How the Child Welfare System Prioritizes Autonomous Family Units, and Punishes Disabled Parents

A faded sign outside boasted great rates and free local calls. The motel windows did nothing to block the West Oakland road noise. Sitting on the stained quilt, Natalie and her fifteen-year-old daughter Tara knew that they needed help. Natalie was starting to make less sense, and she had expressed a passing desire to hurt herself.

Normally, Natalie had a support system in place through the Regional Center of the East Bay (RCEB), but, since she moved into the motel with Tara, it was harder to keep all the various parts of their lives in order. Natalie and Tara both have psychosocial disabilities, including schizophrenia. Tara is also intellectually disabled. Like many disabled people, Natalie lived with the threat that Tara would be taken away from her. After all, it’s legal in twenty-two states to remove a child because their parent is disabled. In these states, the statutes include disability as one of the grounds for removal. In California, one of the grounds for child removal is that “the parent or guardian is suffering from a mental disability.”

While they also say that the disability must impact care, in many cases there does not need to be evidence that it already has impacted care, just that someone predicts that it would. For example, Colorado’s statute says a child may be removed if “emotional illness, mental illness, or mental deficiency of the parent [is] of such duration or nature as to render the parent unlikely within a reasonable time to care for the ongoing physical, mental, and emotional needs and conditions of the child.” Natalie knew that as a poor Black disabled woman, the stakes were high when she moved out of their stable housing.

Weeks before, in the house they shared with roommates, an older man made an aggressive sexual advance on Tara, which had frightened her. The astronomical housing costs in Oakland meant that finding housing with roommates had been their only option. The situation had felt tenable until Tara confessed what the older man had done. Natalie understood that the only reliable way to keep her daughter safe was to remove her from the situation. They left for the motel so that she could devise a plan.

Natalie and Tara, who are both Black, have always been particularly close and feel that they understand one another better than those outside their two-person family. Their overlapping disabilities help Natalie know what Tara needs when Tara is in emotional distress.

Natalie asked the Regional Center of the East Bay (RCEB) for help finding affordable and stable housing. RCEB was initially established to advocate for children and adults with developmental disabilities and has a close working relationship with Alameda County Social Services. Unfortunately for Natalie, a disproportionate amount of the center’s $500 million budget goes toward early interventions—programs for kids in the first three years of life—and they offer only anemic support for adults and parents with disabilities. No assistance had materialized.

It’s legal in twenty-two states to remove a child because their parent is disabled.

While she searched desperately for affordable housing that would be safe for Tara, she found it much more difficult to access the support and medical services on which she usually relied. Hunting for affordable housing disrupted her routine and occupied all of her time. At her motel, she started to feel less stable. They couldn’t think of anywhere to turn except 911, so one of them called, and, within minutes, the police were at the door.

Once inside, they learned that Tara was a Regional Center client, which automatically flagged her as high risk for abuse and exploitation. The police weren’t willing to consider Tara and Natalie’s pleas to stay together and their explanation for the unstable housing situation. Tara and Natalie insisted that they only needed help, not separation. Even so, the officers took Tara away that night.

Within hours, Alameda County Social Services had custody of Tara and was tasked with finding a temporary guardian for her while they processed Natalie’s case. But it is exceedingly difficult to find a foster home for any teenager. Children between the ages of eight and eleven make up around 50 percent of California’s foster care population, yet 95 percent of group home residents are teenagers. Across the board, outcomes for foster children placed in group homes are worse than for those placed with families. Few group homes have the capacity to care for disabled residents, and the closest option Tara’s social workers could find was three hours away in Fresno.

Natalie begged the social workers to stop Tara’s transfer. She knew that a group home setting, away from Natalie, would likely exacerbate some of Tara’s more challenging symptoms. Without her mom’s expert care, Tara was likely to struggle with hygiene and tasks of daily living. But, despite Natalie’s efforts and Tara’s appeals to be returned to her mother, Tara was sent to Fresno. Tara’s social workers said that because of Tara’s disability and unstable housing, Natalie could not be granted custody.

Tara languished in the group home. She stopped washing and began soiling her bed. When staff members tried to help her, she lashed out, retraumatized by the bullying she had endured at school. The caregivers were poorly equipped to support Tara, whose mental health continued to deteriorate after being separated from her mom while Natalie worked tirelessly to find a safer option for Tara.

Without the means to visit her daughter regularly, Natalie spent her days parenting through phone calls with Tara and the people who ran the group home. Tara called her mom constantly and, from hours away, Natalie comforted her. Group home staff called Natalie, too, and she walked them through how they could comfort and talk to her daughter. The caregivers became reliant on Natalie’s advice and guidance.

From three hours away, Natalie was still the person best suited to understand and meet Tara’s needs.

And then, one night, Natalie and Tara’s nightmare came true. Tara was abducted from the home and sexually assaulted. Her social workers weren’t that surprised. Often, exploiters target group homes.  The very thing that Natalie had been working so hard to prevent happened after she was no longer her daughter’s guardian.

