How Kamala Harris’ economic plan would protect children from harm

Imagine a stranger pounding on the door, threatening to take away your children if you don't let them search your home for evidence that your children are unsafe. Traumatic scenarios like this one are inflicted on some 3.5 million children in the U.S. each year by child protective services, as reported by ProPublica and NBC News in a 2022 investigation . More than 37 percent of children in the U.S. are estimated to experience such a search during their childhoods, according to a 2017 study, including 53 percent of African American children.

Contrary to what these statistics would suggest, abuse is not rampant in U.S. families. Only around 5 percent of CPS investigations see findings of physical or sexual abuse. In fact, the vast majority of the reports triggering these searches were not related to suspected abuse at all but stemmed from alleged neglect. This is a broad category consisting of lack of healthy food, clothing, hygiene, shelter, supervision, or medical care — in other words, the impact of poverty.

Indeed, a 2022 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch found "circumstances related to poverty, including housing instability and inadequate resources, were used as evidence of parental unfitness — either to support neglect allegations or justify family separation or termination of parental rights."

Punishing poverty and conflating it with abuse or neglect has serious consequences. Both parents and children are traumatized when children are removed, and placement in foster care can permanently damage children's ability to trust, form prosocial bonds, and believe that society is there to help instead of harm.

These harrowing separations are all too frequent — a child is taken from their home and placed in foster care on average every three minutes, adding up to nearly 200,000 new foster placements in 2022. Even the initial investigations (which far more families are subjected to), can leave indelible scars, as both parents and children subsequently live in fear of being arbitrarily ripped apart. An unexpected knock at the door can become terrifying.

The vast majority of the reports triggering these searches were not related to suspected abuse at all but stemmed from alleged neglect.

This human cost is accompanied by a towering financial bill. In 2020, the U.S. spent more than $31.4 billion to support a child welfare system that, despite its name and good intentions, often causes irreparable damage to children and families. Less than a quarter of that amount directly supports foster children. The rest funds investigators, caseworkers, and other professionals who police families. It is fueled by a system of mandatory reporting that the work of law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts and others has shown to harm more children than it helps.

Research shows that there are far more effective ways of protecting children and families. Providing a monthly stipend to needy families not only reduces the direct effects of poverty that can trigger investigations, but it improves other outcomes. The Baby's First Years study found that giving parents $333 a month led to improved brain activity in infants in a way that may protect later brain development, and also allowed mothers to spend more time with their children.

Since poverty is the leading cause of child welfare investigations and removals, reducing child poverty should also reduce these interventions. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued recommendations including various forms of financial assistance in its report " A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty ." If implemented, these could lead to as many as 1.2 million fewer investigations per year, and decrease investigations for Black children by up to almost 43 percent.

Poverty puts parents under constant duress, as they fear eviction; hunger; having the lights, telephone or heat shut off; or losing income or their job if they stay home with a sick child. It causes so much stress that poverty is one of the adverse childhood experiences that predict poor outcomes for children. Economic stress can also interfere with parent-child bonds, causing long-term deficits in cognition, social skills, and emotion regulation. Strong evidence shows that poverty increases parental stress and the risk of child abuse and neglect .

The Covid-19 lockdowns in New York City dramatically demonstrated this effect. During that time, families were given a one-time cash payment of $500 per child, a monthly cash subsidy of up to $300 per child (via a federal tax credit), and eviction protection. As a result, child poverty was cut by more than half, and child fatalities and reports of neglect and abuse fell dramatically. Increasing family income and stability directly increased the well-being of children.

Unfortunately efforts to renew the tax credits failed in December 2021 amid strong Republican opposition. The current child tax credit, which former president Donald Trump proposes to make permanent, reverted to its former levels in January 2022. Because it excludes those without income and reduces payouts to many low-income families (and has a maximum benefit of a $2,000 tax reduction in 2024), this caused child poverty to more than double, surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris' economic plan proposes restoring the Biden pandemic policy of providing a $300 per month payment per child directly to all low-, middle-, and no-income families. Though called a tax credit, it is effectively an income guarantee , paid monthly regardless of whether a family has earned any taxable income. Her plan would raise the yearly payment to $6,000 for parents of newborns. It has been estimated that a tax credit plan like Harris has proposed would reduce child poverty by nearly 50 percent and lift 5.6 million children out of poverty. These payments should significantly reduce known stressors that contribute to child abuse.

Increasing family income and stability directly increased the well-being of children.

Though financial support to families may raise government spending in the short term, according to a 2024 analysis , a $1,000 increase in household income from cash transfers or benefits like food stamps creates $8,342 in social benefits, and a child allowance policy that costs $97 billion per year would generate social benefits of $1.5 trillion per year. Over a lifetime, such policies result in savings of welfare and unemployment benefits, medical expenses, and criminal justice costs. They also increase government revenues from increased earnings and taxes paid by parents, and later by children who go on to become wage earners or entrepreneurs.

The key to truly protecting children is straightforward: provide struggling families with adequate funds. In addition to restoring the expanded child tax credit as Vice President Harris has proposed, we should also redirect the monthly payments provided to foster parents (which are around $1,300 per child in high cost-of-living cities like New York) to support the financially struggling biological parents of reported children.

Of course, the small minority of children who do suffer serious neglect or abuse need protection, not just funding. Child abuse is a crime and should be reported to the police (who are obligated to respect parents' constitutional rights), rather than to protective service agencies that routinely disregard parents' rights.

The key to truly protecting children is straightforward: provide struggling families with adequate funds.

Substantiated abuse cases should then uniformly be handled in collaborative family treatment courts, or FTCs, which focus on keeping families together safely. FTCs include judges, career counselors, mental health professionals, and social workers who are trained to provide family members with appropriate assistance by bringing together many different community resources. These services include substance abuse and mental health treatment, housing and financial assistance, parent education, vocational training, and job placement. FTCs are more effective than adversarial family courts in preventing abuse, and they save costs.

Instead of paying billions to harass and separate families, we can better protect poor, neglected, and abused children through direct financial support for parents. We cannot create a society that holds itself together instead of ripping itself apart, unless and until we first protect loving bonds — even unfamiliar-seeming or imperfect ones — in America's families.

Ruth Bettelheim, Ph.D., is a life coach and a child, marriage, and family psychotherapist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, USA Today, and other publications.