Posts Tagged ‘child abuse’
Presenting Model CPS Reform Legislation to ALEC This Week
This week, our president, Will Estrada, is in Atlanta attending the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) national convention. Will is presenting our newest model legislation: a bill that state legislatures can introduce to ensure that CPS investigators respect a parent’s constitutional rights when they are investigating child abuse or neglect. You see, far too often,…
Read MoreAnswering Your Questions
A few weeks ago we planned to answer your questions about parents’ rights in the final episode of the Parental Rights Podcast. While we had an urgent news story come up instead, we still wanted to go through your questions and answer them as best we could. Where listeners asked similar questions, we’ve combined those into…
Read MoreDon’t Buy the Hype That Child Abuse Is Sky-Rocketing
Perhaps you’ve heard the dire predictions: with more children at home, more parents out of work, and fewer eyes on the students because schools are closed, child abuse and neglect will skyrocket during this COVID-19 pandemic. But now there are refreshing warnings: warnings from both the federal government and private sources, to caution us not…
Read MoreEven Insiders Are No Longer Safe
Just when we think they won’t get any more brazen, they do. Not long ago, the system’s violations of parental rights were kept to the shadows. Child Protective Services (CPS) targeted minorities and the poor because these were least able to defend themselves, and more likely to be dismissed by the general population. But the…
Read MoreMom Investigated for Neglect: “There’s Something Really Wrong”
“For something like this to happen to me, there’s something really wrong.” That is the thought of a lot of good parents who suddenly find themselves caught up in a child welfare investigation without cause, and it’s the exact words of Wilmette, Illinois, mother Corey Widen to the Chicago Tribune last week. On August 2,…
Read MoreThe “Age of Fear” in the “Land of Surveillance”
It’s one of the toughest balancing acts you face as a parent: how to teach your child independence and self-reliance while keeping them safe in a dangerous and interconnected world. I say “interconnected” because, as wonderful as connection is, in some instances it can cause more harm than good. A key example: anonymous reporting. You…
Read MoreThe Controversial Child Abuse Epidemic Tearing Families Apart
Jessica Holt* was only a few months old when her mother, Sally*, noticed that something was wrong. Jessica didn’t feed well and, rather than gaining weight like most infants, she soon began to fall off the growth charts. As a result of her poor growth, Jessica was quickly given the “failure to thrive” label by…
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