I Was the System: Atonement, Regret and the Children I Cannot Forget

I spent the first four years of my child welfare career in Child Protective Investigations. I began as an investigator and was promoted to supervisor two years later. We were the representatives of the State, the ones who knocked on the door and made the decision whether to remove a child.

When Florida transitioned to the Community-Based Care model, I moved from Investigations to the Community Based Care Lead Agency, responsible for overseeing ongoing dependency case management. The case management organizations collaborated with a team of professionals,  who made recommendations to the court “in the child’s best interest.”  These recommendations included whether a child should be reunified with their parent or if another permanency option should be explored.

Throughout my time with the Lead Agencies, I held multiple leadership positions. Eventually, I began managing agency operations, including adoptions. When I supervised the adoptions team, I signed off on the adoption review committee recommendations.

At the time, I genuinely believed I was doing what was best for children.

But the truth is: I caused harm.

And today, I’m finally saying that out loud.

In the early years, I fought for children to stay with their families, especially Black families, because I believed in the power of cultural identity. While working for one lead agency, we received a federal Family Finding grant, and this allowed us to identify families for children who had been lingering in foster care for years. During that time,  I witnessed the distress that came when children, who had lived with foster families for years, were suddenly moved to newly identified relatives. I began to view those moves as too disruptive, even if it meant the child was returning to family.

Then I attended a Statewide foster parent conference, where a clinician spoke about the importance of bonding and attachment. She shared a personal story: she and her husband had been contacted about taking in a two-year-old relative from another state. But based on her expertise, she declined the placement, believing that removing the child from their foster home would cause more harm than good.

That moment shifted something in me.

From then on, I began advocating for young children, especially those ages 0 to 5, to remain in their current foster homes if a strong bond had formed. My team understood the message: if you wanted to move a child out of a long-term placement, you needed compelling justification. We leaned heavily on clinicians who emphasized that a bond with a caregiver was more important than maintaining sibling connections or cultural ties.

I believed them.

I co-signed adoptions that prioritized foster parents over kin.

I signed off on decisions where children stayed with strangers rather than being reunified with family, thinking I was protecting them.

But here is the truth I could not see at the time:

The same professionals who urged us to preserve a child’s bond with a foster parent weren’t there when that baby was taken from their mother.

They didn’t show up with assessments or outrage at the moment of removal.

They weren’t sounding alarms about the broken bond with that caregiver, the birth mom.

We say children ages 0–5 are the most vulnerable.

We say their bonds are the most fragile.

But we do not protect their attachment to their parents.

We protect their attachment to strangers.

Why?

Because birth parents can’t afford bonding assessments.

Because professionals like me almost always sided with the foster home.

Because the system pays those professionals, not the parents.

And because, too often, professionals who claimed to be focused on the best interest of the child,  believed that a Black child placed with a stable white family was better off than being raised by a struggling Black grandmother.

This is how structural violence gets sanitized.

For years, I signed off on adoption review committee recommendations. Those cases weighed heavily on me because they were final. Permanent. Irreversible. Choosing one adoptive family over another felt like playing God. I used to tell my team, “This child will either thank us or need therapy because of this decision.”

Now, I wonder if some of those children are still wondering what happened. Are they  still grieving the family we erased?

I cannot change the past.

But I can name it.

I can regret it.

And I can do the work to make sure it does not continue.

The truth is:

I was part of a system that commodifies Black children and rewards white families for “saving” them.

I was part of a machine that offered stigma-free resources to strangers, while judging and discarding birth parents who simply needed support.

I witnessed how easily we justified permanent separation.

How the language of bonding and attachment made it sound therapeutic, even humane.

But let’s be honest. When we follow the money, it is clear who the system supports.

It’s not Black mothers.

It’s not poor families.

It’s not the people who are most at risk of losing everything.

It’s the professionals. The providers. The “helpers.”

It was me.

I have spent years wrestling with this. And now, I’m telling the truth, not to point fingers, but to take responsibility. Because I can’t ask God for forgiveness and sit quietly. I do believe He has forgiven me.

But true atonement requires more than prayer. It requires action.

My blogs, this movement, this truth-telling  - this is my atonement.

It’s the only way I know to honor the children I once failed.

If you were or are  part of the system, I invite you to join me.

Not with defensiveness.

Not with shame.

But with honesty. With humility.

With a willingness to look in the mirror and say:

I was the system, too.