Read his thoughts in his new essay for Aeon, “Modern culture blames parents for forces beyond their control“
Family Caregiving (for Adults, Children, and Disabilities)
“The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire
“The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire
A briefing paper prepared by Kelley Fong (Georgia Institute of Technology) for the Council on Contemporary Families.
August 11, 2020
In recent months, conversations around the role of the police have drawn mainstream attention to what contemporary policing actually encompasses. Responding to violent crime constitutes only a small share of police work; instead, we often call on armed officers to address homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and other social adversities. Even when these encounters do not lead to arrest or physical violence, ubiquitous policing in marginalized communities, especially Black communities, heightens experiences of exclusion, injustice, and precarity.
In a new study, I trace how another, parallel institution comes to loom large in marginalized communities: Child Protective Services (CPS). Each year, U.S. child protection authorities, tasked with responding to child abuse and neglect, investigate the families of over three million children, disproportionately poor children, Black children, and Native American children. A staggering one in three children can expect a CPS investigation at some point during childhood.
To understand why CPS encounters are so commonplace, especially for marginalized families, I observed CPS investigations in Connecticut and interviewed approximately 100 key participants on these cases: professionals reporting suspected child maltreatment, frontline investigators, and investigated mothers. My research shows how, with the fraying of the social safety net in recent decades, efforts to help families take the form of summoning an agency that can forcibly separate them. As with the police, this expansive reliance on authorities with coercive power fosters fear and mistrust even when CPS does not find sufficient evidence to confirm maltreatment.
Contrary to media coverage focused on a few exceptional cases of horrific maltreatment, CPS’s broad reach does not imply millions of malevolent parents are willfully or seriously abusing their children. The situations drawing CPS’s attention typically involve adversities such as domestic violence, substance misuse, homelessness, and mental health needs, often among families experiencing material hardship and systemic racism. As I learned, the educational, medical, law enforcement, and other professionals who initiate two-thirds of CPS reports usually do not think the children they report are in grave danger. And CPS investigators agree. Nationwide, the vast majority of reports (over 80 percent) are deemed unfounded by CPS.
But nor does widespread CPS reporting represent a deluge of false reports from bureaucrats concerned about liability given legal mandates, or, conversely, eager to see children taken from “bad” parents. Overwhelmingly, teachers, nurses, police officers, and other service professionals say they would have reported their most recent case even if not legally required to do so. But usually, they do not want or expect CPS to remove children from the home. Instead, they call CPS in the hope of resolving a key dilemma they face: They want to help families but have limited time, resources, and roles to do so as they believe necessary. Thus, they turn families over to an agency they hope can intervene with families in ways they cannot. At a women’s services center, a staff member explained that “this is the tool that we have” to ensure children’s needs are met. These purportedly benevolent intentions expand the reach of CPS, as reporting professionals call on CPS not primarily to identify children in need of foster care, but to rehabilitate families broadly.
- Reporting professionals almost always want CPS to provide supportive services, reasoning that CPS has more information about available and appropriate services. For example, in one case, a police officer responded to an incident of domestic violence. “I don’t think that it’s a situation where the kids need to be removed from the house,” he said. Instead, he hoped CPS could assess the family’s needs and perhaps refer them to counseling, interventions he saw as beyond his role and knowledge.
- Yet reporting professionals also call on CPS’s coercive authority, framing the agency’s power as useful in pressuring parents to accept voluntary services or adjust their behavior in ways reporters believe will improve conditions for children. Another case involved a school struggling to manage a child’s behavioral outbursts. The parents had resisted the school’s desired intervention and the child also mentioned his father hitting him on the head. The school social worker hoped the parents would be more receptive to advice and service referrals coming from CPS. As she reasoned, when CPS refers, “parents either hear it differently or out of nervousness and fear of what if I don’t accept this service. Not that that’s the greatest way to get people involved, but if you get them involved, then hopefully the outcome is beneficial.”