After Tara was assaulted, she was categorized as even higher risk, and the requirements for her future caregivers became stricter. Social Services told the family court that a disabled teenager who had recently endured so much trauma needed more care than a disabled woman with unstable housing could provide. The judge agreed. The very fact that Tara was assaulted after the welfare system separated her from her mom meant that she could not be reunited with her mom.

When Tara was still fifteen, the county terminated all of Natalie’s parental rights, and she permanently lost custody of Tara.

When I spoke with Kavya Parthiban, an attorney who is well acquainted with Natalie and Tara’s case, I said I wanted to make sure I told their story in a way that would keep them anonymous. I didn’t want to put them in danger. Parthiban laughed wryly. “Situations like this occur so frequently here that there is no way that someone could isolate which specific case this is.”

Parthiban, who is neurodivergent and was born in India, worked as a case manager in Alameda County right out of college. In that job, she observed the rampant bias and discrimination against disabled parents and, years later, as an attorney, returned to the East Bay to advocate for disabled parents who face losing custody of their children. She is, as far as she knows, the only attorney with this specialty in all of California. The demand for her specialty is so high that by consulting instead of representing, she has more time to help more people. Acting as the lead attorney on cases would end up narrowing the scope of who she can help. Instead, she works as an advisor to the attorneys representing disabled parents. Occasionally, she will join as co-counsel.

In her experience, the prospects for a disabled parent who has a custody case opened against them are dire, particularly if their child also has a disability. “If you are disabled and your child is disabled, your chances of separation are so high,” Parthiban said. In fact, two-thirds of states permit parental rights to be terminated simply because of a parent’s intellectual disability.

Our culture’s deluded insistence that a nuclear family should be autonomous has far-reaching negative consequences, which include disabled parents losing custody of their kids.

California has a reputation as a beacon of progress, but Parthiban explained that two appellate court rulings in 2000 actually made disabled parents’ interactions with the welfare system more difficult there than in other states. Those cases, which are still used as precedents, ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not apply in dependency court. In other words, the laws that demand that disabled people have the right to reasonable accommodations become moot when they are at risk of losing their children. Ms. Parthiban hopes that one of the cases on which she advises may soon be heard by the appellate court, and, once it does, perhaps a new precedent could be set that would allow the ADA to be enforced in California family court.

Writing this chapter, I found myself sucked into the legal particulars of the child welfare system—as if untangling the knot of regulations and rulings would reveal a solution. And, in some ways, progress can be found in legislation. But I’m also convinced that the problem runs deeper than that. The injustice within the system is just one manifestation of the ways in which contemporary dominant parenting structures are faulty. Our culture’s deluded insistence that a nuclear family should be autonomous has far-reaching negative consequences, which include disabled parents losing custody of their kids.

Toward the end of our call, Parthiban asked to share the story of one of her clients in San Francisco. Annette is thirty and has an intellectual disability. Her mom is also disabled, and when Annette was a child, the county sent her to live with foster parents, Dan and Linda. The couple sexually and physically abused Annette throughout her childhood. Desperate to escape their cruelty, she ran away as an adolescent and experienced intermittent homelessness over the next decade. But when Annette, who is Black, became pregnant at twenty-nine, Dan and Linda convinced her to move in with them, and she did, eager to offer her baby stable housing. Once Annette was back in their home, they tormented her, demanding her Social Security Disability payments and threatening to call CPS once the baby was born.

While pregnant, Annette once again left the abusive couple and was able to secure housing in the Tenderloin for low-income and disabled residents. Annette was deeply committed to building a healthy life for the baby growing inside of her. But, even after she moved out, Dan and Linda continued to threaten Annette. They said that they would take away her baby. She was terrified.

She gave birth to a baby boy, Oliver, in a San Francisco hospital and said she fell in love immediately. She knew she would do anything to protect her son. But she couldn’t relax; she kept looking at the door, waiting for Dan and Linda to come and take him. When it was time to sleep, she asked the nurses if Oliver could join her in bed. That way, she could make sure that no one stole her baby. The hospital told her that no, Oliver needed to sleep in a bassinet but that he would be safe.

Annette, after decades of abuse and manipulation, could not be comforted, and while she allowed them to place Oliver in the bassinet, on that first night, while recovering from the exhausting work of labor, Annette refused to sleep. She sat up in bed and watched her son. She wouldn’t let them take him.

The nurses noted that Annette wasn’t sleeping. Concerned with her preoccupation, healthcare providers contacted social services, filing a report that Annette was too fixated on her son. They suggested that maybe she was too disabled to be a parent. Tragically, Dan and Linda still had the power to manipulate Annette, and they convinced her to return to their house for her recovery. She did so, and, just as they had threatened to do, they called CPS and expressed concerns about Annette’s capacity to parent.

A few days after giving birth, social services came into Dan and Linda’s home, and, just like Annette had feared, they ripped Oliver from Annette’s arms and took him away. They placed him with a couple who are “eager to adopt.”

When I spoke to Parthiban, Oliver and Annette had been apart for nearly six months, and Annette’s commitment to him had not wavered. She texts or calls her attorneys daily, updating them on her efforts to reunify with her son and asking for advice.

