Does CPS Investigate One Third of All Children in the US?

Ever and anon a post will go around X citing an astounding stat about the scale of Child Protective Services in the US. Often, they are attached to a horrifying report of loving parents losing their child after a blankface schoolteacher or pediatrician reported them. Something like this:

But astounding stats will go viral on X whether they are true or not and despite a morbid curiosity and a libertarian concern for government overreach, I’ve never looked beyond the tweet level at any of these claims. So are they really true?

The short answer is yes.

The primary source here is the annual Child Maltreatment report published each year by the CPS. The stats and screenshots below are coming from the 2023 version of this report.

First, lets get a basic scale and stats on the number of referrals, investigations, and interventions.

Each year, the CPS receives about 4 million referrals from people notifying the agency of alleged child abuse. Around half of these are immediately, and likely automatically “screened out” for not meeting certain criteria like actually being relevant to child abuse, or having enough information for the CPS to follow up. Four million referrals means about 5% of all ~70 million children in the US are referred to the CPS every year, though some children are reported multiple times.

Screened-in referrals are what’s actually investigated by the CPS and they are called reports. After the CPS receives a report, an agent will make an unannounced visit to the home in question within 24-72 hours, speak to all the children and guardians, and search the home for signs of neglect or abuse.

70% of reports (i.e the ~2 million screened-in referrals) come from professionals like police, teachers, and doctors. Most reports come from these groups because they are mandatory reporters, which means they are criminally liable if they observe evidence of child abuse or neglect and do not report it.

Of the children involved in the ~2.1 million investigated referrals about 15%, or 530,000, are classified as victims. This means that the CPS officers substantiated or indicated the report and found a preponderance of evidence that the alleged maltreatment actually is taking place.

Of these 530,000 victims, around 20% are removed from their homes. A third of these removals place the children in the homes of a grandparent or other family member and the rest are placed into foster care. The median length of stay in foster care is 16 months. 65% of children leaving foster care are reunited with their parents, other family members, or previous guardians, 25% are adopted, and the remaining 10% age out.

Now we are finally able to evaluate the claims about CPS going around X.

Does CPS remove 200k children from their parents every year? Well, 20% of 530,000 is only around 105,000, but there are other sources of removals. 20% of the children that CPS classifies as “victims” are removed, but around 1.4% of non-victims (40,000) are removed as well. Here’s CPS’s explanation for why non-victims are sometimes removed from their homes.

There may be several explanations as to why nonvictims are placed in foster care. For example, if one child in a household is deemed to be in danger or at-risk of maltreatment, the state may remove all of the children in the household to ensure their safety. (E.g., if a CPS worker finds a drug lab in a house or finds a severely intoxicated caregiver, the worker may remove all children, even if there is only a maltreatment allegation for one child in the household.) Another reason for a nonvictim to be removed has to do with voluntary placements. This is when a parent voluntarily agrees to place a child in foster care even if the child was not determined to be a victim of maltreatment.

That takes us to about 150,000 removals every year which I would count as close enough to make the tweets true, especially since these two sources do add up to 200k in e.g the 2019 data.

But there are also probably more home removals that aren’t counted here. As far as I can tell, the removals counted in this data are those that come with a court order. But for the 80% of substantiated victims that don’t receive a court-ordered removal, CPS will still organize some level of intervention that may involve some less formal separation of parents and children. For example, CPS might develop a safety plan where parents are asked to leave the house or children stay with relatives. These safety plans are not technically legally binding, but breaking one is strong evidence that CPS can use to get a court order.

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 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.

Behind the viral X posts and the salient case studies is an implicit or explicit claim that CPS is overreaching their authority and splitting up innocent families.

To be sure, there are horrifying examples of false positives where CPS will visit or, less charitably, raid innocent parent’s houses and leave with their young children in tow. Here’s a scene from one Massachusetts family who caught the suspicion of CPS after their child presented to the hospital with a fever and a healed rib-cage fracture.

For an hour, as their children slept, Sabey and Perkins tried to reason with the officials at their door. Sabey was convinced that the removal must be illegal; he wouldn’t learn until later that it is within the authority of a child protective agency to take custody of children without documentation on hand. When Perkins asked how they planned to feed their children — Clarence has severe allergies, and Cal, who also has allergies, was still exclusively breastfeeding at the time — she received no clear answer.

But beware interpreting salient case studies because the current salient false-positive cases are caused by a law motivated by the previous salient false-negative cases.

The hurry to end families can be traced to the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton.

Its prominent supporters pointed to high-profile cases in which children were brutally beaten or killed after having been returned to their parents from foster care. Many argued that it was far more important to move children quickly into permanent homes than to spend an indeterminate amount of time trying to “fix” birth families. That ultimately would make more kids available for adoption.

So at current margins, how many CPS interventions are false positives vs false negatives? It’s obviously very hard to tell.

One striking fact that is that the majority of children classified as victims by the CPS are less than four years old. These cases are often reported by pediatricians when they discover things like bruises or fractures. But research on the occurrence of benign fractures is inconclusive, i.e the base rate of fractures in non-abuse scenarios is unknown so it's not clear how strong this medical evidence is.

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. These might not exactly be false positive cases, but reasonable people may disagree about the extent of parental supervision necessary to avoid neglect, for example in the high profile cases of parents getting arrested for letting their kids walk a mile or few alone. It's not clear how many family separations are happening from solely neglect cases though.

Mandatory reporting seems likely to lead to heavy false positive bias. There are also zero consequences for CPS agents for false positives. But adding consequences would be dangerous both because of false negative risk and also because of incentives on the agents to cover up their mistakes.

