The Many Different Ways Your Child Can Be Taken By CPS/Social Workers

In this video, criminal defense attorney Jonathan M. Lynn discusses with Paul J. Wallin the many different ways your child may be taken by CPS and social workers. The different reasons may surprise you!
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Transcript:
00:01:26
Paul J. Wallin: Okay, and that's what I'd like to talk about, about the child dependency system. Can you talk about what happens when children are taken from their parents?, how are they taken?, under what circumstances?
00:01:40
Jonathan Lynn: So there's a few different ways that can happen. One situation could be a parent to the hospital and they've just given birth and they find out that the child's tested positive for drugs and they because the parent was taking drugs, they might take the child right from the hospital. You could have a situation where there's domestic violence in the home, so maybe the mother calls, and the parents… the police show up and they see that there's been some domestic violence around the kids and that case gets referred to the social worker. There might be a situation where a kid is being physically abused or sexually abused and they reported to a teacher in school that teachers a mandated reporter, they have to tell social services. So in those situations Social Services comes and it could be in the middle of the night, they have an order from the judge to take hold and your child's taken from your home. It's a very serious situation that someone's looking at.
00:02:30
Paul J. Wallin: Wow. So, one thing that really is interesting but a lot of people don't know. So if you're at home with your significant other, and you have young children in the home, and there's a fight that breaks out it could be screaming, people could throw a plate or something, that's enough and the kids could be taken from you, right?
00:01:40
Jonathan Lynn: Yeah, it could be. It could be enough and it doesn't have to be that somebody struck the child or did anything to the child, it's the fact that you have a child in this home, where there's violence, and that could be unhealthy for the child. So that's something that you might have to look at going to court and dealing with that issue in court.
00:03:07
Paul J. Wallin: And in many cases these children have never been away from their parents, even in the day, right?
00:03:14
Jonathan Lynn: Yes, that's the tough thing about these dependency cases is that you might have a situation where you have a mother or father who have never been separated from a child for 24 hours and then all of a sudden now they're put into foster care, or a group home or situation that's just completely different from what they were in before. So, these are very difficult cases for the children and the parents that are going through dependency.
00:03:36
Paul J. Wallin: I have also, obviously also handle these cases for like 40 years, and that's the worst part of these cases for me. People don't understand that it's a balancing. Social workers look at a possible problem, and they take children away. And sometimes that's not the best alternative. There's alternatives other than that, because of the trauma that children go to. They're sleeping in a stranger's home, they don't know anyone there, there's tears, there's just… it's a horribly uncomfortable situation.