Parthiban is doing all she can to help Annette regain custody, but she is often pessimistic about the chances that they can be reunified. In her experience, as soon as a judge hears that a parent is intellectually disabled, they are much more likely to terminate the parent’s rights. Most parents have a legal right to reunification services: a period of time in which they can follow the social worker’s instructions and “earn” their children back. But often a parent has not lost custody because of a lack of effort. The requirements are simply impossible without support.

In some cases, a county will petition to permanently terminate a parent’s rights before their guaranteed reunification time has passed. For example, if a parent has previously lost custody of other children and there have been no significant changes in circumstance, a judge may determine that moving toward adoption is more beneficial for a child than working toward reunification. In Parthiban’s experience, this approach is often used with disabled parents. Once a disabled parent loses custody of one child, a judge is likely to circumvent reunification efforts and terminate a parent’s rights before they have had any time to honor the social worker’s requirements.

In Annette’s case, Oliver is her first child, so the county is taking a different approach. They initially told the judge that Annette is simply too disabled to benefit from reunification efforts. If a judge terminates her rights to parent, that will pave the way for separations from any future children she may have.

According to Annette’s counsel, her ability to obtain safe and stable housing and prepare for the birth of her child demonstrates that she is able to care for Oliver. Her behavior in the hospital was a result of the abuse she endured at the hands of the welfare system, not proof that she is unfit. Fortunately, the judge agreed that Annette deserves a chance to reunify with Oliver. Annette has been granted six months to prove that she can provide the stability and safety that Annette needs. San Francisco CPS has specific metrics in place that will measure Annette’s fitness, like stable housing and healthy relationships. For most of this case, Parthiban explains, it’s been clear that Oliver’s social workers are not earnestly pursuing reunification—they had, until recently, never tried to observe Oliver and Annette together.

A great deal of the social workers’ reluctance was because of a lack of disability accommodations. For months, they believed that Annette was refusing to provide information and answer the social worker’s questions. However, her silence wasn’t defiance but, instead, a result of their questions being too abstract. Annette couldn’t process the questions in the form they were presented. But, once her counsel was able to explain the accommodations that Annette needed, the social workers began breaking down the questions into distinct parts, and, instantly, Annette became engaged and transparent.

The county uses Annette’s IQ as evidence that she is unfit. Despite the fact that it’s still used in practice, IQ testing has long been debunked as a test of parental fitness. In fact, it’s not until IQ drops below fifty that there is any correlation to parenting ability. Moreover, the IQ test itself is faulty and perpetuates racial discrimination.

About a month after Parthiban and I first spoke about Annette, she updated me on the case. She had convinced Oliver’s social worker to attend a visitation between Oliver and Annette. Every week, Annette has nine supervised hours with her son, divided over three days. It was the social worker’s first time observing Oliver’s connection with his mom.

Parthiban lights up when she describes Annette as a parent. Annette is teaching Oliver about body parts and purchased him a stuffed animal and uses it to make up songs. “This is bunny’s ear,” she sings. “This is Oliver’s ear. This is Mommy’s ear.” Oliver is rapt and touches his own ear and then his mom’s. It’s impossible to deny the strength of their bond. “She focuses on him for every second of the three hours,” Parthiban said.

Oliver’s social worker has said that Annette cannot parent because her intellectual disability prevents her from parenting independently. Parthiban objected to this standard and challenged the original case plan and its requirements. She explained to me that demanding that someone parent without support is discriminatory. Parthiban prevailed, and Annette’s case plan now allows for assistance and accommodations.

Annette has worked tirelessly to put these supports in place. The San Francisco waiting list for the disabled parenting classes she needed was so long that she went over to Oakland and asked for help there. Unfortunately, the East Bay agency that had space to provide services was unable to access adequate reimbursement from Annette’s San Francisco agency. Anyone who has interacted with this kind of bureaucracy knows the utter frustration that it brings. It’s like trying to navigate a corn maze blindfolded after spinning around a bat. But Annette persists.

Her case took a turn in March 2023 after she was approved for In-Home Supportive Services (IHHS), which would allow her access to supportive services while at home. The funding she received wasn’t quite adequate, but a family friend stepped in and offered to supplement the paid-for support. If Annette provides this friend housing, she will help Annette care for Oliver.

Parthiban isn’t surprised that a relationship is providing Annette with a way out. “She is very loyal to the people she considers family,” Parthiban said. When Annette trusts someone, particularly a woman, she calls them a sister or an auntie. Parthiban explained, “All she has ever wanted are aunties to love her.” She is loyal and kind and deeply appreciates the value of community. She is happy to share the housing she fought so hard to obtain.

For the first time since Oliver’s birth, Parthiban thinks that they might be able to reunify, but she needs the social worker to stay convinced.

Annette’s attorneys are not permitted to update the judge directly, so the social worker’s interpretation of Annette’s parenting carries the most weight. The social worker could change her mind at any moment. Parthiban is hesitant to express too much hope. “It’s all so precarious.”

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Excerpted from Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World by Jessica Slice. Copyright 2025. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.