By Shamecca Brown-Granite State News Collaborative
In New Hampshire, children don’t just enter systems, they get pulled into them through delinquency cases, abuse and neglect proceedings, or CHINS (Children in Need of Services) cases.
On paper, these are different legal categories. In reality, they often reflect the same underlying conditions: trauma, instability, poverty and unmet needs, met with responses that come after the fact instead of addressing what caused them in the first place.
This isn’t just theory for me. I’ve lived parts of what it means to be misread by systems meant to “help.”
When my family first moved to New Hampshire from New York, my son experienced a major identity adjustment. In one situation, he was exposed to other children using the N-word. He responded in a way that reflected how our culture teaches us to react to racial disrespect.
Instead of that moment being understood in context, it was treated as a behavioral issue. He ended up in diversion and was required to complete anger-related programming for expressing his feelings.
That’s where the deeper issue shows up, because what was missed wasn’t just the incident, it was the context.
It wasn’t just behavior. It was identity, environment, and how Black children are often interpreted when they respond to racial harm. Instead of slowing down to understand that, the response focused on correction, anger management, compliance programs and structured interventions that never fully addressed what actually happened.
This is exactly the kind of systemic disconnect that Lisa Wolford has pointed to in her work through the Children’s Law Center of New Hampshire – that systems built to respond to behavior often fail to account for trauma, environment and lived experience. When that happens, families don’t feel understood. They feel processed.
Across New Hampshire, children and families are often funneled into systems designed to manage behavior rather than understand it. But behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s shaped by environment, stress, trauma, identity, and survival. Yet families are often expected to complete programs, anger management, counseling, compliance plans, without anyone first asking the most basic questions:
• Can this family realistically access these services?
• Do they have transportation?
• Do they have stable housing?
• Are their basic needs even being met?
When those questions go unanswered, compliance becomes unrealistic, and punishment becomes the outcome.
Breaking the cycle
In New Hampshire, a significant portion of children in foster care are placed in group homes or institutional settings – far above the national average. These placements are expensive and disruptive, often costing hundreds of dollars per day per child. But the true cost is not financial. It is relational.
Children lose connection to family, school, culture and community. And many age out of the system at 18 without stable housing, consistent support or a foundation to transition into adulthood. And then we act surprised when the cycle repeats.
The Children’s Law Center of New Hampshire works through legal representation, policy advocacy and systems training, but even their work points to a deeper truth: Real reform cannot begin in court. It has to begin before systems ever get involved.
That means investing earlier in families, expanding access to mental health care, strengthening schools and addressing poverty as a root cause, not a background factor.
Children who grow up in foster care, court involvement, or disrupted educational systems are more likely to re-enter those same systems later in life, and more likely to have families who experience them again. That is not coincidence. That is structure. And it continues when systems respond to behavior instead of cause, compliance instead of context, and punishment instead of understanding.
But the question is not whether New Hampshire’s child-serving systems need reform. The question is whether we are willing to admit they currently respond to families in ways that judge more than they understand.
Families need systems that actually see them, understand them – and respond to what is really happening beneath the surface.
Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.