Child Custody Battles and Child Protective Services (CPS)

Even if you're convinced you would be a better custodial parent than the other parent, I recommend you NOT call Child Protective Services (CPS) to try to keep the other parent from seeing your child.

File a child custody modification petition in Family Court (Divorce Court) instead! (And you had better collect a lot of believable evidence.)

CPS agents, sometimes called "social workers" though they may not possess a social work degree, can wreak havoc in YOUR life, cause trauma for you and your child, and turn a bad situation into something much worse.

Here's how it happens:

1. The CPS agent takes your call, listens to your complaints, and writes them down.

2. The CPS agent goes to visit the other parent. The other parent makes complaints about YOU. The CPS agent writes those down.

3. The CPS agent now has a case file hidden from both parents that contains allegations against both of you. They can drop the case or pursue it. If you're lucky, they drop it. If you're not lucky, they take you to court and / or make you complete "services". You have to deal with the fact that your life is no longer your own; you are being told what you must do by government agents. It is very unpleasant!

4. The CPS agent may make decisions that you believe are the wrong ones. Many parents who called CPS had their children taken away and given to the other parent. Some believe that complaining parents are "alienating" children from the other parent. They believe the habit of making CPS complaints is emotionally abusive to the children involved.

5. Worse yet, the CPS agent can decide that BOTH parents are pathetic and neglectful, and take the child to a foster home.

6. While the CPS case is open the parents have to complete a "service plan" that is anything but a service to you. It is used as a way to get more evidence against you.

7. After keeping children in foster care for 15 out of 18 months the CPS agent can petition the court to terminate parental rights in a TPR hearing.

8. After the TPR, your child can be adopted out to strangers.

9. States get bonus money from the federal government for adoptions, and adoptive parents get subsidy payments if they convince a doctor that your unhappy, traumatized child needs psychotropic meds and is therefore a "special needs" child. See: Drugging Foster Children.

Frequently I get comments at my site, Fight CPS, from parents or grandparents who called CPS thinking that they would get custody. However they constantly tell me how terribly things turned out, and how much they regret their decision to make that call.

Mainly it is the children who will suffer forever because their parents couldn't get along.

Over the course of my years as a CPS victim advocate, I've met and talked to many caseworkers online and off. Whenever the topic of parents who call CPS to complain about the other parent came up, they all had the same reaction - that it happens far too often and that the complaining parent is suspect. This is said usually in a manner that told me the CPS caseworkers didn't like or respect parents that used CPS to try to get a child custody advantage over the other parent.