discuss their story, to connect with other mothers or other parents that are going through this, and to do as much community work as they can to make changes. I often say if I were Jatoia, I would want nothing to do with this case. I would want nothing to do with CPS. I would want nothing to do with being front facing for the movement.

But I'm always astonished by her power that she's taken back, right? And also her resilience, and as I put in the book, Jatoia sees this as a much larger purpose than her individual story. When a mom goes through this now, Jatoia is a resource for them. And I think it's amazing.

PLAYING JENGA: AN ANALOGY FOR THE FUTURE - 48:18

BLAIR HODGES: Take us through the Jenga analogy. Jenga is this game people might know where you're building these blocks, and the blocks are all stacked up and you're pulling one block out and putting it on top. You just kind of keep doing that.

You use this Jenga analogy to talk about the system itself because a lot of listeners might be wondering, does the system get anything right? How solid is the system? Are there some people that are being helped by it? Are we just looking at rearranging a few pieces or do we need a fundamental change?

JESSICA PRYCE: I'll start with responding to the question of, “Is the system doing anything right? What are we doing well?”

I'll start by saying that I often talk about this, I believe the system needs to be here. I know not everybody believes that, but I believe that we need a CPS system—but we need a CPS system that investigates actual child abuse. I hope in my lifetime I see a parceling out of, what is child abuse and what is a family crisis? What is economic stratification? What is poverty? What is mental illness? I personally don't think CPS should be investigating as much as they're investigating.

So back to the question. When there has been abuse, when there has been a child that has been willfully harmed by their caregiver, I absolutely think CPS is a structure that comes in and it's very clear this child needs protection and there needs to be accountability for what happened. I just wanted to put that out there, that I do think when it comes to willful abuse and children that are in need of help, this system can really step in in that way.

Then when I go to other issues that are societal and community wide, CPS in my opinion is a little bit out of their depth. I think when it comes to neglect and poverty and mental illness and things of that nature, I don't think they're the best source of support. I don't think they're the best mechanism or structure to really come in and try to figure out what's going on with that family.

You brought up Jenga, and Jenga became a powerful metaphor for me because I play it a lot with my nieces. And I realized we do that with child welfare. The entire point of Jenga is you move a block and you put it on top of the Jenga system. You're doing all you can not to make the system fall. You're just keeping it standing up. You're moving blocks from here and there, very rarely touching the bottom. If you're touching the bottom, you're being very meticulous about it, because again, we don't want the system to fall.

I realized we're doing that in child welfare, and we have for a hundred years, continued to move programs, move services, add something here, add something there, but we're putting it back on the same system. But we're not getting to the root. We're not getting to the dysfunction and the assumptions that have been found in years of policies that are really driving the things we're doing. And until we actually get to the bottom of child welfare and until we start moving blocks from below and changing those blocks, I think we're going to continue to perpetuate what we're seeing.

If we continue to have a block at the very bottom of our system that is absolutely targeting and blaming parents, then we're going to continue to be punitive and blaming parents with the policies and the practices we're doing.

So I challenge folks to consider letting it fall. It's scary—the idea of letting the system fall down is huge and scary. People are like, "This is my livelihood. This is how I work." I think it takes courage to build something new, but that's what I'm advocating for—not being too afraid to go to the foundation of a system and say, “Why do we think this? Why is it built on that? Why are these families excluded? Why don't we send every parent to a parenting class? Why do we do the things that have built this system?”

If we start to really tease that out and dismantle that part, and then rebuild a system that actually investigates actual abuse, right? And then diverts families that need assistance and support, I think that's when we get to rebuild something that we're actually proud of and rebuild something professionals can come into and feel less moral conflict, hopefully less burnout, and the families can really experience a different system.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you have hope that we can move in that direction?

JESSICA PRYCE: I do. I do. And the reason why I have hope is because child welfare, as a system, is doing things differently today.

I was just at a convening this week around kinship care. Kinship care is when you remove a child from the home if there's a safety threat, but you place with family. Although I think we've always wanted to place with family, we haven't been having discussions about, “Are we supporting kinship here as much as we support a foster placement?” So we're having those discussions now. Don't just place with Grandma and say we've done it—which reminds us of the Naomi case. Don't place with Grandma and say we've done it, we placed with kinship.

Now, how are you going to support that grandma? How are you going to support making sure those kids are connected to their mom? Because now they're far away from their mom, and not in communication.

SoI do have hope we're moving in that direction. Again, I don't know how quickly we'll get there. But I think people are having those hard discussions about, “Why do we provide all of this financial support to foster parents, but we don't have that same energy toward a grandma or an older sibling or an aunt or uncle that have said, ‘I want the child to stay with us. They're our family.’"

EVERYDAY ADVOCATES – 53:46

BLAIR HODGES: Is there anything actionable you would suggest everyday listeners do—like listeners to this show that might not have direct ties, a lot of them might not have any kind of direct involvement in the CPS system. Is there something that everyday folks can do to help push things in the direction you're advocating for?

JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. I'm so grateful I was able to include some resources in the book for folks, particularly around reporting abuse.

I tell people all the time, there's a resource in the book that says consider these things before you report abuse. For everyday listeners, as you said, if you have thoughts about a neighbor, or you're concerned about folks in your life—is this abuse? Should I call this in? I do offer some things that hopefully make you pause and consider certain aspects of the family before you make that call. Some people when they go through these considerations, they no longer want to make the report, right? But some people still do. Now they have a lot more information to provide to the system because they've actually thought through what's actually going on.

I am grateful I was able to include that resource for folks that might be wondering about a family, might be wondering how they might be able to support. I want people to understand what happens when you report a family, what they experience when a CPS agent comes to their home, and with that sort of knowledge I hope that it makes reporters pause.

REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES – 55:08

BLAIR HODGES: The resources you offer have some ideas for mandated reporters, and also for people who might be considering talking to CPS, and you're inviting them to think about how well you know the circumstances in that family's life. If you've considered connecting them with community or social supports that can help them out, if there's a trusted colleague or community advocate you can connect with to brainstorm about what to do. There are things people can do if they're wondering what to do in situations where they're wondering about children.

The book, again, it's called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services, really gives some good ideas and good tools that people can consider when they're trying to help out kids. Because at the bottom of it, I really believe that pretty much everybody truly does want to protect kids, and even the people who are overseeing the system and making policies that are actually damaging families, I don't see any evil people that are like, "Let's destroy lives." [laughs]

JESSICA PRYCE: Yep.

BLAIR HODGES: They're thinking in individualistic terms and not addressing systemic issues. The more we can get people thinking in that way, the more likelihood we have of impacting the CPS system.

Jessica, I just want to say, the book was so helpful for me. I learned so much about the system. It was also really personal. I felt connected with you. So I hope people will check this book out, because together we can start to make inroads in the system.

Again, that's Jessica Pryce, research professor at Florida State University in the College of Social Work there.

Alright, that brings us to our final segment of the show. This is called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. Jessica, this is your chance to choose your own adventure. You can speak to one, two, or all three of these things. If there's anything you'd change about the book now. This book's just now coming out, so this is one of the freshest books on the show. Maybe you haven't had time to think about what you would do different at this time. But you can also speak to challenges, what the hardest part about writing it was, or the surprises, how you changed in the course of making the book.

JESSICA PRYCE: I really appreciate the question. I'll start by saying the most challenging part by far was feeling that I've done justice to the stories that were shared with me. And also, connecting with former colleagues and really re-living what I did in the system. I did this exercise around narrative journaling, just writing out cases I've been on and how they impacted me and what I remembered about them, and how I thought in that moment, and how I think today. I think that was challenging in general to take that journey back.

Another challenge is making sure I've done justice to the best of my ability to the stories that were shared with me.

As far as surprises, I think for me, a big goal of mine was for people to see my development. I could have written this book from the seat I'm in now, and we've only talked for an hour but there's a lot of things I could have said about data and science and organizational change and culture. Because that's where I'm at now. I understand these things.

But it was important for me that people saw my developmental trajectory because I hope it shows them they can also change. That if they think a certain way, if they see parents a certain way, if they have a certain opinion about certain communities, that you can get on the other side of that if you continue to educate yourself and you take a journey with colleagues who actually want to take this introspective journey. That you can also get on the other side of this work, do this work ethically, and do this work with compassion, and advocate and become an activist toward social justice and racial justice.

So again, I think that's been the most surprising and the most edifying, that I was able to really show my development, and it surprised me how much I appreciated being able to share that. It's not easy to share how you used to think about families. But I think in sharing that it might show someone else they too can change.

BLAIR HODGES: I certainly hope so. That's part of why I do this show myself, because I'm on a journey about all my thinking about families, what they are, about how we treat families, and your book is a really important part of that story.

Again, it's called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services by Jessica Pryce. And again, Dr. Pryce, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for writing this book, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us about it.

JESSICA PRYCE: Thank you so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to this episode of Family Proclamations. I invite you to listen to other episodes if you haven't had the time to do that yet. Special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor, and to David Ostler, who sponsored the first group of transcripts. If you'd like to sponsor transcripts, please let me know. Reach out to [e-mail]. You can also send feedback about any episode you want. There's a lot more to come on the show.

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I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

[End]

Transcripts are edited for readability.