- Embracing CPS reporting as a means of rehabilitating families disproportionately channels marginalized families to CPS. Race and class biases shape which families reporting professionals believe need supervision and correction. A daycare director, for example, described “red flags” that might make her more likely to turn to CPS: “Your quick, first red flag would be a lower-income family. Where they live has a lot to do with it too.” Moreover, given underinvestment in communities of color and poor communities, systems serving these families face resource constraints that may increase reliance on CPS. In one case, a major provider of mental health services for low-income Black and Latinx families reported a Latina mother who did not follow through with treatment recommendations after her daughter’s suicide attempt. The therapist said she “didn’t want to throw CPS at” the mother, but with her high caseload, she felt she could not keep following up to ensure the daughter received recommended services. “Because I’m seeing so many families,” she said, “things get lost and they fall through the cracks… [so it’s] gotta go to the big guys.”
But professionals’ wide-ranging concerns about families are often ill-suited to the intervention CPS offers.
- Frontline investigators point out that responding effectively to many of the families coming to their attention does not require the coercive authority that CPS can exert. CPS is uniquely empowered to identify candidates for legal intervention and child removal. But with children’s basic safety typically not at issue, investigators question the need for a child protection-specific response, recognizing that any assistance they might be able to offer could be provided by others instead. As one investigator noted, reporting professionals could make referrals or educate families themselves, but “they just pick up the phone and call us,” straining his caseload and subjecting families to unnecessary surveillance: “Once you call us, it’s a whole different ballgame… We come in and we delve into everything.”
- CPS investigators, like reporting professionals, are often unable to address families’ persistent needs. “I know I’m supposed to be a miracle worker, but sometimes there’s nothing we can do,” lamented another investigator. For example, the agency can refer to therapeutic services, but cannot address the chronic material needs at the root of many reports. On one case, involving a family’s housing conditions, the investigator wondered aloud, “What am I supposed to really do? I don’t see the kids being neglected.” She wanted to help the family, but CPS could not provide ongoing rental assistance. “The sad part is there’s nothing we can do in the sense that we don’t have housing,” she reflected.
Upon receiving reports, CPS investigators conduct multiple home visits and question families on numerous aspects of their personal lives. Investigators try to connect families with social services, but, like police, these efforts are often undermined by the agency’s coercive authority. Faced with the possibility of family separation, parents react with fear, mistrust, or resentment, straining their relationships with critical service providers.
- CPS investigations foster substantial anxiety among investigated families. Although reporting professionals and investigators rarely expect children will be removed, the threat of removal is ever-present even if unstated. “I couldn’t speak. The only thing that crossed my mind was that they were going to take them away,” recalled one mother. “I always thought that their job is to come in and take a child from their family,” another reflected. “Oh my God. You don’t understand. I was so scared.”
- CPS reports can also lead parents to distance themselves from reporting systems, even when parents ultimately view CPS investigators positively. For example, one mother, reported to CPS for using marijuana during pregnancy, hesitated to speak openly with healthcare providers afterwards, potentially precluding her from accessing needed support. After giving birth, she worried she was experiencing postpartum depression. But, she explained, “I don’t tell them any of that because I don’t need them to say, oh, she’s going through postpartum. She’s gonna hurt the baby.”
Thus, in asking CPS—like the police, armed with tools of surveillance and coercion—to take on all manner of social problems, we further traumatize and marginalize families. To work towards a more effective and just response, we can, first, revise mandated reporter trainings and CPS hotline screening to discourage and remove routes for professionals to wield CPS as a tool of disciplinary control. Second, akin to models that replace police with unarmed, support-oriented crisis response teams, we might devise an alternative entity for reporting professionals to obtain assistance for families, perhaps one that can refer families to a range of services based on the needs they identify.
Any alternative must provide truly voluntary assistance and advocacy, offered without threats of punishment. Recent reforms seeking to orient CPS more around service delivery, such as “differential response” systems and child maltreatment prevention services, remain tethered to the agency’s inherent coercive authority. But effectively supporting child and family welfare requires investments outside coercive systems—investments that shift power and resources to affected communities. Research is clear that broad-scale anti-poverty policies, such as minimum wage increases, the Earned Income Tax Credit, childcare subsidies, and child support pass-throughs, reduce child maltreatment risk and CPS intervention. Families navigating the U.S.’s weak labor market supports, stingy welfare state, and persistent and pervasive racism do not need intrusive and apprehension-inducing inquiries into their parenting; they need equitably distributed material resources as well as the political power to ensure public policy responsive to their needs.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Kelley Fong, Assistant Professor, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology; ktfong@gatech.edu.
LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-brief-report/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-release/
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
August 11, 2020
Before and during COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality
Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality
A briefing paper prepared by Thomas Lyttelton (Yale Sociology), Emma Zang (Yale Sociology), and Kelly Musick (Cornell Policy Analysis and Management) for the Council on Contemporary Families.
August 4, 2020
The puzzle. The COVID-19 crisis has resulted in an unprecedented shift to remote work, with 55 percent of currently employed parents working from home in April/May 2020. At least some of the pandemic-related shift to telecommuting is likely to persist for some time, with companies like Facebook moving to permanent remote work for many workers. What does this mean for the perennial issue of work-family conflict, and additionally, what are the implications of expanded telecommuting arrangements for gender equality at work and in the households of parents with children?
On the one hand, telecommuting can ease work-family conflict by giving workers greater control over their schedules. Mothers of young children particularly value telecommuting, and flexible work has been linked to higher rates of maternal employment. Although mothers still do a great deal more housework and childcare than fathers, the amount of childcare done by fathers has increased almost threefold since the 1970s, and in 2019 fathers, on average, spent 55 minutes per day caring for children. Fathers also report that they would like to be spending more time with their children, so working from home could be a way for fathers to increase their share of housework and childcare. For many working couples, then, telecommuting may be an attractive and egalitarian strategy for managing the competing demands of work and family.
On the other hand, telecommuting can worsen rather than ameliorate gender inequalities in the home and in the labor market. Workplaces provide a barrier, both physical and psychological, between parents and demands to do additional childcare and housework. Social pressures to spend intensive time on child-rearing and on housework are much stronger for mothers than fathers, and once the separation from home life provided by workplaces is removed, this may lead mothers to increase the amount of household labor they do by more than fathers.
Early indications of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender inequality have been contradictory, with different surveys suggesting that gender gaps in household labor have either narrowed or widened, depending on whether the researchers focused on housework and childcare alone or included home schooling.
The data. We examine the links between telecommuting and gender inequality with data collected before and during the COVID-19 crisis: the 2003-2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS, N = 19,179) and the April and May 2020 COVID Impact Survey (N= 784). This allows us to report on gender differences in parents’ household labor and work contexts for parents working in the workplace, at home, and splitting their time between the two before the pandemic, as well as to assess the impact of telecommuting that was a direct response to the pandemic and has been taking place in the context of schools and child-care centers being shut down. We also use a subsample of regular telecommuters in ATUS (N = 339) to compare the behavior of mothers and fathers on days in the workplace and days working from home. The parents in this sample tend to be more similar in their work-related characteristics relative to a broader group that includes those who never work from home.
The results for pre-COVID-19 childcare: Telecommuting dads catch up with moms. In general, telecommuting parents put more time into household labor than do parents who work at a separate location. But prior to COVID-19, we found an interesting gender difference in what types of household labor individuals did more of when working from home, and this produced two diverging patterns in the division of total household labor. Under ordinary circumstances, telecommuting fathers increase the amount of childcare they do more than do telecommuting mothers. Looking at a subsample of mothers and fathers who all reported telecommuting some days for their job, we find that dads spent 67 more minutes caring for children on the days they worked exclusively from home than on the days they worked exclusively from the workplace. This increase in childcare time was 47 minutes larger than the average increase in childcare we find on days when mothers worked from home, and it appears to effectively close the gender gap in childcare hours (see Figure 1). By contrast, gender gaps in childcare were substantial for workers who mix their time at home and the office or who work only from the office. These results suggest that telecommuting can bring fathers closer to parity with mothers when it comes to childcare.
