[kyoob]

I think it's smart to frame this as an anti-poverty issue. People often imagine "suburban" families falling victim to overreaching child neglect laws and enforcement. In fact poor children are separated from their families for reasons of child welfare far more often than non-poor kids. (Of course, this ends up affecting black families disproportionately.) Families are being broken up in the US for the crime of being poor.

Editing to add a link to a study detailing "Drivers of Inequalities among Families Involved with Child Welfare Services: A General Overview" for folks who find the Bar Association's article to be limited in scope.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/chi...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9265799/

[ZainRiz]

> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children)

While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider poor households. That would give a much better picture of how much of the existing system is biased against a given race vs being biased against poor people in general.

[kwhitefoot]

>> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children).

So more than 25% of all children experience a child welfare investigation?

That's mind boggling.

[crazygringo]

EDIT: dang fixed it, thanks! Orig comment below

----

What/who are you replying to?

Your quoted text isn't in the article and also isn't in any of the comments on this page.

[joe_the_user]

Your quote isn't from the article but a link in a post by kyoob (currently below this) that you aren't even replying to (were you so eager to beat hn's post throttling you put this on the main thread?). Kyoob's post already acknowledges this is also a poverty issue so your complaint seems a bit off the topic at hand.

[hosh]

The Let Grow organization that wrote this article and help advance legislation protecting parents, advocates for a parenting style that lets kids grow into resilient, independently-thinking adults. This is more than just protecting parents or preventing unnecessary breakup of families.

From that lens, the question I have is, how does this kind of parenting style help poor families?

[kyoob]

Advocating for laws that promote reasonable childhood independence benefits families where all the adults have to work more hours to get by, leaving their kids in safe but unsupervised situations more often.

[em-bee]

poor families have less resources/time to provide for continuous supervision for their children. so they use this parenting style by default. what helps them is that this style gets legal protection, so they are not targeted for letting their kids run unsupervised.

[yamtaddle]

> a parenting style that lets kids grow into resilient, independently-thinking adults

> how does this kind of parenting style help poor families?

I am not sure what you mean.

[emodendroket]

Yes, but it can happen to well-to-do families too -- if someone thinks your medical routine seems suspicious, for instance, even if it has been recommended by a doctor. Casting it as a poor people's issue or a black issue runs the risk of complacency because others decide it couldn't happen to them.

[cryptonector]

Poor families don't have the resources to fight this crap. No surprise then that CPS goes after them more than after the wealthy.