It’s the knock on the door that many mothers fear: a visit from Child Protective Services (CPS), the state agency with the power to take their children away. Over the last half-century, these encounters have become an all-too-common way of trying to address family poverty and adversity. One in three children nationwide—and half of Black children—now encounter CPS during childhood.
In Investigating Families, Kelley Fong provides an unprecedented look at the inner workings of CPS and the experiences of families pulled into its orbit. Drawing on firsthand observations of CPS investigations and hundreds of interviews with those involved, Fong traces the implications of invoking CPS as a “first responder” to family misfortune and hardship. She shows how relying on CPS—an entity fundamentally oriented around parental wrongdoing and empowered to separate families—organizes the response to adversity around surveilling, assessing, and correcting marginalized mothers. The agency’s far-reaching investigative apparatus undermines mothers’ sense of security and shapes how they marshal resources for their families, reinforcing existing inequalities. And even before CPS comes knocking, mothers feel vulnerable to a system that jeopardizes their parenthood. Countering the usual narratives of punitive villains and hapless victims, Fong’s unique, behind-the-scenes account tells a revealing story of how we try to protect children by threatening mothers—and points the way to a more productive path for families facing adversity.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the William J. Goode Book Award, Family Section of the American Sociological Association
- Winner of the Outstanding Book Award, Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association
- Winner of the Herbert Jacob Prize, Law and Society Association
- Honorable Mention for the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Distinguished Book Award, Crime, Law, and Deviance section of the American Sociological Association
- Finalist for the Media for a Just Society Awards, Evident Change
"Investigating Families...crucially illuminates the perspectives of women tangled in the [child protective services] web. Fong is a sociologist, and Investigating Families is based on rare firsthand access to CPS investigations and in depth interviews with dozens of impacted mothers —the kind of mothers upper-middle-class readers don't typically find relatable .... We would do well to examine why we continue to ignore the horror that is unfolding for millions of families in America each year."—Kristen Martin, New York Review of Books
“Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Investigating Families provides compelling insight into the terror and trauma CPS investigations inflict on marginalized mothers. Kelley Fong powerfully shows that caseworkers’ threatening interventions increase struggling mothers’ precarity, deter families from getting needed help, and reinforce social inequalities. Essential reading for understanding fully the toll family policing takes, and a call to replace this intrusive system with an approach that supports families.”—Dorothy Roberts, author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build A Safer World
“Investigating Families brings to life the fears mothers feel when faced with child protective services, as well as the way those fears affect their relationships with the world they live in. Reading it, I felt anger and sorrow, but most importantly I felt renewed energy to fight against the injustices, the marginalization, and devaluation inflicted upon mothers and their children through poverty, racialized disadvantage, and involvement with the child welfare system.”—Jerry Milner, Director of Family Justice Group and former Associate Commissioner, U.S. Children's Bureau
“A gripping and intimate examination of the policy that has put fully a third of all American children under the surveillance of Child Protective Services. The intrepid Kelley Fong takes us inside CPS to show how the threat of family separation undermines and jeopardizes the very families who need help. Investigating Families offers essential insights for understanding poverty, our response to it, and a way forward. For any parent, or any citizen, this is a riveting read.”—Kathryn Edin, coauthor of $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
“Investigating Families expands our understanding of how social programs that should offer support to families who are struggling instead further destabilize them, often making them even more precarious. Using rich data, Fong shows how ongoing CPS involvement pushes mothers—often already facing trauma, hardship, racism, isolation, and stigma—further to the margins in ways that have immediate and far-reaching effects on children, parents, and communities.”—Jennifer A. Reich, author of Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System
“The most complete in-depth analysis of what is formally known as the child protective services system ever written. And the best book of its kind I’ve ever read. Fong embedded herself inside a largely hidden world and now reveals to the public how perverse a system that in name is committed to improving the lives of children really is.”—Martin Guggenheim, author of What's Wrong With Children’s Rights
