July 9, 2026
Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently shared a harrowing experience that is all too familiar to many parents and children across the U.S. Law enforcement and a Child Protective Services (CPS) worker knocked on his door and told him he could not be alone with his children until allegations against him, later shown to be unfounded, were investigated. The children spent the night with their grandparents before coming home the next day.
“The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life,” he wrote on Substack.
What happened to the Buttigieg family is not anomalous. His four-year-old twins are two of the over three million children this year who will be subject to a CPS investigation. One in three U.S. children – and over half of Black children – experience a CPS investigation by age 18. Every hour of every day, children across the country are going through what Buttigieg’s children experienced: interrogation by a caseworker, often alone and separated from their siblings, feeling profound fear and uncertainty.
One in three U.S. children – and over half of Black children – experience a CPS investigation by age 18.
These investigations draw little media attention, almost exclusively affecting families with fewer privileges than Buttigieg’s. When they do, the debate focuses on whether CPS did its due diligence in investigating a family. It’s time to ask another question: what do investigations themselves do to children?
We might think that these interventions are reserved for imminent, grave concerns about children’s safety. In fact, CPS investigations have become the default government response to families experiencing poverty, stress, or adversity; this is the case even when the underlying concern is a lack of family resources rather than a threat to a child’s safety. In most states, child neglect is defined so broadly in the law that circumstances such as inadequate housing, a lack of child care, school absences, or unmet medical needs can trigger CPS involvement even when parents are trying their best to care for their children.
Reports are made for many reasons: because someone genuinely fears a child is being harmed; because professionals lack other pathways to respond to families in crisis; because poverty is mistaken for neglect; because cultural differences are misunderstood, and because someone wants to weaponize the system against a family.
In over 80 percent of cases, including Buttigieg’s, investigators don’t find enough evidence to confirm allegations of child abuse or neglect. But even when investigations summarily close, the trauma that children endure can do lasting damage to their sense of security and wellbeing. As research has shown, investigations are not simply administrative events, they are experiences children and parents carry long after their case is closed. This disproportionately impacts Black children, who are almost twice as likely to experience an investigation in any given year.
If we take the rights and dignity of children seriously, then we must examine not only whether suspicions of harm are addressed, but how our response itself affects the very children we are trying to protect.
If we take the rights and dignity of children seriously, then we must examine not only whether suspicions of harm are addressed, but how our response itself affects the very children we are trying to protect.
Protecting children means protecting them not only from abuse and neglect, but also from unnecessary government intrusion that leaves children frightened, parents traumatized, and families forever changed. A child welfare system worthy of its name should be just as careful about the harms it creates as the harms it seeks to prevent.
We can make progress by protecting children while examining the reality of harm that stems from our reporting system. We can change reporting laws and practices that encourage investigations even when families need support rather than surveillance. We can institute clearer standards for when reports are warranted. We can require reporters to give their names to CPS (even if they remain anonymous to the family) to reduce malicious reporting, as New York and Texas have recently done. We can develop better training so that reporters can distinguish family need from abuse or neglect. We can invest in community-based responses that offer help without launching an investigation whenever safety is not at risk.
Another key solution is to eliminate the criminal and civil penalties that mandated reporters can face for not reporting – a threat that drives overreporting and does nothing to protect children. New York has a bill before the state legislature right now that promises to do just that. Supporting Families Together would remove those penalties, letting professionals use their judgment to connect families with help while still allowing any genuine safety concerns to be reported. Every child and caregiver spared the harm of an unnecessary and unsubstantiated investigation is real progress – and this bill would spare many.
What happened to Buttigieg, his husband and their children never should have happened. But by talking about it and telling the world, “don’t mess with someone’s kids,” Buttigieg turned an ugly moment into an opportunity to galvanize change, just as system-impacted people have long been doing. Given the millions of parents and children whose dark hours happen behind closed doors, hidden from our view, that’s a message that needs to be heard.
Shereen A. White, Director of Advocacy & Policy, Children’s Rights
Kelley Fong, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine