This is Part I of a three-part series based on recent research by sociologist Tatevik Karapetyan, which focuses on reframing the idea of care deprivation within a family setting. Based on cases from the FAR Child Protection Center in Armenia, it identifies and names specific challenges that often go unseen and advocates for the identification of a variety of specific challenges and for earlier intervention.
“Could we have helped this child earlier?”
When you work with children and families in crisis, this painful question can linger even after successful interventions. Child protection systems are designed to respond when problems arise, such as neglect, inadequate parental care, or family crisis. At that point, social workers, courts, schools, or other institutions intervene.
However, in many cases we see at the FAR Child Protection Center in Armenia, the difficulties that brought the children to our door may have been developing for years. New research tries to reframe care deprivation in families as a process that develops over time. This may sound obvious to many onlookers, but there is a difference between that school of thought and the current definition of care deprivation, which is seen in the eyes of child protection systems as a status that is triggered by a specific event that requires our intervention. You are either care deprived and in need of intervention, or you are not. This binary choice often leaves children in precarious positions that may have been prevented. Measuring and defining elements such as the child’s extended care and support network and their legal status earlier may lead to better outcomes.
Stable families rarely slide into crisis overnight
Reliable relationships may weaken over time, or a parent may be physically present but less emotionally or practically available. Likewise, extended family connections and people who once helped fill the void may no longer be available. Financial pressure, illness, migration, violence, and unemployment are just a few of the many challenges that can pile up and eventually isolate a family that once had support.
The child may still be living in what appears to be a stable and reliable caregiving environment. No tangible event has drawn the attention of child protection services, nor have they crossed the threshold of any legal classification that requires intervention. But internally, the fabric of their social capital and those people they can depend on may be stretching thin and on the verge of tearing apart.
Recent research in Armenia by sociologist Tatevik Karapetyan highlights the need to focus on this period. Instead of viewing the loss of family care as a single event or legal status, her work frames it as a process that can begin well before a child enters the child protection system.
Karapetyan currently serves as a researcher and lecturer at Yerevan State University’s Chair of Social Work and Social Technologies and as Senior Programs Officer at the Armenian Association of Social Workers. Previously, she served as a quality assurance officer at the Fund for Armenian Relief's Mardigian Child Protection Center (CPC).
Karapetyan’s work focused on children deprived of family care using case records from CPC interviews with child protection professionals, and interviews with children themselves. Her study examined 239 family case histories from the CPC involving 321 children, alongside interviews with 10 key informants and 30 children. A quantitative analysis drew on a subset of 153 family cases involving 246 children. (Full disclosure: I was fortunate to serve as the scientific advisor on this project.)
Karapetyan’s perspective has significant implications for prevention and may help build systems and implement policies and procedures to identify issues earlier, leading to better outcomes for the child and their family.
Care deprivation is a process
The study distinguishes the social process of care deprivation from the outcome of family care deprivation. It's the difference between a dynamic, ongoing process and a static condition. In Karapetyan's model, key relationships may weaken, become distorted, disintegrate, and eventually rupture well before they gain the attention of child-protection services.
That distinction matters because child-protection systems function on specific categories and the criteria that define them. Formal decisions often depend on defined categories and thresholds, which may not fully capture the gradual changes in a child’s everyday care. A child either meets a threshold for intervention or does not; a child remains with a family or enters an alternative form of care.
While these categories are operationally and functionally necessary, they can downplay what occurred before a family crosses these thresholds. When we focus only on outcomes, it is easy to overlook the deterioration that led to them.
This raises a new question for social workers everywhere and others involved in child protection. What if the best opportunity to protect some children occurs before they officially need protection?
Moving child protection upstream
By viewing care deprivation as a process rather than a sudden event, there may be opportunities to strengthen families, repair relationships, restore resources, and prevent separation. We need to shift our objective from identifying more children as "at risk" to recognizing emerging vulnerabilities around a child and strengthening the relationships and resources that support their care.
Sometimes the most successful child-protection intervention is the one that prevents a child from ever entering the child protection system.
Coming Next: Part II: The Very Real Value of “Social Capital” in Determining Care Deprivation Among Children and Families