The Free Press
Last fall, we reported on the epidemic of overreaching government agencies falsely accusing good parents of neglecting their children. We applaud the work of Lenore Skenazy at Let Grow, the organization that encourages adults to allow elementary school kids to run simple errands or play in a park unsupervised without their parents fearing arrest.
In response, we heard from Naomi Schaefer Riley, a writer and scholar who advocates for our society’s most vulnerable children. She has another story to tell, a story about the hundreds of thousands of children in this country whose parents put their lives in danger each year, and who desperately need more government intervention, not less. —The Editors
Last fall, Brittany Patterson was arrested for child endangerment because her 10-year-old son, Soren, was spotted walking alone on a road a mile from their house. The case sparked outrage over government overreach. As a Free Press story put it, “Increasingly, parents all over the country are being punished for giving their kids a bit of leash.”
Such incidents provoke justifiable outrage and calls for reform. These stories, however, are rare, isolated incidents that grab headlines—but are true outliers compared to the reality of children’s welfare in America. Unfortunately, these accounts also fuel the misconception—held by people on both sides of the political aisle—that child protective services are inherently and unnecessarily punitive.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Far fewer people have heard the story of Gavin Peterson, the 12-year-old Utah boy who died last July 9 after being tortured and starved by his father, his father’s girlfriend, and his older brother. Ten years prior, Gavin went to live with his father and father’s girlfriend after he was found as a toddler wandering outside alone and his mother pleaded guilty to exposing her children to illegal drugs.
Over the years, school employees and others frequently called the Division of Child and Family Services about Gavin—but DCFS decided these reports did not meet the criteria to open an investigation. When Gavin began helping cafeteria workers at his school clean up, they realized he was so hungry he was eating the food they left behind. One worker told local news, “He would hover over the trash. . . and wait and watch for something to be thrown away that was almost fully intact. And he’d grab it and take off.”
A school nurse saw that the skin on Gavin’s fingers was bitten so severely that his hands were infected. She and the principal both called DCFS. Shortly after these reports were made, Gavin came to school with a chipped tooth. Then in August 2023, his father withdrew him from school.
Remarkably, like many states, Utah allows parents to remove children from school, no questions asked—even if the family has a history of abuse or neglect. Parents’ rights advocates may cheer this, but preventing authorities and other adults from helping children also has severe consequences.
A year after he was taken out of school, Gavin was brought to the emergency room. He died the same day. Police investigators concluded that he had been locked in a room at his home without bedding or blankets, beaten and starved, while the father, father’s girlfriend, and brother—all now charged with homicide—monitored him on multiple surveillance cameras.
Gavin’s death is part of a tragic national trend: a sustained increase in deaths due to child abuse and neglect—a trend that continues as states release data for 2023–2024. There is a terrible through line to many of these cases: People knew, including representatives from government agencies tasked with protecting children.
They knew but did not act—in part because ample protections for parents make it difficult for child welfare workers to gather information during investigations, and to remove a child from a home because of potentially dangerous conditions.
Today, some libertarians and religious conservatives who believe parents should be freer from government interference have formed an unlikely alliance with progressives who believe the child welfare system is structurally racist. This has resulted in the idea that child maltreatment is rare, and that behaviors that can cause grave harm to children—such as taking drugs while pregnant—can be categorized as a lifestyle choice.
Last year, under the aegis of the American Enterprise Institute, a group of colleagues and I launched the research project Lives Cut Short. According to federal reports, there are around 2,000 deaths of children by abuse and neglect each year. We suspected this number was being significantly undercounted due to a failure to investigate many child deaths, misclassification of the manner and cause of death, and a failure to report information to child welfare agencies. So far, our suspicions have proved right.
To discover the true number, my colleagues and I are investigating and documenting every neglect- and abuse-related death in the U.S. between the years 2022 and 2025. When we started examining all the available material about what happened to these children, it became devastatingly clear they had not suffered from overzealous government meddling. What’s more, official statistics are missing a great deal of these tragedies. For example, many of these fatalities are mischaracterized as “accidents.” A toddler’s lethal exposure to fentanyl may be an accident in the sense that a parent likely did not intend it to happen, but it constitutes parental neglect under the legal code in every state.
Based on medical examiner records from just 15 counties so far, we have found dozens of examples. In Pennsylvania, there has been a surge in children sickened or dying as a result of their parents’ drug abuse, according to an investigative report by TribLive, which covers the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. After examining 845 reports from the state’s Department of Human Services detailing the deaths and near-deaths of children under the age of 18 from 2018 to 2022, reporters found that drugs were a factor in nearly 1 in 4 of these cases, including in 70 deaths. Alarmingly, more than half of all deaths came after the child welfare agency had been alerted that a child was in danger.
