I Stopped Being a Doctor and Became a Mother Who Couldn't Get Home
On June 5th, 2026, Dr. Rupinder K. Legha — a double board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist — stopped being Dr. Legha and became Tiana Flores.
Tiana is twenty-nine. She's Asian/Pacific Islander. She works seasonal retail jobs making five hundred dollars a week, doesn't own a car, and relies on public buses to get anywhere. She has no identification documents. She's serving probation after a shoplifting conviction that landed her fourteen months in jail — time she spent separated from her two-year-old daughter, Mia.
This wasn't an abstract case study. It was a simulation called Walking in Their Shoes: The Effects of Separation, organized by Families Inspiring Reentry & Reunification 4 Everyone — FIR4E. The woman who built it, Stephanie Jeffcoat, had her own daughter taken away and adopted out while she was in custody for a probation violation stemming from being unhoused. Ten years before that simulation, Stephanie hadn't seen her child in a decade.
"Every time I get to share my story, it helps me heal," Jeffcoat said. "By sharing, I give people hope."
The Board Game That Exposes How the System Is Rigged
The simulation space was laid out like a board game. Stations represented probation check-ins, career centers, counseling services, supervised CPS visits, parenting classes, a pawn shop, plasma donation, and a wild card booth for unexpected life challenges. Participants moved through thirty-minute rounds, racing to complete nearly ten requirements before time ran out — armed with a small supply of transit tickets and limited funds.
Legha went straight to probation first. Addressing the criminal record felt most urgent. But when she arrived, she was told she needed an ID first. She didn't have one. So she traveled to the Department of Motor Vehicles — burning through limited funds and two of her six transportation tickets just to complete a single requirement.
Then she proceeded to earn more money for housing, sitting through a five-minute simulated shift while the clock kept running. By the time she looked up, she hadn't made it to counseling, parenting classes, or housing. Worse — she hadn't visited Mia.
She is a psychiatrist. She couldn't figure out how to do this. And she had the extraordinary privilege of knowing that when the round ended, she got to go home.
Four rounds in. Never able to complete all ten tasks. The realization hit hard: the barriers families face are not proof of failure. They're the system's design.
What Mandated Reporters Are Never Taught in Their Training
Mandated reporters — doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers — are required by law to report suspected child abuse or neglect. The bar is "reasonable suspicion." Reporters don't need proof. They don't need to ask parents questions first. And in most states, they face no legal consequences for reporting someone unfairly, unjustly, or incorrectly.
Legha has sat through hours of required mandated reporter training. It never covered what happens to parents after their children are taken away.
The training emphasizes three things, and all of them are wrong:
"Report to keep kids safe." The lifelong consequences of abuse and neglect are emphasized. But the harms that come with CPS involvement — family separation as profound trauma, children in foster care facing heightened risks of abuse, investigations that close without a finding but leave fear and stigma behind — are largely ignored.
"Report to get them resources." Investigations don't guarantee food, housing, mental health care. Nationwide, one-third of child welfare parents needed mental health services but only half received them. The training presents child welfare as "protection" without naming inequities, loss of parental rights, or the trauma families endure.
"Report to avoid liability." The penalties for failing to report — loss of licensure, criminal charges — are front and center. But there are no clinical standards addressing the consequences of overreporting or misreporting. No accountability when a report tears a family apart based on poverty, not danger.
As Legha puts it: mandated reporter training teaches clinicians how to protect themselves. It doesn't teach us how to best protect families.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Sit With
More than half of Black children in the United States experience a CPS investigation before age eighteen. Most often, it's for poverty-related neglect — not abuse.
Black children are reported to CPS at nearly twice the rate of white children. Native children have the highest rates of entry into foster care. These disparities exist not because maltreatment is more common in these communities, but because poverty, housing instability, and other structural barriers are policed more heavily.
CPS investigates over three million referrals annually. Most close as unsubstantiated. But the damage doesn't disappear with a closed case.
Legha describes one family she worked with — Black, transgender parents, a twelve-year-old girl on the autism spectrum. Devoted. Attentive. Present at every appointment. During a routine checkup, the girl mentioned offhand that her sister had hit her head with a book. Her mother explained immediately: the older sister had tossed it to catch. No injury. No concern.
Months later, a school counselor filed a CPS report based on that same comment. Investigators showed up at their door.
The investigation closed without a finding. But as the father told Legha: "Because we were warned, we weren't completely caught off guard. Still — it was terrifying."
Being warned is not the same as being protected.
Mandated Supporting: A Different Way to Hold the Line
A growing movement called mandated supporting offers a fundamentally different approach: when families are struggling, the first response should be support, not surveillance.
The framework was developed by Just Making a Change for Families and has been embraced by impacted parents, legal advocates, and organizers reimagining how communities respond to family stress in equitable, antiracist, harm-reductionist ways.
Legha has begun operationalizing it in three concrete clinical practices:
First, speak openly about mandated reporting. Explain plainly what it is, who reports, how racism and poverty shape investigations, and what investigations usually involve. Be especially proactive with families who are already highly surveilled — racially minoritized, disabled, impoverished, or queer and trans parents.
Second, document in ways that protect rather than criminalize. Clinical notes shape how families are viewed by every professional who reads them — caseworkers, judges, other providers. Instead of labeling families "noncompliant" or "difficult," name the context: supportive parents who are fearful of medical procedures due to prior mistreatment in healthcare settings.
Third, exhaust supportive options first. Food programs. Childcare support. Rent assistance. Transportation vouchers. Community organizations providing direct cash aid for rent, legal expenses, and essentials — helping families stabilize without being pulled deeper into child welfare oversight.
Slowing down. Answering questions. Acknowledging prior harms. Thoughtfully explaining recommendations. Sometimes that's enough to prevent an unnecessary report.
Why Every Reporter Should Walk in Their Shoes
Stephanie Jeffcoat put it plainly: "This is what you have parents do — this huge checklist — and then you just send them off. It should be more of the social worker working with the parent to navigate those barriers, not just giving them a list. This is what you signed up for. And if you don't feel like you can do the job, then get out of the way."
Legha's conclusion is uncompromising: every mandated reporter — every physician, every social worker, every teacher — who has ever picked up a phone to call CPS should be required to spend a morning as Tiana Flores.
She fumbled. She ran out of time. She ran short of money. She didn't get to see her daughter. Then she drove home and moved on with her life.
Tiana Flores doesn't get to do the same. Neither does Stephanie Jeffcoat. Neither does the family Legha described — the one that was terrified by an investigation that closed without a finding but left them shaken anyway.
The system wasn't designed for Tiana to succeed. It wasn't designed for Stephanie to succeed. And the single report a mandated reporter files in five minutes can detonate a family's already precarious equilibrium.
Constant oversight is not the same as protection. Families doing exactly what we ask of them — reaching out for help — should not be treated as suspects.
The real question isn't whether better approaches exist. It's whether we're willing to use them.