Hennepin County program reaches out to expectant mothers at a highly sensitive stage of their pregnancies, offering assistance to those who agree to work with the child welfare agency. The aim is to avoid another foster care removal in the family.
Each year hundreds of Minnesota moms lose custody of their children through the civil courts, accused of abuse or neglect. And once they’ve involuntarily lost one kid to the system, each subsequent birth will mean an automatic referral to child protective services and heightened scrutiny that could lead to another removal into foster care.
But a new program in Hennepin County aims to upend that trajectory by offering support and services to pregnant moms who have struggled with addiction and mental health challenges. The Prior TPR/TLC Support Program works to keep those two acronyms from re-entering the women’s lives: Termination of Parental Rights and Transfer of Legal Custody.
It’s a noteworthy mission for a child welfare agency typically associated with taking children from homes, rather than keeping families intact. And as a result, it raises plenty of skepticism and fear.
“Every time somebody walked past the hospital door, I still was like, ‘Are they coming in here? Are they gonna take my baby?’” said Brittany, a participant who used her first name only to protect her privacy. After she gave birth in May, the feeling never left her, even as Brittany packed up to go home with her newborn.
“My social worker had to keep reassuring me that I was OK. And when I got home, I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I just stared at my baby boy thinking someone was going to knock on that door at any moment to take him.”
The Prior TPR/TLC Support Program often collaborates with the county’s Project CHILD, which focuses on safe, sober pregnancies for parents 16 and older. At a recent voluntary weekly gathering, participants met at Hennepin County’s Behavioral Health Center in Minneapolis, a home-like space with faded carpet and boxes of toys lining the walls. Some of the women had previously lost children to foster care. Some brought their newborns along, others were expecting. They sipped coffee, sought social support and received guidance from social workers, ending the Tuesday gathering with dishes of fried chicken and sides.
“Our goal is to work with these mothers voluntarily and help them navigate their fears and anxieties about what will happen when their baby is born,” said Allyssa Mashak, a child protection supervisor who oversees the Prior TPR/TLC Support Program.
Social workers contact expectant mothers six to eight weeks before their due dates. They are referred through Project CHILD or prenatal clinics with the goal of creating “a supportive environment where mothers feel empowered rather than judged.”
In its pilot stage over roughly a year and a half, the Prior TPR/TLC Support Program has assisted 12 families with social work support tailored to their needs, including preparations for a safe and healthy birth and help with plans to bring the newborns home. Participants receive rides to prenatal appointments, transportation vouchers, baby supplies and help securing stable housing.
Child Protective Services here has no legal grounds to intervene before a baby is born — even when a woman has had other children taken into foster care due to issues such as substance abuse or mental health challenges.
But under Minnesota law, if a parent discloses at a prenatal clinic or hospital that they’ve had parental rights involuntarily terminated in the past, the baby is considered “subject to threatened injury.” Those parents are automatically reported to CPS when subsequent children are born. If suspicions about safety arise in subsequent investigations, mom and baby can be separated during a critical bonding time.
The Prior TPR/TLC Program seeks to head off that outcome, by offering the mothers a choice to opt in to services earlier on. If they accept, they receive immediate assistance with basic needs during pregnancy through the birth. Ongoing help is available through Project CHILD. That includes the weekly group meetings and referrals to therapy and recovery programs, if mothers choose to continue working with the child welfare agency.
Although the help is provided by Hennepin County’s Department of Human Services, absent any concerns that surface, there is no open CPS case before the local courts during this period. The assistance is offered to new moms regardless of how many previous children they’ve lost in the past to foster care.
Participants are informed at the outset that CPS workers will conduct an initial child safety “assessment.” They are also told that should concerns arise after the birth, a petition alleging maltreatment may be filed in court. But program staff said that so far that outcome has been rare.
In interviews, they acknowledged the fraught nature of a CPS worker approaching pregnant mothers weeks before their due dates, even if the intention is to avoid yet another foster care removal. If I was addicted when I last gave birth, will my new baby automatically be removed? Is there any way to avoid losing yet another child? Such fears and anxieties could not be higher when these birthing moms approach labor and delivery, they said.
Rebekah Butz, a screening and intake social worker for Project CHILD, described the trauma from losing a child earlier in life as “not easily undone.” But she and her colleagues said they try to instill hope for the future.
