In recent years, DCFS throughout the nation has been targeting perfectly good parents and slamming their kids into foster care where they languish and sometimes even die without their parents. Ripping kids from their parents has to have a better process and procedure and rights for good parents. Currently the proceedings are held in secret and parents are routinely denied their court file, the state’s attorneys’ files and even their own attorney’s files.

This has to end. But until it does, listen up:

Someone threatened to report me to CPS because she heard my child screaming. The screaming was just her having a tantrum. How do I prevent her from making a report?

I knew someone in a similar situation. She spoke to an attorney immediately. The attorney advised her to take her child somewhere, such as to her own mother’s house, and stay there until her child’s pediatrician’s office opened. At that time she was to take the child directly to the pediatrician for an examination.

That’s what she did. The pediatrician wrote a letter with the date of the examination, with the fact that he had been the child’s pediatrician since whatever the date of the initial visit (in this case, since the child had been brought home from the hospital after his birth), and with a statement that there were currently no signs of abuse or neglect and had never been any signs of abuse or neglect since the child’s birth. The letter also contained information for the CPS worker to use to contact the physician.

With the physician’s statement that there had been no signs of abuse or neglect the up to and after the time the report had been made, no CPS worker would have grounds to intervene. If a CPS worker did come to the home, the parent would be able to say that a threat by a neighbor caused the parent to take the child to the pediatrician. Then the parent could give copies of the physician’s letter to both the worker and the police. This is probably the best way to get CPS to back off. It would also be a good way to get a copy of the letter into the police files. In case of further trouble, an attorney might appreciate proof from the police that the letter had been presented to CPS at the initial contact.

You can’t prevent someone from making a report, but you probably can prevent any investigation from going further than a knock on your door, and yes, you should step outside and make it clear that you will not allow anyone to enter your home without a valid reason.