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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18103 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The Long Arm of the State and Parenting

@ControlsFreak challenged me on my assumption that society has changed to the extent that the average parent faced real consequences if they treated their children the way every child was treated even 40 years ago, in the dark days of the 1980s.

Immediately I fell into personal anecdote, “I’ve been pressured by other women to supervise my children doing tasks I was able to do alone at the same age.” “All the parks have signs that children under 12 need to be supervised.” I even gave a personal anecdote about an Amtrak train that made it seem like I am disturbingly misremembering things or a short-lived policy was walked back. This gave me pause. So I did the more rational thing and asked, what kind of data can I find on this?

Looking around, I found a study that analyzed how many kids had parental rights terminated in the year 2000 compared to now. Their data only goes to 2016, but it does present a trend:

The cumulative prevalence of having parental rights terminated for both parents was 0.7% in 2000. It then increased to just under 1.0% in 2007 before decreasing between 2007 and 2012, ultimately falling to 0.9%. Starting in around 2012, the rate of the termination of parental rights started to accelerate, reaching a high of around 1.1% by the end of the study period in 2016. This 0.4% increase is equivalent to a 60% increase from 2010 to 2016.

There is a trend of more children being taken away from their parents, which is what I expect.

For every parent that has a child removed, there will be more that are investigated. What does that number look like?

Now, the claim in the title: Does CPS investigate one out of every three American children? The answer to this one is not available directly in the primary source reports and the underlying data is only available after an application for research use, so we’ll have to trust a group of researchers at the Washington University school of public health. They download and de-duplicate the master data files from 2003-2014 and confirm that 37% of American children are the subject of at least one screened-in referral to CPS from ages 0-18. We can sanity check this against the numbers we saw above: Around 2.5% of children are the subject of a screened-in referral each year. If about 2 percentage points of those are first-time subjects each year, then in 18 years you’ve investigated 36% of American children. There are extra complications when considering the children entering and leaving the cohort each year, but the 37% number estimated by these researchers makes sense given what we know from the CPS reports.

1/3 of American children are investigated by the time they are 18. That sounds like a ridiculous number. Are American parents just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking their kids more than in the past?

Additionally, the most common type of maltreatment found by CPS is neglect. 64% of substantiated victims are victims of neglect only and most of these neglect cases are specifically about lack of sufficient supervision rather than lack of access to food or clothing.

No. Basically my intuition - the intuition of most parents - is correct. Insufficiently supervising your child will get you a visit from CPS and your child potentially removed. The data bears that out.

Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life? How does that compare with the freedom you or your parents had when they were children (if they were born before 1990?)

How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10? How old were you when you first got to buddy up with a similar age child and split off from your family at an county fair or water park? If you are a parent now, what age would you consider this safe to allow your child to do?

I was born in the early 90's, grew up in a semi rural area. I had about a 1-2 mile range where I'd explore and play.

I have young kids now. My oldest is 7, I'd be fine with her walking to a store a half mile away and buying something, but she doesn't seem comfortable with that. I have neighbors with homeschooled kids. I see their 9 year old outside all the time playing alone. They are my 'canary' family. I'm seeing how much they get away with to know the local limits of acceptable free range parenting.

Homeschooling families can get away with a lot more because almost all stupid, frivolous, or borderline CPS reports are made by large institutions, particularly schools.

Is the main mode here busybody teacher makes a report because she doesn't like some way a child is being raised, or hyper-cautious institutional representative makes a report because they don't want to be caught up in a lawsuit or turn up on the local news?

Probably a little of column a, a little of column b, but schools do seem to push teachers to report cases they aren’t really sure about(I mean, teachers have told me this).

What did you think "mandatory reporter" meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Sarcasm, obviously, but the vibe of such laws is distinctly "better some arbitrary number of questionably-founded investigations than a few children actually get abused". For some value of arbitrary there, I'd even agree with the statement (disclosure: am mandatory reporter of some things), but of course the state considers false investigations as roughly harmless.

But I'm also not strictly opposed to the state investigating whether a kid in the hospital fell down a flight of stairs or "fell down a flight of stairs".

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