The state took these children away – then used their parents’ low IQ scores to keep them apart
In the US, IQ scores are often a key factor in gauging parenting ability. Critics say the assessments are misguided and unfair – and the results can be devastating
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Abbi Gibson at home. Parents with intellectual disabilities face disproportionate scrutiny from officials. Photograph: Michael Hanson/The Guardian
The state took these children away – then used their parents’ low IQ scores to keep them apart
In the US, IQ scores are often a key factor in gauging parenting ability. Critics say the assessments are misguided and unfair – and the results can be devastating
by Britta Lokting
Wed 6 Mar 2024 10.00 EST
Last modified on Wed 6 Mar 2024 10.28 EST
Amethyst Gibson brought her son home from St Charles hospital in Bend, Oregon, five days shy of Christmas.
It was 2022 and Gibson, who goes by Abbi, was renting a room from Tina Berlin-Dungan, who owned a one-story house in a nearby town and charged her $400 a month. The two women had equipped the home with everything the baby, Dean, would need: a Pack ’n Play crib and changing station, clothes, bottles, a baby bath, baby gate, and ointments for rashes.
The next night, Berlin-Dungan and her friend Dena Singleton were hanging out on the couch with the baby while Gibson briefly stepped outside to meet her then boyfriend, Singleton’s adopted son. “And we hear pound, pound, pound on the door,” said Singleton. Through the entryway window, Berlin-Dungan saw a caseworker from the Oregon department of human services (DHS) accompanied by several police officers.
“Very quickly, we knew what they were there for,” said Berlin-Dungan.
She opened the door and the caseworker presented a court order to remove Dean from his mother.
The state took these children away – then used their parents’ low IQ scores to keep them apart
Abbi Gibson holds a photo of her son Dean. Photograph: Michael Hanson/The Guardian
Seeing the flashing lights, Gibson rushed home and started to cry. Berlin-Dungan, a retired 911 dispatcher with a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality, was surprised by what she considered a show of force. They “took him from his breastfeeding mother”, she said.
This wasn’t the first time Gibson, 25, had her children removed. The agency took away her firstborn, Seronica, in 2020 and her son Octavian after his birth in 2021.
Both times, one of the reasons given was the same: her cognitive functioning. Gibson had undergone a psychological exam at the behest of DHS that concluded her IQ was 79, results that typically indicate borderline impairment. According to DHS, she lacked the knowledge and skills to safely parent.
Those two kids had been placed in foster homes and Gibson said they were later adopted by family members. But with Dean, Gibson had taken every precaution to ensure the agency wouldn’t remove him. She started a job as a cashier at a McDonald’s, and secured the room at Berlin-Dungan’s to show that she had support and resources. She wasn’t sure who Dean’s father was, but Singleton took on a grandmotherly role. And while Gibson had struggled with depression and fear since DHS had become involved in her life, she was feeling better. She watched Grey’s Anatomy as a distraction, journaled and went to therapy.
“I was doing so good,” she said. “And then they came back in and took another child.”
Gibson is among the 1.6 million parents in the US with cognitive disabilities, a group that faces disproportionate scrutiny from child welfare agencies. About two-thirds of state codes consider intellectual disabilities a factor for termination of parental rights.
Parents with intellectual disabilities are more likely than the general population to have contact with child welfare agencies. A 2020 paper in the Maternal and Child Health Journal looked at records from Washington state and found that of the 567 children born to mothers with intellectual disability diagnoses from 1999 to 2013, over 21% were the subject of a child protective services (CPS) report within one year and over 35% within four years – higher rates than the general population, at 5.5% and 13.3%, respectively.
For decades, researchers have found that child welfare agencies lean on IQ tests to assess the parental capabilities of a person with intellectual disabilities, a deviation from the test’s original and intended use of predicting academic success.
Dr Maurice Feldman, a professor emeritus at Canada’s Brock University and a pioneer in parenting education research, says that the presence of intellectual disabilities “still drives many decisions to remove a child if it’s known the parents are slow learners and have low IQ”.
A 2016 paper co-authored by Feldman looked at 42 termination cases and found that 86% discussed and referenced IQ scores. Another study, published by the psychologists Marc J Ackerman, a founding member of the Wisconsin School of Professional Psychology, and Tracy Pritzl in 2011, surveyed 213 child custody evaluators and found that 65% used intelligence and personality tests, and that only 3.7 hours out of the 46 hours of each evaluation were spent on observing the child and parent.
Feldman is troubled by the use of those tests to appraise parenting fitness. “IQ tests are not parenting measures,” said Feldman, whose groundbreaking work in the 1980s showed that with positive feedback, parents with intellectual disabilities can hone their parenting skills.
Traci LaLiberte, University of MinnesotaSociety focuses on the disability rather than what is being demonstrated
Psychological evaluations, which typically include IQ tests, can be issued at the request of DHS by a judge if a parent isn’t willing to voluntarily participate. Once they are approved, a caseworker contacts a therapist on the parents’ behalf and provides parents’ records. In these cases, DHS pays the therapist.
All of this might happen against a parent’s wishes. “People who have gotten into trouble with CPS are not dying to get a psych eval,” said Dr Eric Morrell, the psychologist who conducted Gibson’s evaluation and typically receives around $1,600.
Sometimes, CPS hears of these cases through anonymous calls or tips to a hotline. Other times, a police officer or hospital staff might alert DHS.
In 2019, the US health department’s civil rights office opened an investigation into DHS to address disability discrimination. Yet cases like Gibson’s and others show that the agency has continued to remove children and assess parental fitness based on intellectual, learning or developmental disabilities. (In response to emailed questions, DHS would not comment on specific cases but said: “Having a disability, development or physical, or any other health need, is never on its own a safety risk to a child. A safety threat must be observable, severe, imminent, out of control and impact a vulnerable child.”)
At the heart of these cases is the complicated question of whether DHS is making determinations based on discrimination against disability, or whether the agency has a reasonable suspicion of a safety threat involving a parent with a disability. Both may be possible.
In Gibson’s situation, the agency removed her daughter, Seronica, after finding feces in the house and the child, then 15 months, alone inside a garage when the temperature outside was about 90F (Gibson denied there was feces in the home but did say a roommate had moved Seronica near the garage; she said Seronica wasn’t in danger).
In addition, sealed internal documents show that the agency relied heavily on her psychological exam to argue that her intellectual capabilities and accompanying mental health diagnoses were further reasons to remove Seronica, and later Octavian and Dean.
“There are people with intellectual disabilities that can parent their kids and they do a great job,” and “there are people with intellectual disabilities that absolutely cannot parent their kids,” said Traci LaLiberte, the executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota. “Just like there are parents who don’t have disabilities who can parent and those without who absolutely cannot parent.” Society, she said, focuses “on the disability rather than what is being demonstrated”.
In 2013, DHS removed Amy and Eric Ziegler’s first son, and later, their second son, in large part on the basis of the parents’ mild intellectual disabilities and IQ scores of 71 and 66, respectively.
That year, Amy awoke in pain while staying with her now husband, Eric, at his house in Redmond, Oregon. Lying in the dark, she tried not to panic. Then she felt a popping sensation.
Alarmed, she shook Eric awake. “He goes to turn on the light and look down below,” Amy recalled. “And there’s a baby.” She hadn’t known she was pregnant.