For more than 450 years, European settlers in North America, and their children, somehow managed to survive without an enormous, out-of-control federally-supported behemoth bureaucracy, backed by police force and perverted courts. During that entire period, American children were far better off, far less frequently subjected to abuse and neglect, and their families nearly always put faith and family ahead of government--especially distant, non-responsive and rapacious government--when it came to matters of family, familial relations, and child rearing.
Even when the phenomenon of "street children" began to rear its head in the nation's largest cities in the 19th century, very rarely did agencies set up to deal with the problem look to federal governments for funding, family-trampling legislation, or physical force to back up their actions. Invariably, these agencies leaned on churches and private charity to assist families and the rare runaways and actually abused children that came to rely upon them were rarely seized, and permanently separated, from their families.
Prior to the 1980s the familial and governmental relationships of the people of North America--while now in flux from a values perspective-- by and large, still respected traditional institutions, such as church and families led by loving fathers. While, those factors were already under increasing attack from liberal ideologies, they still held sway to the point that no one really envisioned the massive boondoggle and bloodsucking monster that our modern "Child Protective" "Services" (CPS) has become.
The attacks on traditional institutions actually began in Germany and the Scandinavian countries in the 18th-century with the advent of something called "higher criticism." It is a misnomer, because there is no higher authority than God and His Word as revealed in Holy Scriptures, but German Rationalists (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche) and their northern allies such as Swedenborg and Kierkegaard began to substitute man's reason for God's revelation as the premier arbiter of human relations, and for re-interpreting Scripture in a "logical way."
As a result, the church's pre-eminence as the first line of defense for at-risk children beyond the family came into question, and doctrines once held immutable--such as that man should be the head of the family, and God the head of the man-- began to crumble and to be replaced with humanist philosophies.
The eugenics, feminist and socialist tendencies of the 1920s-30s began to really grow in influence (largely as a result of the ROCKEFELLER INSTIGATED AND PROMOTED "Great Depression") and as they did so, so did the size and presumed "reach" of the federal government. Alfred Kinsey (heavily funded by the Rockefellers) and his partners at Indiana University began to do to North America's sexual mores what the German rationalists had done to the church. Extremist notions of feminist power began to displace men and their authority in the home, and new types of non-Bilblical families (via divorce and new definitions of acceptable human sexual proclivites) began to emerge.
(Alfred Kinsey--Rockefeller stooge, multiple "grant" recipient, and "sex researcher." Image courtesy of CBS News.)
With the 60s came the Tavistock-Institute-induced psychedelic drug push, and many runaways began to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and simply abandon their families and all traditional notions of what "family" should be. During this same period, the real attacks on nuclear families also ratcheted up in earnest, with the "free love" movement coming into prominence, and many young people eschewing marriage altogether for more "communal" and "non-permanent" relationships, multiple concurrent partners, etc.
(Image courtesy of groovyhistory.com.)
With the family and church under siege, many more children began to suffer very real negative consequences, up to and including legitimate abuse and neglect. The same liberal milieu that had brought these changes stood prepared to bring in their prepared "solutions"...i.e. government as parent, and real parents as merely surrogate foster parents for a burgeoning nanny state hegemony.
The 1980s saw, at least within deep-state bureaucratic circles, a growing acceptance of the concept that government should not only have a role in family life, but a preeminent one. Gradually, legislation came in to existence which backed this ideology to the hilt. As a result, we now have a government that presumes to itself the "right" to break up families, often on the flimsiest of "reasons," often undocumented and rarely proven.
Once THAT Rubicon had been crossed, the "profit motive" was then easily introduced which allowed legions of big-government sympathizing "professionals" to step in and reflect that federalist over-reach in their practices (and essential lawlessness) so that, in reality, the most important element of the modern CPS milieu is self-preservation and growth of the bureaucracy itself. Literally, CPS went from providing real assistance to families to being a WRECKER OF FAMILIES and an abuser of children. Sadly, the public has been kept lulled to sleep by public statements, "laws/procedures/policies" (usually ignored,) and pronouncements by CPS and their supporters that still sound "family friendly" on the surface. Additionally, the real status of CPS--especially things like the sale of children to desperate couples, the placement of children in dangerous settings, and the actual farming out of children into the sex trade-- receives short shrift in the mainstream media, and is often coverup by CPS's own actions and compliant "courts."
I can be for "reform" rather than out right abolition now, only if it is as a prelude/half-measure on the road to that better and essential end. CPS is a proven failure and can not be effectively improved through legislation and other (sleight of hand) "reform." If CPS disappeared tomorrow, on balance, the society would be much better off, and far fewer children would be abused and in states of permanent "risk." CPS has proven it has a systemic and immutable preference for self preservation above all else, and has little-to-no respect for "the law" --until/unless when it is obvious that their agents will be drug off to prison or levied with enormous fines. CPS is also addicted to the profit motive --i.e. placement that creates a return--either from the feds or from desperate potential caregivers (or both)-- and incapable, now, of existing without it.
CPS, in the deep-state bureaucratic morass of left-leaning technocrats currently running western socities--will never be, again, actually about helping children or families, no matter what the laws/policies might say, or what a decent federal judge might occasionally pronounce against them. You can not make a pig into a princess, despite all the perfume, lipstick and silk you might apply.
Only in a drastically reformed government--reduced to it's infinitesimally smaller Constitutional essentials-- might a CPS agency actually benefit society. i.e. AFTER A MAJOR REVIVAL and RESTORIATION of proper government and moral values.
Until then, count me out.
Remember the three Fs...FATALLY-FLAWED FAILURE.