What the Child Welfare System Got Wrong About Home
Daphne Wallace* and her husband adopted two half-sisters, ages 3 and 4, through the child welfare system. They had resources. They had intention. What they didn't have was any real idea of how much their daughters had already lost before they arrived — or how long that loss would keep showing up. Nor did they know the system they were counting on for support would become one more thing to fight.
"It wasn't until later that we truly understood the significance of just how much [our daughters] had missed and been hurt in their early childhood," Daphne said. Her older daughter hadn't had a consistent, safe caregiver for the first three years of her life. The signs were there almost immediately — hair-pulling during termination-of-rights visitations, tantrums that stretched two hours, a startling ease at bonding with strangers that Daphne later understood wasn't attachment at all. Her younger daughter, who came from a separate kinship placement, carried her own distinct history of trauma.
By the time her eldest daughter turned 12, behaviors that had always been difficult began to amplify — more defiance, more dishonesty, disregard for house rules and running away.
Daphne and her husband had already provided years of therapy for their daughter: equine therapy, play therapy, family therapy. They were not new to this. What they needed at that point wasn't to put forth more effort or love. They had done and provided everything they could.
It was outside support that they needed and that neither of them could provide alone, no matter how hard they worked. That's where the system should have come in — and where the fight Daphne couldn't yet see coming actually began.
Asking for Help — and Getting Nothing
Indiana's Department of Child Services (DCS) entered the family's life for the first time not because of anything happening at home, but because of a false allegation — later realized as unfounded. It was an unsettling introduction to how much power the system held over their family, whether or not they'd done anything wrong. "Child welfare is some large, anonymous bureaucracy that seems to wield a lot of power," Daphne said. "We just didn't know anything, other than we had to show up, and now we had to kind of explain and prove and justify."
Years later, as her daughter's behaviors escalated into what Daphne called "chronic crisis mode," the family made a different kind of call to DCS — not in response to an allegation, but a request. "Rather than them hearing something or reaching out to us in reaction, we thought, we need help," Daphne said. "And so we called them." They asked DCS to open a case, naming plainly that their daughter had come to them through the child welfare system and that they could not support her the way she needed.
It was outside support that they needed and that neither of them could provide alone, no matter how hard they worked. That's where the system should have come in — and where the fight Daphne couldn't yet see coming actually began.
During one visit, Daphne's daughter, in the midst of a dysregulated episode, swore at the caseworker and told her to get out. The caseworker shrugged and said she didn't know what to do — and left.
"There was this point of desperation and wanting help, and begging for help," Daphne said. "And that was met with zilch." DCS didn't offer resources, and the suggestions they did make were things the family had already tried for years. Yet the same system that couldn't help them would still hold them accountable if a new allegation came in.
When her daughter ran from a youth shelter and was picked up by police, DCS told Daphne and her husband to come get her. They said they couldn't — the whole reason she'd gone to the shelter was that they couldn't keep her safe at home.
DCS threatened to charge them with neglect or abandonment. "We just were not experienced with that facet," Daphne said. "And we didn't wanna be involved with them, because they were this large, wielding power of authority — or at least we perceived them to be so."
Not long after — after another middle-of-the-night pickup from the police station — a caseworker came to the house to conduct a home study, entering their home to photograph her younger daughter at 5:30 a.m. Daphne later understood how inappropriate that visit had been: an intrusion into their home and their other child's life that had nothing to do with the case DCS was supposed to be handling.
That pattern repeated for years: crisis, temporary placement, a return home and a faster, harder escalation the next time. Daphne's younger daughter absorbed the fallout of every cycle, dreading what would happen each time her sister came home.
The Shift: Learning to Name the Risk, Not the Relationship
Everything changed on her daughter's 16th birthday. She had run away and stayed in their own town without returning home — occasionally showing up at school, repeatedly encountering police — until, eventually, she was brought to the emergency room for alcohol poisoning. It became the entry point to a secure facility, and the moment Daphne began working with Amy VanTine, founder of RAD Advocates, to think differently about how she talked to DCS.
"I remember at that point putting focus away from the impact of what she's doing on our family, and all on just her safety and her wellbeing," Daphne said.
Much of that reframing, she said, came directly from Amy: keep the language focused on the child DCS is already involved with, name the safety risk plainly and never bring a sibling's name or wellbeing into a report or a conversation with the system. "You don't want DCS to come in and start thinking that they need to mess around with and help this other person whom you're not asking for help for," Daphne said — a family member who had already been harmed enough by the system's presence in their home.
"There was this point of desperation and wanting help, and begging for help," Daphne said. "And that was met with zilch." DCS didn't offer resources, and the suggestions they did make were things the family had already tried for years. Yet the same system that couldn't help them would still hold them accountable if a new allegation came in.
The clearest test of that shift came when her daughter was discharged from a group home and the family made a decision they knew would be reported as neglect: they did not go pick her up.