“Truth be told, we go beyond hope and we go with the full attitude of: Let’s manifest this,” Butz said. “This is happening.”
“My social worker had to keep reassuring me that I was OK. And when I got home, I didn’t know what to do. I just stared at my baby boy thinking someone was going to knock on that door at any moment to take him.”
— Brittany, Prior TPR/TLC Support Program participant
Pregnant moms have the option of declining the offers for help from the county’s Prior TPR/TLC Support Program. But as a result, they place their fate in the hands of CPS workers who will be dispatched to assess the baby’s safety at birth. After that investigation, the case can be closed with no additional agency involvement, or it can remain open, with parents monitored by the courts while receiving social services to remedy difficulties at home.
The outlines of the Prior TPR/TLC Program raised concerns for Richard Wexler, an occasional contributor to The Imprint’s op-ed page, and a well-known critic of child welfare systems. The executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform is among those who say foster care prevention and ensuring the well-being of children shouldn’t require “family policing” by agencies with the power to remove kids from their homes.
“This could be a very good program — in someone else’s hands,” Wexler said in an email. As long as a program is affiliated with the CPS agencies, “parents will shy away, often for good reason.” He added that any resistance or reluctance on the parents’ part could be construed as hostile and result in a less-cooperative worker prone to taking a more punitive stance toward the family.
Wexler pointed to promising multi-disciplinary approaches to avoid foster care removals that are run outside of child welfare agencies, including a collaboration in Pennsylvania between legal advocates, medical staff and social workers.
“So, how might a program like this be made to work? It’s not that hard,” he said of the Hennepin County model. “Lift it out of the child protective services agency and put it somewhere else,” such as a community-based agency or public interest law firm. Staff could inform authorities if they “genuinely believed a child was in danger and there was no other alternative,” he noted, but they would otherwise be exempt from mandatory reporting laws.
Brittany, 34, said she lost seven children due to substance use — a cascade of trauma after trauma. She had moved to Minnesota for a fresh start when she became pregnant.
Months into her pregnancy, she received a text message offering help from a social worker with Hennepin County’s Prior TPR/TLC Support Program.
Fresh with painful past memories, Brittany tried at first to ghost the worker. But she kept messaging her with compelling arguments. The winning text? The worker wanted CPS to “leave her alone,” she wrote, rather than to take yet another baby away from her.
“She was working overdrive to prove herself and help,” Brittany said.
Letting her guard down wasn’t easy, though. But things gradually began to shift when she saw how much the social worker seemed to be invested in her success. First, it was delivering a car seat — which Brittany didn’t think she would need because “they were going to take the baby anyway.” Then, a stroller. Still skeptical, Brittany felt these were kind gestures, but to what avail? The baby surely wasn’t joining her on the trip home, she thought.
Baby clothes, blankets, and diapers followed, along with rides to all her appointments and later to the Tuesday meetings for new moms.
“‘I’m not going to give up until you know I’m on your side.’ That’s what she told me,” Brittany said. “I wanted to see action and she proved to me that she wanted my baby to come home just as much as I did.”
Nationwide, more than 65,000 children had ties to their parents severed in 2021, according to federal data. That figure includes 960 Minnesota children.
Involuntary terminations occur when a parent is deemed unfit by the family court, often due to failure to comply with court orders to attend therapy, overcome substance abuse issues, or address domestic violence or other problems that led to allegations of abuse or neglect.
A growing number of states, including Minnesota, have enacted legislation to restore parental rights after they’ve been terminated in the foster care courts. And some states such as New York, have weighed laws that would allow parents previously deemed unfit to have contact with their adopted children.
Safe Babies courts in northern Minnesota and elsewhere across the country attempt to move mothers and babies through age 3 as quickly as possible through the child welfare system, with extra social services support, specially trained judges and expanded opportunities for family visitation.
But the Hennepin County program appears unique in that it sets out to specifically prevent subsequent children being removed following a prior termination of parental rights.
Supervisor Mashak said watching parents leave the hospital with their newborns is the most gratifying part of her work.
“We’ve seen mothers with multiple past terminations successfully take their babies home,” she said. “This is about fostering hope, not shame. People change, and they deserve a second chance.”
Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that the Prior TPR/TLC Support Program is separate from — but often collaborates with — Project CHILD. And some but not all of the women at a recent gathering of Project CHILD had their children placed in foster care. It also now correctly states the number of children Brittany has had removed from her custody.