Take the short life of 10-month-old Marcello Meadows, found dead in June 2023 in New Haven, Connecticut, after having ingested fentanyl, cocaine, and xylazine—a veterinary tranquilizer. His mother had a long history of criminal activity and drug use. When Marcello’s older sister was born with opioids in her system, no case was opened by the Department of Children and Families (DCF).
Marcello was also born with opioids and cocaine in his system, and was diagnosed with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome and failure to thrive. DCF created a “safety plan” for Marcello and his sister, with his father listed as the “sober caregiver” despite the fact he had never completed a drug test. The mother’s drug tests were unsupervised and, despite agency recommendations, they were not surprise visits, and took place at a relative’s house. The agency closed its case against the mother—apparently determining Marcello was safe—three weeks before his death.
Connecticut, along with New York City, Washington State, and New Mexico, is pulling back from investigating and monitoring parents with substance abuse problems. Doctors and hospitals there are not required to report to DCF the name of the family whose newborn is positive for drugs. If you don’t report a name, then no one is being held accountable. New Mexico no longer requires medical professionals to report parents to child welfare agencies when their children are exposed to drugs or alcohol in the womb. And in Boston, Mass General Brigham hospital recently announced that a positive drug test on a newborn is no longer enough to merit a report to child protective services.
This is all being done in the name of “equity”—both racial and economic, because drug use—including during pregnancy—is more common among poor families. As Jodi Hill-Lilly, Connecticut’s DCF commissioner, said, “We don’t want this to be a narrative where poor people who don’t have the means get their kids taken away unnecessarily.”
But these policies have resulted in many of these addicted infants going home and then dying of drug-related causes. In the fall of 2023, New Mexico’s Democratic attorney general, Raúl Torrez, railed against the policy: “If an infant is born in one of our hospitals and we know they are drug-addicted, it is not a policy failing, it is a moral failing, to send that child back to a home where we know they came into the world addicted to drugs.”
And so, the concern over racial and socioeconomic disparities means more black children will stay in dangerous homes where they can be harmed or killed. Nationally, black children are three times as likely to die of maltreatment as their white peers.
Take the case of Jahmeik Modlin. On October 13, 2024, the 4-year-old was found emaciated with his three severely malnourished older siblings—ages 5, 6, and 7—in the Harlem apartment they shared with their mother and Jahmeik’s father. Jahmeik was pronounced dead the next morning. Doctors said Jahmeik’s hair was matted with feces. He had been eating his own vomit for weeks. His father said he didn’t notice because he was playing video games. All the while, there was a fully stocked refrigerator in the home. But it was turned to face the wall so that none of the small, desperate children in the apartment could access it.
New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) had been aware of Jahmeik’s family for years, but in 2022 ACS closed the case, determining that the family wasn’t in need of intervention. Neighbors never saw the kids, and they didn’t seem to attend school. But even if they had, New York City public school teachers have recently undergone training discouraging them from reporting suspected maltreatment to ACS.
The agency’s head, Jess Dannhauser, has been touting his plan to divert cases toward its Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement & Support (CARES) system instead of the authorities. CARES explains to parents that they don’t have to let ACS into their home to investigate reports of child maltreatment.
Meanwhile, a third of all child abuse victims are 3 years old or under, and half of all removals to foster care are for kids ages 5 and under. Two-thirds of child fatalities are among kids younger than 3 years, and close to half are among children less than a year old. A common response to the call for more government intervention is that foster care is worse. But there is evidence that foster care improves the outcomes, including the safety and survival of at-risk children.
Reading through these wrenching accounts, it would be easy to assume government caseworkers are simply bad at their jobs. But the truth is they face a constant barrage of messages from politicians and advocates: that parental drug use is something for parents to address on their own, that children always belong with their parents, and that reducing racial disparities is one of their primary responsibilities. Even when caseworkers decide a child is unsafe, their judgments are regularly overruled by courts, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
We can’t let the occasional story about government overreach blind us to the larger truth: that tens of thousands of children are being failed by the system every day—and without intervention from the authorities, they will suffer and die without anyone hearing their cries for help.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she helped to found Lives Cut Short. She is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.
For another deep dive on child welfare in America, read Jennifer Block’s piece, “The Junk Science That Gets Parents Convicted of Murder.”