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It is natural to assume that the author of a book on “transforming child protective services” would be interested in children. As such, the most surprising thing about “Broken,” Jessica Pryce’s memoir of her career in child welfare, is how disengaged she seems from kids and how best to promote their well-being.
There can be real tension between the needs of children and the rights of their parents, between protecting children and pathologizing different parenting styles or criminalizing poverty. Pryce is not the first expert to argue that the child welfare system places disproportionate scrutiny on Black families — and in particular, on Black mothers. One version of an engaging book on this subject might offer a comprehensive proposal for policy reform. Another might make the case for a family welfare system instead of one focused exclusively on children. Unfortunately, “Broken” is neither of these things. Structured as an awkward crossover between a memoir and reported investigation, the result is a bizarre chronicle of self-congratulation rather than an effective contribution to child welfare debates.
By her own account, Pryce drifted into child welfare work, accepting a job as an investigator in the Department of Children and Families in Tallahassee after interning there during her social work master’s degree program. She writes that she felt no particular drive to interview families or children, zoned out during training and focused on churning through case files, even knowing that as a result she “came off to parents as hurried and detached” and her investigations lacked depth. Until a dear friend was reported to CPS, Pryce writes, she never considered whether the requirements she imposed on parents were fair or helpful. It was not until she went back to graduate school a second time that Pryce says she became acquainted with the extensive data documenting the disproportionate involvement of Black families in the child welfare system, numbers she could have employed to bolster her anecdotes about how Black women experience being investigated.
Pryce borrows a title chapter from “Torn Apart,” Dorothy Roberts’s deeply researched 2022 cri de coeur against racism in the child welfare system, but doesn’t cite that volume or invoke Roberts’s arguments about how foster care affects children. It says a great deal about what kind of book “Broken” is that Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Anti-Racist” appears in Pryce’s footnotes three times, while Roberts, whose decades of work on child welfare ought to have been vital to this book, merits only a single mention. (Pryce makes no mention of — much less offers a rejoinder to — proponents of much more aggressive child welfare policies, such as Harvard University professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who argues for swifter termination of parental rights and speeded-up adoptions).
Instead of drawing from academic literature, Pryce prides herself on using case studies to build her argument that the child welfare system unfairly penalizes conscientious parents. But the examples she’s chosen tend to work against those contentions.
Take the story of Madisen, whose mother, Didi, struggled with depression and homelessness. Didi left Madisen in the care of Erica, Madisen’s godmother and Pryce’s good friend. (Pryce writes in her introduction that she uses a mix of pseudonyms and real names throughout the book, though it’s often not clear which names are invented.) Though the arrangement was intended to be temporary, Didi eventually abandoned Madisen. Out of quite understandable grief and confusion, Madisen began acting out, and Erica began spanking her, ultimately escalating to holding Madisen down and hitting her with a belt.
To many readers, Madisen’s visible bruises might seem like a logical thing to investigate. Yet Pryce invokes Erica’s experience as evidence of the extreme unfairness of CPS to Erica. How awful and unfair that Pryce’s dear friend, a person who Pryce is sure is incapable of cruelty, could be investigated! What business is it of the state whether parents employ their “chosen form of discipline”?
In defense of Erica, Pryce suggests that 70 percent of American parents spank their children. But she never provides a citation for that figure, which is odd given that some evidence suggests that spanking is on the decline, and probably far less widespread than that figure would suggest. Nor does she spend a moment grappling with whether spanking is an effective form of discipline — many studies suggest it is not — or whether Erica’s escalating punishments of Madisen might have been a sign that they were both in crisis.
I can imagine that being investigated was humiliating and awful for Erica, whose feelings appear to be Pryce’s primary concern. But the story Pryce tells suggests that involvement with the child welfare system did help to straighten out a dreadful tangle. Didi’s parental rights were terminated (a development to which Pryce doesn’t muster much objection) and after Madisen was temporarily placed in foster care, Erica was able to adopt her goddaughter legally.
Then there’s the story of Jatoia and Lawrence, who underwent a harrowing investigation after their prematurely born son Kenny was horribly injured. Only years later, after both parents lost custody of both of their children and spent time in jail, did Lawrence finally acknowledge that he alone was responsible for Kenny’s injuries: While drunk and high, he dropped the baby outside, and then concealed the accident. Based on the information Pryce provides in “Broken,” it seems terribly unfair that Jatoia also lost her parental rights. But the person most responsible for that injustice isn’t the child welfare investigators who wanted to find out what happened to Kenny. It is Lawrence. If he’d acknowledged his role in Kenny’s injuries sooner, Jatoia would not have been unfairly tarred as an unfit mother, and their children might still be in the custody of one of their biological parents.
It’s also hard to understand why Pryce devotes so little of “Broken” to “blind removal,” an approach to removing children from their families for which she has been a major national advocate. This decision-making process, in which committees of child welfare workers make determinations without knowing a family’s race or ethnicity, or even names, has been adopted in multiple cities and states seeking to reduce racial disparities in their child welfare system. This is arguably Pryce’s most significant contribution to her field. But perhaps discussing it more fully would have required her to wade into the debate about whether it actually works as intended, and whether “blind removal” is consistent with Pryce’s goal of convincing the child welfare system to see mothers as individuals working through complicated circumstances.
While Pryce tells readers that she was motivated by “a genuine desire to help children in some way,” “Broken” gives the impression that she has little interest in or connection to the specific kids whose stories appear fleetingly in its pages. Pryce reported her own sister to child protective services after witnessing her sister’s partner assault her — and bemoans the impact of that act on their relationship without exploring what happened to her sister’s children. In her telling, Pryce never bothers to find out what happened to the children she met during her first case as an intern, who were living in squalor, infected with ringworm and effectively parenting their baby brother.
Pryce shows no more care with the big questions that have long bedeviled much more serious books about the child welfare system. Writing about domestic violence, she notes that efforts to protect children may end up in tension with efforts to protect mothers. Rather than attempt to propose a balance, she asks, “Who is responsible for protecting whom? What is the prioritization of which victim?” and moves on.
She blithely excuses herself from the greatest problem of child welfare by writing: “There are some children who need immediate protection, some families who need state intervention, and some parents who need judicial accountability. Those types of cases are in the minority nationwide, and they constitute none of the Black mothers in this book.”
That kind of evasion isn’t fair to kids like Rob Henderson, whose recent memoir “Troubled” recounts an early life with a mother who tied him to a chair so she could get high, a series of neglectful foster parents, and an adoption by a well-meaning mother and father whose marriage subsequently fell apart. It’s not fair to children like David Edwards, who was beaten to death by his parents, and whose murder became the subject of “The Book of David” (1996), a serious investigation of the child welfare system by Richard J. Gelles.
Designing a child welfare system with the resources and flexibility to keep a child such as Madisen with a parental figure who is loving but overstretched; with the clarity and commitment to place Henderson for adoption sooner; and with policies that didn’t leave Edwards to be murdered by his parents is very, very hard. It takes “vulnerability and culpability,” as Pryce so proudly claims but does so little to demonstrate.
Alyssa Rosenberg writes about mass culture, parenting and gender for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.
Transforming Child Protective Services — Notes of a Former Caseworker
By Jessica Pryce
Amistad. 283 pp. $28.99
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