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Notes -
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:
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?
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?
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?
Thank you for providing data. This is a good post. I admit that I did not expect the rate to be as high as it is. Duly updated.
Some thoughts. The Tabarrok post is pretty good. He also compares to other sources to try to get a sense for a rate at which one might expect some sort of activity to be at least reasonably warranted. His back-of-the-envelope was that it was broadly correspondent. I also did not expect this to be that high, either. He concludes by suggesting, as you do, that perhaps they could ease off on the neglect-only cases.
This seems broadly plausible. I am perhaps colored by my own experience in the 90s, and my familiarity with a couple cases in which parents did have their parental rights terminated. For one, I could see it being classified as 'neglect-only'. However, this neglect was so severe (e.g., leaving an infant in a car seat literally 24/7) to the point that it caused the child to have physical deformities. Whatever CPS was called at that time/location was actually far too loathe to push for terminating parental rights (they eventually did, after a long time).
In another case, a mother was simply seriously too mentally deficient in whatever way to care for a child. I don't know whether the cases were officially tallied as 'neglect-only', but in any event, this mother just kept having babies. After enough of them were taken, apparently the court just said that they could take any further babies immediately. The story goes that on the n+1th iteration, the social workers showed up at the hospital, only to be asked by the mother, who clearly knew them by name at this point, having had multiple prior children taken at birth by those exact people, "[Name], what are you doing here?" "Uh, we're here to take your child, just like the last time and the time before that." Like, this person was that mentally out there.
Obviously, those are extreme cases, but to me, 'neglect-only' doesn't simply mean, "You let your pre-teen go to the neighborhood park without you." Perhaps that type of thing is generating some reports, but I still don't think we have any data to know how prevalent that sort of thing is.
Concerning observations in the data. I think they're probably noisy enough that I don't think that's much of a trend line. A brief look at other papers that cited this one found this, which presents serious concerns about measurement effects, which contributes to my initial thought that it seems plausible that it's more noise/data problems than genuine trend.
Concerning further observations in the data. Figure 2 is a real trend line. Vastly more plausible that it's capturing a real phenomenon. That phenomenon would be that the likelihood drops rapidly with age. That's concerning termination of parental rights, not investigations or other things, and I can't find a similar chart to see age effects on those things or whether 'neglect-only' cases are relatively distributed across age groups or are concentrated in some areas. Without this data, there are still pretty big questions. At the very least, there seems to be a significant reduction in termination when you get up to your age range of 8-10, but are there still a bunch of neglect-only cases in that range? I don't know. Broadly-categorized 'neglect' concerns seem to be far more likely to be justifiable in the earliest years, when a child needs significantly more care and attention. The closest we get to a claim about the neglect-only case is when Tabarrok says:
Perhaps someone else can find another place in the primary source that he's using, but frankly, my best guess is that he actually misreported what the report said. The closest statement, with the same 64% number, is:
I don't see anything in the report to support the claim that "most of these neglect cases are specifically about lack of sufficient supervision rather than lack of access to food or clothing". Perhaps I'm missing it, but I just don't see that this report (that I thought was his primary source for his post) makes any distinction along these lines. Perhaps this was drawing on a different one of his links, and it just wasn't clear.
I am in violent agreement that cases where the government gets involved just because a pre-teen went to the park alone are extremely bad. I still remain fairly unconvinced that I have any idea how common they are. And my lying eyes still look out the window or around the neighborhood when I'm out and see kids in that age range roaming around unsupervised all the time. Maybe it is worse; it probably is; everything is worse.
1 - Me here: There are other bits about how they treat multiple substantiated claims. It talks about duplicates elsewhere, saying, "A victim with two substantiated reports of neglect is counted twice in neglect only." So it seems like there's some double-counting possibly going on, and it's this category of folks that are two-or-more-counted where 64% are neglect-only.
@OracleOutlook
As an addendum, I'd like to go back to my analogy. If someone were telling me that there's such a huge, serious, problem of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police for no reason, I would still want to have some sense of the scale of the problem. If they returned with statistics on how often black men have encounters with police or how often they're incarcerated, or how often there is use of force in police encounters, etc., that might be interesting data. Perhaps some of it would have been unknown to me until it was presented to me, and I would want to update on those items.
...but I sort of don't think that most of those buckets actually capture the phenomenon in question. Certainly, there may be other relevant questions about general allocation of police forces, or people can haggle over how many encounters/arrests/incarcerations/uses of force are ultimately justified/not justified, and those would all be interesting questions that could (and should) be addressed by folks who are interested in them. But none of them really tell me much about the actual scale of the specific problem of unarmed black men being shot to death by police unjustifiably. It could still be huge! It could still be tiny!
Even if they cite a small number of high-profile examples of unarmed black men being shot by police, and even if those small number of examples are bad shoots, I would feel pretty comfortable saying, "Yes, those are bad, but I still don't really know how common it is." And so, I wouldn't really know how reasonable it is to have significant fears on the topic.
The reason I think this is a useful analogy is because I recall seeing that someone did do a bunch of work to figure this out for the case of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police, and the result was that it was quite rare. But I don't think we have anyone who has done this for the question of children being taken away for reasons like a pre-teen going to the park alone. We have a bunch of other statistics that can tell us other things about the system in general, but not this, AFAICT. It could be really common! I don't know!
Elsewhere in the thread I wrote:
I think we probably agree on more than you think, in the sense that most parents just get a warning, deal with it, and move on.
My issue is more that we have to follow the inane suggestions in the first place. Because if you stand your ground and say, "No, my six year old can play in my fenced backyard on his own while I stay in the house, I will not follow along with your weird brand new rule that you just made up that this is somehow neglect," then you do face more and more push back in the form of lawyer fees, repeated visits, and eventually your kids being taken away.
In the case of a black person being stopped for shoplifting by a jerk cop, you can look at that and say, "yeah, shoplifting is bad. I hate having to ask an attendant to unlock the deodorant." The person who is shoplifting should stop. If they complain about it I have little sympathy.
In the case where a parent is just treating their kid normally, I can't look at that as a reasonable request to stop. Just asking that the parents change their behavior here is wrong. Even if most parents will cow under the pressure, and most kids wont get taken away, it's wrong.
And this is especially relevant in the discussion of whether it is harder to have kids these days. While we have made everything else more convenient, we have made having kids less convenient. That hurts society as a whole.
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