Breaking the Cycle: How Mosaic ParentHub is Working to Empower Parents and Transform the Child Welfare System
A mother shouldn’t have to go to prison to get access to education and resources to care for her children.
I still remember the day that Child Protective Services showed up at my mother’s house. I was only 10 years old at the time, and I couldn’t understand what was happening. My mother had always done her best to take care of us, but she was facing a system that didn’t seem to care about her struggles.
My grandmother gave birth to my mother when she was just 14 years old. My mother is the oldest of three sisters all born to a child. My grandmother never got the help she needed to raise children as a child, and she grew up in a community that had been experiencing generational poverty for decades. Despite the unimaginable abuse that my mother and her sisters faced being raised by a mother who was just a child and growing up in unthinkable conditions, the child welfare or any family serving system was not there for my mother and her sisters.
My mother went on to have five children of her own, beginning at the age of 19. She did her best to provide for us, but she was facing a system that seemed determined to tear our family apart. The same child welfare system that was absent in my mother’s childhood decided to show up at our door after receiving a call from my grandmother accusing my mother of "leaving her children in the house alone".
I was the same age as the so-called "latch-key kids", yet the system substantiated the claim, designated my mother "unfit", and removed her children. It was a traumatic experience for all of us, and it showed me just how broken the system was. It’s unfortunate but my mother wasn’t even offered education as a solution until she went to prison.
That experience stuck with me as I grew older, and I knew that I wanted to do something to help other parents like my mother. That’s why I created Mosaic ParentHub - a resource that helps agencies see parent needs clearly and so they can get parents the help they need without being labeled, stigmatized, or shamed. At Mosaic we are exploring how AI language models and machine learning can be used to improve family service delivery. Ultimately the ParentHub is a place where data and stories come together to create insights for how to best support parents before, during and even after a family crisis.
I know that my mother would have benefitted from a resource like Mosaic ParentHub when she was raising us. But even though she didn’t have access to that kind of support, she did the best she could. And I’m proud to say that I’m following in her footsteps - doing everything I can to help other parents who are facing the same challenges she did.
