Attachment, Risk, and the Moral Governance of Families: A Critical Child Welfare Analysis of Safety and Risk Assessments In U.S

Background/Purpose: Critical scholarship suggests that institutionalized risk and safety assessments in child welfare are not politically or culturally neutral (Foucault, 1977; Featherstone, Morris, & White, 2014). Over recent decades, attachment-informed safety and risk assessments have become central to evaluating caregiving adequacy and predicting future harm in U.S. child welfare systems, particularly for infants and toddlers (Zeanah et al., 2011). These tools translate attachment theory and developmental science into standardized risk indicators that define “adequate” caregiving and authorize state intervention (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; White et al., 2020), reproducing classed, racialized, and gendered norms (Hays, 1996; Keddell, 2017). For economically marginalized and racially minoritized families, such assessments often mark the earliest and most consequential point of surveillance and separation (White et al., 2020). This calls for a critical reflection on how the standardized assessment process functions in governing families. The paper thus aims to examine how attachment-informed assessments became institutionalized within U.S. welfare policy and argues that they operate not merely as clinical tools but as technologies of moral governance aligning developmental science with economic and political projects of family regulation.

Methods: This study integrates historical institutional analysis, political economy analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Key federal legislative milestones—including the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (1980), the Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997), and the Family First Prevention Services Act (2018)—are analyzed alongside policy guidance documents and professional assessment frameworks. The analysis also focuses on how attachment-related concepts (e.g., secure attachment, developmental risk, toxic stress) are framed within policy texts and how these framings intersect with fiscal accountability measures and risk governance structures. Particular attention is given to discourses of risk, responsibility, and prevention and their role in shaping institutional authority and intervention practices.

Results: Findings reveal that attachment-informed safety and risk assessments are the outcome of historical, economic and political transformations in the governance of family life. Historically, federal mandates consolidated state authority to evaluate family life through policy shift-from early moral regulation to psychological scientization and finally to actuarial risk management. Within this institutional environment, attachment constructs became codified as measurable risk indicators. Economically, these tools were rationalized through prevention and human capital logics, translating relational vulnerability into individualized risk profiles and recasting family life as a domain of cost management. Politically, attachment-informed assessment operates as a governance technology shaped by neoliberal responsibilization and racialized regulation, defining which families are legitimate or deficient while presenting intervention as neutral, scientific, and fiscally necessary. Together, these processes convert relational and socioeconomic vulnerability into administratively manageable risk categories.

Conclusions and Implications: Attachment-informed child welfare assessments are best understood as governance technologies rather than neutral developmental instruments. Historically institutionalized, economically rationalized, and politically legitimized, these tools mobilize developmental science to justify intensified state oversight of families—particularly low-income and racially minoritized households. Greater reflexivity regarding the political uses of attachment theory is necessary to advance more equitable and family-preserving child welfare policy.