There is some very interesting research here using the shutdown in CPS reporting in NYC during COVID as a natural experiment. During the COVID shutdown, New York’s family regulation system "shrunk in almost every conceivable way." Schools closed, caseworkers adopted less intrusive tactics, and courts limited operations, so the number of investigations and family separations plummeted. Despite this, the paper finds that the fall in reports did not lead to a rise in child maltreatment; in fact, “child fatalities fell, as did reports of child neglect and abuse,” suggesting that many of the marginal reports that did not happen during COVID would have been false positives.

In general, though, it's tough to justify non-pareto tradeoffs between false negatives and false positives in this case. Both outcomes are extremely bad. The ratio would have to be massive or else we'd need a pareto improving move where we'd get more of one without sacrificing any of the other. It's also worth noting that the family separation outcome is still pretty bad even when it is a true positive intervention.

Another place we can look to assess the rate of false positive CPS cases is the trend over time. This polemic report gives a sense of the scale of growth since the mid-60s.

The Explosion of Reports (Mostly False) of Child Abuse and Neglect since CAPTA’s Passage

In 1963, at the time that the first generation of (limited) reporting laws were being put into place, there were 150,000 reports of abuse and neglect nationwide. By 1972, just prior to the passage of CAPTA, there were 610,000. In 1982, there were 1.3 million.31 In 1984, ten years after passage, the number had climbed to 1.5 million.32 By 1991, the number was 2.7 million reports annually,33 by 1993 it was 2,936,000,

It does seem unlikely that the massive expansion in the number of reports since 1965 is matched anywhere close by the number of actual cases of abuse. So there are more investigations of innocent parents, and thus more chances for false positives.

But again this could just be moving along the pareto frontier of false positives and false negatives to avoid more false negative cases, and arguing against a move like that isn't trivial. The rate of substantiation also fell over this period.

Since the early 90s the aggregate scale of investigation has stayed pretty flat, but the rate of substantiated cases has fallen significantly, although by much more for physical and sexual abuse than for neglect.

I'm not sure what this says about the false positive rate. Clearly, the false positive rate of reports is going up, because fewer of them are ever substantiated. But a false positive visit by a CPS agent is nearly as costly as a false positive substantiation that might lead to family separation. That false positive rate isn't directly measured.

The fact that the substantiation rates for neglect are staying high while the more objective types of abuse are plummeting combined with the informal observation that society has become much more risk averse for what children are allowed to do on their own does suggest that there are a significant and growing number of false positive neglect cases coming from the CPS.

There are also these survey measures which seem to match up pretty closely to the CPS rate, suggesting not too many false positives

The most recent wave of the 3 National Surveys of Children’s Exposure to Violence estimated that 38.1% of children had experienced maltreatment through age 17 years.¹⁷ The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health surveyed young adults in 2001–2002 and found a lifetime maltreatment prevalence of 41.5% for supervision neglect, 11.8% for physical neglect, 28.4% for physical assault, and 4.5% for sexual abuse.

Although actually it seems like a lot of this is coming from peers or siblings, not from parents and maybe is more bullying or even playing.

More than one-third of all youth (37.3%) experienced a physical assault during the study year, primarily at the hands of siblings and peers (Table 1). An assault resulting in an injury occurred to 9.3%. An assault by an adult occurred to 5.1%.

More numbers specifically about caregivers are a bit lower. Also note that rates are lowest for <5 when they are highest for them in CPS (all children under 10 had rates reported by caregiver, not child themselves).

The rates of physical abuse by a caregiver were 5.0% for the full sample in the past year and 18.1% for the group 14 to 17 years old in their lifetime. The rates of emotional abuse by a caregiver were 9.3% for the full sample and 23.9% for the group 14 to 17 years old in their lifetime. The rates of neglect were 5.1% in the past year for the full sample and 18.4% over their lifetime for the group 14 to 17 years old. There were no significant sex differences. Physical abuse was lowest for children younger than 6 years, and emotional abuse was highest for children 14 to 17 years old.

Larger survey with these questions of 15,197 young adults in 2001–2002

“By the time you started 6th grade, how often had your parents or other adult care-givers left you home alone when an adult should have been with you?” [supervision neglect]; “How often had your parents or other adult caregivers not taken care of your basic needs, such as keeping you clean or providing food or clothing?” [physical neglect]; “How often had your parents or other adult care-givers slapped, hit, or kicked you?” [physical assault]; and “How often had one of your parents or other adult care-givers touched you in a sexual way, forced you to touch him or her in a sexual way, or forced you to have sexual relations?” [contact sexual abuse]

The rates of abuse indicated by these surveys aren’t orders of magnitude off of what the CPS is finding by investigating 37% of children, substantiating 20% of those investigated, and removing 20% of those substantiated.

14.2% of all respondents, said [physical assault] happened >=3 times.

1 in 20 respondents (5.0%) reported >=3 episodes of physical neglect

1 in 25 respondents (4.5%) said they had been victims of contact sexual abuse perpetrated by a parent or other adult caregiver at least once

The scale of CPS investigations in the US is staggering. Like all things, this trend began in the late 60s and early 70s as mandatory reporter laws expanded and caused massive growth in child maltreatment reports. Since the 90s, the number of reports has stayed pretty stable and the number of substantiated investigations and interventions has been falling.

The CPS could probably scale back it’s interventions for cases of maltreatment that only involve neglect, especially those that only involve lack of supervision rather than physical neglect. Other tradeoffs between false positive and false negative investigations and interventions are more difficult to have a strong opinion on given the terrible outcomes on both sides of the trolley track.

There are probably some available pareto improving moves. The most straightforward in my view would be increasing staffing and state capacity in family courts so that cases can be reviewed more accurately and without requiring months or years of effort and tens of thousands of dollars on the part of the parents.