The results for pre-COVID-19 housework: Telecommuting moms, but not dads, do more. But for housework the opposite is true. Comparing mothers and fathers in the same sample as above, we find that on the days mothers worked from home, they increased their housework by 49 minutes. Fathers did no more housework on days when they worked from home than on days when they were absent from home while working. So when it comes to the division of housework, unlike the division of childcare, telecommuting may be associated with increased gender inequality.
The results for pre-COVID-19 work-family conflict: Children spend more than twice as much time in the presence of telecommuting moms when the moms are working than they do with dads. The issue is further complicated by the fact that people who work at home are sometimes in the presence of children even when they are not doing childcare but are working – or trying to work. This creates spillovers from the parental role into the employee role. When people are forced to juggle their attention between children and work, they experience a form of work-family conflict that is absent in work settings separate from the home – one that leaves parents unable to give either work or home life their full attention. This conflict is far more intense for telecommuting women than for their male counterparts.
In general, parents working from home report that their children are with them while they work far more than do parents in the workplace. But while telecommuting fathers reported children as present during work for 21 minutes per day, on average, on days they worked from home, mothers reported children present during work for 54 minutes per day, leaving a gender gap of 27 minutes (Figure 1). That this kind of work-family conflict disproportionately affects mothers may have downstream consequences for labor market gender inequalities, as the quality or productivity of working time may be lower for telecommuting mothers than fathers.
Figure 1: Gender Gaps in Household Labor by Work Location among Ever-Telecommuters
Why do moms do more? Our research doesn’t tell us why, exactly, telecommuting mothers do so much more housework. But we know that women often hold much stricter standards than men about the amount of laundering and daily cleaning that has to be done. While these may be “choices” made by the mother or the couple, they are often choices constrained by the tremendous pressures that women – especially married women – feel to “keep up appearances” in the home. Women also tend to feel much more pressure than men to live up to the ideals of intensive parenting. Whatever the reasons that telecommuting mothers spent more time on housework and were more likely to be interrupted by children while trying to work, the consequences seemed to counteract many of the advantages of telecommuting. Comparing the wellbeing of mothers working from home and a separate workplace before COVID-19, we find little evidence that telecommuting resolved work-family conflict: Telecommuting mothers were no happier, and no less stressed or tired, than mothers working from a workplace.
Implications? Assessing the implications of telecommuting for gender equality is especially complicated in the United States, where government support for working families is far less generous than that provided by other rich countries. Most localities do not provide free or subsidized childcare, and its unsubsidized cost is prohibitive for many families. In this context, telecommuting is a choice many parents make to solve a childcare problem. It may be the best choice in the circumstance, but it should be no surprise that making such a choice involves work-related tradeoffs, and that, given parenting norms, these tradeoffs are more severe for women. As an example, using a simple approach that assigns median earnings to average changes in work hours associated with housework, we estimate that the potential annual earnings mothers lose by devoting extra time to housework instead of wage-work is $660 for mothers who telecommute one day a week, and $2638 for mothers who telecommute four days a week.
These patterns suggest that even under circumstances where telecommuting is not a substitute for childcare or full-time school, it poses some threats to the long-term progress of gender equality, at least when engaged in by women. Given the intense socialization of women into not being able to ignore perceived demands of children and dust bunnies alike — and the outright shaming they often experience when they do ignore them — there may be some benefits to working outside the home for women. By contrast, given their socialization to be able to ignore the demands of children, there may be some benefits to working inside the home for men.
The results on working at home during the pandemic. The conditions of telecommuting imposed by COVID-19 are especially likely to increase gender inequalities in household labor and the labor market. The closure of schools and childcare facilities greatly increases childcare burdens on parents, with telecommuters now expected to educate their children alongside doing their day jobs, a job that has so far fallen most heavily on women. Overall, parents in the workplace report less depression than telecommuting parents. But the extra stress for telecommuting women is striking. Mothers telecommuting during April – May 2020 reported feeling anxious, depressed, and lonely at significantly higher rates than telecommuting fathers, who unlike actually mothers experienced less anxiety when working from home. For parents in the workplace, we found no statistically significant gender differences in rates of stress and depression (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Subjective Well-Being During COVID-19 by Gender and Work Location
Implications, taking COVID-19 into account. Our findings on telecommuting both before and during the pandemic point to families’ –and society’s– urgent need for more government support for parents. Telecommuting has real benefits. It gives parents greater flexibility to structure their work, saves time commuting, and allows parents to spend more time with their children. And given COVID-19, telecommuting is surely the best option for parents at the moment. But when parents have to combine working from home with looking after children, it is easy for telecommuting to exacerbate gender inequalities in both formal and informal work. Even with fathers doing more, telecommuting with children detracts from mothers’ work environments and is associated with more stress. Subsidizing childcare, and, where possible, reopening schools in the fall would greatly reduce this tension. But until science suggests it is safe to do so, employers must be urged to rethink traditional measures of productivity and recognize the need for men as well as women to make the work adjustments they need to as they strive to cope with these unprecedented demands on their time and energy.
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Notes
Childcare Measures
In our paper, we construct two different measures of parents looking after children. First, we create a measure of childcare that combines basic care activities of younger children (e.g., feeding, bathing) with activities relating to education (e.g., helping with a child’s homework or attending a PTA meeting) and health (e.g., sitting with a sick child) and associated travel of all children under 18. This measure captures time spent explicitly caring for children. Second, we construct a broader measure of all time parents spend with household children when they are actually doing tasks other than childcare. This broader measure captures time during which parents may be splitting their attention between looking after children and another activity. We use this measure to analyze the presence of children while parents are working. In our full paper, we also look at gendered differences in time with children by telecommuting, and we find results that are similar to our reported estimates of childcare (see paper Table 2).
Couple-level Dynamics and Same-Sex Partners
The American Time Use Survey collects information on all members of a household, including couples, but only records time use data, including childcare and housework, for one person per household. This means that we can examine how telecommuting parents’ behaviors differ based on their partners’ employment, and we find that telecommuting fathers particularly increase the amount of childcare they do when their partners work full time (more than 35 hours per week). But we do not have information on partners’ telecommuting, and thus cannot assess how parents react to their partner’s telecommuting. The number of telecommuters in our descriptive sample (788 parents telecommuting for full days) also prevents us from examining same-sex couples. Without such narrowly prescribed gender roles to fall back on, same-sex couples divide childcare and housework tasks more fairly than opposite-sex couples, and so we would expect their reaction to telecommuting to also differ. This could be a fruitful avenue for future research.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Thomas Lyttelton / PhD candidate / Yale Sociology / thomas.lyttelton@yale.edu / (203) 606-8047.
Emma Zang / Assistant Professor / Yale Sociology / emma.zang@yale.edu / (919) 536-9621.
Kelly Musick / Professor and Chair / Cornell Policy Analysis and Management / musick@cornell.edu.
LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality-advisory/
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions
August 4, 2020
CCF’S Stephanie Coontz Interviewed by Legacy Washington
“Legacy Washington recently recorded an interview with author/historian Stephanie Coontz. Watch Legacy Washington historian Bob Young interview Coontz, an expert on family and marriage whose writing influenced the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Coontz has recently appeared in The New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine, and gave this year’s commencement speech at The Evergreen State College. Stephanie Coontz is profiled in the Legacy Washington book Ahead of the Curve.”
Watch the full interview here
CCF’s Executive Director Jennifer Glass on the Struggle for Child Care in a Pandemic
Parents often rely on their networks for child care, but how has that changed since COVID-19? CCF’s Executive Director Jennifer Glass has some thoughts in The Christian Science Monitor’s “‘I can’t keep this up much longer’: Parents struggle with pandemic strain.”
CCF Experts Featured in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Deseret News
CCF experts Dan Carlson, Richard Petts, and Joanna Pepin discuss the findings of their latest brief report on gendered division of labor during the covid-19 pandemic with Deseret News’ Lois M. Collins.
Read the article, “More men are doing housework during the pandemic, research finds,” here.
UPDATE: read more coverage of CCF’s latest brief report in the Boston Globe’s, “Men are taking on (slightly) more household chores during pandemic,” as well as The Washington Post’s, “The pandemic didn’t create working moms’ struggle. But it made it impossible to ignore.”
