Child Protection

This chapter studies the parent–child relationship through the lens of child protection laws, with emphasis on the issues of state intervention into that relationship. Throughout the history of the laws governing the complex relationship of parent, child, and state, there has been a struggle between parental authority and family privacy, on the one hand, and the state's responsibility of guarding the best interests of the child, on the other. The rhetoric has been that parents have the basic right to raise their children as they see fit, subject to their not overstepping the bounds of reasonableness in all aspects of childrearing. However, parental rights are not unlimited. Historically, the state, the ultimate parent who looks after all the children in society under the parens patriae concept, has a right to subject parents to public scrutiny and legal examination. In the United States, in the main, child protection in the form of child welfare services in the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is basically the responsibility of the states. State social service agencies under the executive branch deliver certain social services themselves but more commonly for reasons of economy contract for foster care and adoption services with private social service agencies, which they monitor. The chapter then looks at the federal government's impact on the child protection systems in the states.