Description:  What if our response to struggling families was support instead of surveillance? As Guest Editor for Tampa Bay Parenting Magazine, Tewabech Genet Stewart challenges readers to become mandatory supporters rather than mandatory reporters. Drawing on more than two decades of experience inside the child welfare system, she explores how systems designed to help families can cause harm. This article is a call to rebuild the village. It challenges us to reclaim our responsibility to one another and to recognize that strong families are built through relationships, not systems. When neighbors help neighbors, faith communities support parents, and communities rally around families in difficult seasons, children are more likely to remain connected to people they love.

In this deeply personal conversation, Tewabech Genet Stewart reflects on how adopting her son from foster care fundamentally changed her understanding of the child welfare system she spent more than two decades helping lead. Building on the themes explored in her earlier conversations with Corey Best, Genet shares five new truths she learned by becoming a parent herself. She challenges the system's definition of success, questions why society funds strangers to raise children while denying support to struggling families, examines how attachment and bonding are selectively valued, and explores the cultural and spiritual consequences of separating Black children from their families and communities. Drawing from her lived experience, faith, and framework for a replacement system, Genet argues that what is commonly called the "child welfare system" often serves the interests of adults more than the well-being of children. The discussion invites listeners to imagine a different future. One rooted in truth, family preservation, community, and the belief that children belong with the people God entrusted them to. "The state punishes parents for abandonment, but celebrates itself when it does the same thing in a courthouse with cupcakes."

In this Women’s History Month feature, Tewabech Genet Stewart shares how her personal experience of family separation during Liberia’s civil war shaped her lifelong commitment to ending forcible family separation. Joined by her son Leo, she reflects on the lessons she learned through adoption and discusses her advocacy for family sovereignty and every child’s right to family. The interview explores her vision for replacing systems built on surveillance, coercion, and separation with systems that strengthen families, preserve belonging, and support children by supporting the people who love them most. Her work challenges us to rethink how we define child well-being and asks a simple but profound question: What would our systems look like if children had a voice in designing them?

In this thought-provoking presentation, Tewabech Genet Stewart traces a line from the plantation to the present day, examining how the lie of inequality became embedded within many of America's institutions. Drawing from her experience as a child welfare professional and adoptive mother,  she challenges audiences to reconsider the assumptions that continue to shape public policy and practice.  Although the presentation focuses on the child welfare system, its message extends far beyond foster care.  Genet explores how similar beliefs have influenced education, healthcare, housing, criminal justice, and other systems that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. She invites audiences to imagine what becomes possible when we build systems around human dignity, family sovereignty, and the right of children to remain connected to those they love.  This presentation is both a critique of the past and a call to create something better. Different systems may use different language, but too often they are rooted in the same underlying belief. And until we confront that foundation, we will continue reproducing the same outcomes.

Unless you change and become like little children… — Matthew 18:3 What would child welfare look like if children helped write the policies that govern their lives? In this thought-provoking reflection, Tewabech Genet Stewart challenges readers to examine the gap between what the child welfare system claims to do and what children themselves would choose. Through the eyes of a five-year-old, she explores how children view family separation, poverty, and belonging, while drawing on Jesus' teaching that we must become more like little children. The piece invites readers to imagine a system that protects a child's birthright to family, connection, and community rather than one built on fear, surveillance, and separation.

In this interview with the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York Radio Show, Tewabech Genet Stewart draws on her 22 years of experience inside the child welfare system, her experience as an adoptive mother, and her work as a family advocate to challenge conventional thinking about child safety, foster care, and adoption. She introduces her original replacement framework, a practical alternative to today's child welfare system that prioritizes family integrity, prevention, and community-based support. Through a real-world case example, she demonstrates how families could be supported differently in a system designed to strengthen families rather than separate them.

In Part Two of Torn, Tewabech Genet Stewart explores why she believes the child welfare system cannot be reformed and must be replaced. The conversation examines the financial and institutional structures that benefit from family separation, the relationship between child welfare and racial disparities, and the moral obligation to confront systems that cause harm.  Genet also introduces the principles behind her seven-step framework for building a new system. One that heals,  strengthens families,  and honors every child's right to family, community, and belonging.

In her first conversation with Corey Best, Tewabech Genet Stewart reflects on the truths she discovered during more than two decades working inside the child welfare system. Rather than focusing on individual failures or isolated cases, Genet examines the assumptions that form the foundation of the system itself. The discussion challenges widely accepted beliefs about safety, neglect, poverty, risk, and family separation while exploring why child welfare systems across the country continue to struggle despite decades of reform efforts, leadership changes, policy shifts, and new service models. Genet argues that the system's persistent failures are not a coincidence. They are the predictable result of a structure built upon faulty premises. Just as no building can stand on a cracked foundation, no system built on falsehoods can consistently produce justice, healing, or family well-being. The conversation ultimately poses a provocative question: What if the child welfare system is not failing because it is broken? What if it is failing because it was built on a lie?

In Part One of Torn, Tewabech Genet Stewart shares her journey from child welfare professional to outspoken advocate for family preservation. Drawing on 22 years of experience inside the system, she discusses what she witnessed, the racial disparities embedded in family separation, and how becoming an adoptive mother deepened her understanding of the lifelong impact of removing children from their families and communities.

In this powerful follow-up conversation with Corey Best, Tewabech Genet Stewart moves beyond critique and presents a practical blueprint for replacing the current child welfare system. Using the provocative premise that government agencies should be held to the same standards imposed on parents, Genet argues that if parental rights can be terminated for failing to meet deadlines and case plan requirements, then the institutions responsible for serving families should face consequences when they fail to meet their own legal and ethical obligations. The discussion explores the contradictions embedded within child welfare, the harms caused by family separation, and Genet's seven-step framework for a newly imagined system. Her proposal shifts power away from surveillance and coercion toward truth, healing, accountability, family preservation and economic support. Rather than asking how to reform the existing system, this conversation asks a more fundamental question: What would it look like to terminate the institution's rights and build something children would actually choose?