"We knew she was safe," Daphne said. "We in fact said, 'Please call DCS, or take her for an evaluation to the ER.'" She was firm on the rest: "We cannot pick her up." It was, she said, "an act of advocacy and care to support her safety" — even as DCS framed it as refusing to care for their daughter.
Getting her daughter into a facility equipped to meet her needs meant DCS first had to document that the family's home wasn't enough. That was true. It was also the only door available.
What Holding the Line Actually Looked Like
Learning to hold that line came neither easily nor alone. The line itself was simple and true, repeated no matter how exhausting it became: "We cannot keep her safe." And: "The level of care she requires exceeds what we can provide." Repeating it wasn't a failure, Daphne said — it was how she kept her own account of events on the record, even inside a system inclined to describe her as unwilling or neglectful.
Daphne built this discipline over years with guidance from RAD Advocates, a support she hadn't known she needed until she had it. Amy wasn't only her advocate — she was another parent who'd lived this exact journey, who understood firsthand not just how to work with the system, but the heartache that went with it.
With that guidance, Daphne began keeping her communication with DCS in writing rather than by phone or text, often copying everyone involved so there was no room for one caseworker's account to stand in for what actually happened. "I could easily then forward it to a lawyer if I needed to," she said. "Or refer back to, 'In this email I sent on January 25th, I answered your question.'"
Daphne also learned, through advocate support, that not every interaction had to happen entirely on DCS's terms. Meetings didn't have to happen in her home. Missing-person calls didn't require a police visit to the house. "They had already violated it," Daphne said of her family's privacy — but she found she still had some say in where and how DCS showed up next.
RAD Advocates [provided] support Daphne hadn't known she needed until she had it. Amy wasn't only her advocate — she was another parent who'd lived this exact journey, who understood firsthand not just how to work with the system, but the heartache that went with it.
Having an advocate present mattered too. Amy sat in on a meeting with DCS, and Daphne said having someone else in the room creates accountability: a witness who can confirm what was and wasn't said.
And she stopped assuming DCS would follow through on its own. "Their primary mode of operation is inertia," Daphne said, of DCS and, in her experience, large systems generally. Reports that were promised didn't arrive for months unless she asked. Action items she'd already provided got requested again the week before a deadline. Nothing moved without her pushing it.
None of this was a formula. What worked for Daphne was specific to her state, her case and her family — another parent's path through this may look nothing like hers. But for Daphne, it made a difference both in how DCS responded and in how she experienced herself inside it: for the first time in years, she felt like she had some agency over what happened next, rather than simply being at the system's mercy.
Reunification Isn't Automatically Relationship
The hardest idea Daphne named is also the one she thinks the system understands least: that a child returning home and a child being safely connected to their family are not the same thing.
Daphne learned this mostly by watching the pattern repeat: connection came easiest when her daughter wasn't living at home. "The best way for my child and us to relate was when she experienced daily living outside of our home," Daphne said, "where many of her accountability needs were met by staff members who were not emotionally tied to her, so that she could stabilize enough to connect and have relationship with us." Every time her daughter came home, the relationship deteriorated faster than the time before. Every time she was somewhere stable and structured, she and Daphne found their way back to something honest.
The hardest idea Daphne named is also the one she thinks the system understands least: that a child returning home and a child being safely connected to their family are not the same thing.
That pattern points to something the system itself doesn't reckon with. "The child welfare system's goal is reunification no matter what," Daphne said. That goal doesn't account for why a child like her daughter can experience the very person trying to nurture her as a threat — a dynamic author Nancy Verrier named the "nurturing enemy" in her book "The Primal Wound," describing how a primary caregiver can become the target of a child's fear and hostility precisely because of how hard they try to get close (more on this dynamic here).
For kids who cannot tolerate their primary caregivers, she added, forcing that outcome "does not equate to having relationship." Without significant healing first, in fact, the disorder can push the child only further away from the family — and put the safety of everyone in the home at risk.
That gap — between what the system is built to pursue and what actually keeps a family safe — is one RAD Advocates hears from families constantly. She and her husband stopped measuring success by whether their daughter came home and started measuring it by whether they could still build something that would last past her 18th birthday.
What Safety Came to Mean
That relationship remains a work in progress. Daphne's daughter, now an adult, is no longer in the family's daily care, and Daphne is careful not to call the outcome resolved. What she does describe is something more realistic, given the nature of RAD: a younger daughter who could finally feel safe in her own home, an eldest daughter who found more steadiness and safety in structured care than she ever had at home, and a family that held onto each other even without living under one roof.
"How you choose to set the boundary is where the agency lies," Daphne said. After years of feeling at the mercy of a system that offered little and demanded everything, that agency — however hard-won — was, in her words, "empowering."
"Our family does not all live under the same roof," Daphne said. "And yet we can still be a family." It's a belief she and her husband held onto from the earliest, hardest years, long before they understood how much it would be tested — and it's carried them to a place where both of their daughters, in different homes and different ways, are safe.
*pseudonym to protect identity
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