By Mike Shaver, president and CEO, Brightpoint and William Schneider Ph.D., associate professor and lead researcher, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
September 26th, 2024
Recently, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz joked about objections to a free meal program for schoolchildren he enacted as Governor of Minnesota: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn.[1]” This unapologetic advocacy is sparking mainstream conversations throughout the U.S. about the viability of such programs and why we’re not offering more of them.
Here in Illinois, we’re having our own conversations about how to help families. After the 2021 American Rescue Plan child tax credit lifted 46% of American children out of poverty, this year our governor signed a budget with the state’s first-ever child tax credit[2] that could improve the lives of nearly 14,000 Illinois children.
Measures like this matter because research shows that poverty drives child neglect[3], which is often defined as the failure of parents to offer their children necessities like food, clothing, or adequate supervision. Nationwide, 37% of all U.S. children (and 53% of Black children) will be investigated for child maltreatment by the time they turn 18[4]. The current system combines abuse and neglect under the umbrella of “child maltreatment” and a whopping three-quarters of child maltreatment cases involve neglect rather than abuse, both in Illinois and nationwide.
An system that responds the same way to abuse and neglect can mean that a student who shows up to school without a winter coat can end up in the midst of an investigation when a mandated reporter calls the hotline. That family—especially if they are black or brown–might find themselves a couple of steps away from a foster care intervention when what they really needed were options that money can literally buy, like clothing, food, and child care. [5]. When so many children are entering the system for neglect, it’s worth asking how money and time contribute to child maltreatment[6].
Conflating abuse and neglect can lead to assuming all parents involved in the system are “bad.” When rare extreme cases of abuse make the news, it’s easy to forget that those cases are the exception, not the rule, which is that the vast majority of parents love and want the best for their children—including those who can’t provide for them.
What if we could separate the way we respond to neglect and abuse cases? And what if we could take that one step further and also alleviate the poverty that traps parents in a maze of bad options, keeping them from making the best choices for their kids? We know the Illinois child welfare system is imperfect, but the new director of DCFS has said she wants to work with other state organizations to focus on prevention and “make sure that no family is coming into or touching the DCFS system just because they need support and services for their child.[7]”
Launched this summer, our Empower Parenting with Resources (EmPwR) pilot program is following 800 Illinois families reported for suspected child maltreatment and receiving DCFS-funded services to address issues leading to a call to the hotline. Half of these families will also receive a monthly cash stipend based on their location and family size, and the other half will receive only traditional services. Eligible families are free to spend the money as they choose, drawing it from a debit card that lets us track their spending. We’re also monitoring child behavior and parental stress levels for families in both groups.
What’s special about this pilot is that it has broad support from a coalition of government, nonprofit, and higher education organizations—DCFS, Brightpoint, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Social Work and the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. The William T. Grant Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation are funding this pilot’s research, which is the largest of its kind to address families involved in the child welfare system.
Giving cash payments to families living in poverty costs far less than managing a reactive foster care system that treats abuse and neglect cases the same way instead of proactively preventing them from happening in the first place. Saving money and sparing children from harm? How can we afford to not explore preventative measures?
We believe this is why the tide seems to be slowly turning toward the radical act of giving people who are struggling what they need. We’ve tried blaming parents for making bad choices and telling them to pull themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps. We’ve tried turning a blind eye to multi-generational cycles of racial, social and economic inequality. We’ve also tried applying a reactive foster care family separation model to both child abuse and neglect, even though they are distinct scenarios.
We know what doesn’t work, and as pilot programs and policies expand into new ways of doing things, it’s time to explore them, especially when it comes to families living in poverty. We need to empathize with both children and their parents by unapologetically advocating for increasing options that empower families and give them a chance to thrive.
Mike Shaver is president and CEO of Brightpoint, formerly Children’s Home & Aid, an Illinois child and family service organization working to minimize the need for foster care; William Schneider is an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Social Work and Faculty Director of the Children and Family Research Center.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-walz-vp-jokes-trump-attacks-free-school-lunch-policies-2024-8
[2] https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/officials-activists-push-for-child-tax-credit-in-illinois/3349825/
[3] https://www.chapinhall.org/wp-content/uploads/Economic-and-Concrete-Supports.pdf
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227926/
[5] https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2022.pdf
[6] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728457#_i52
[7] https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2024/04/05/illinois-department-children-family-services-director-heidi-mueller-charles-golbert-rich-miller