OPINION: California Built a Child Welfare System Around the CANS Tool. It Still Cannot See Siblings.

Vanessa Davis speaking at a gala.

By Vanessa Davis

President Trump’s recent Fostering the Future initiative marks one of the most significant federal efforts in decades to modernize child welfare data systems and strengthen family-based care models. It is both an opportunity and a call to responsibility. The message is unmistakable: if states want to preserve children’s connections to family—including siblings and kin—they must modernize their data systems, measure the right outcomes, and hold themselves accountable for keeping families together.

California is not exempt from that challenge. In fact, it is already in the midst of one of the most ambitious data-driven reforms in the nation. For years, California has placed the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths assessment (CANS) at the center of its child welfare practice. CANS is now required statewide. It informs placement-level decisions, Wraparound eligibility, service plans, and strengths-based rate payments. Counties are building entire care models around it. Billions of dollars in services, rates, and staffing structures now flow through a tool meant to help the state understand who a child is and what they need to heal.

To understand the magnitude of what is at stake, it is essential to understand what CANS actually does. CANS evaluates nearly every dimension of a child’s functioning. It asks about depression, anxiety, school behavior, substance use, peer conflict, trauma history, emotional regulation, cultural identity, sexual development, and behavioral patterns. It generates a profile of needs and strengths that determines what services a child receives and what level of care a placement is reimbursed for providing.

In other words, CANS is not just an assessment tool. It is a statewide engine driving funding, services, and outcomes for every child in the system. And yet, for all its complexity and influence, CANS does not track the most powerful protective factor most children in foster care have: their siblings.

California is investing heavily in a data system that documents nearly every aspect of a child’s functioning, yet it fails to capture the relationship that stabilizes placements, buffers trauma, and anchors identity. CANS includes no item asking whether siblings were separated, remain connected, or maintain consistent contact. It does not ask whether the relationship is being protected—or quietly dissolving under state supervision.

This is not a small oversight.It is the defining contradiction of California’s strengths-based model.

A tool that claims to measure a child’s strengths cannot ignore the strength most children rely on when everything else collapses. A system that bases its policy, funding, and placement decisions on that tool cannot credibly call itself relational, trauma-informed, or family-centered while refusing to see the sibling bond at all.

I cannot help but take this personally.

My family has lived the consequences of this omission for generations. My father, a Mi’kmaq child separated from his siblings after his mother died, carried a grief throughout his life that was never acknowledged, let alone repaired. I entered foster care decades later and was separated from my brother—a wound that still has not healed.

Years after I aged out, I became the resource parent to my younger siblings when their foster mother fell ill and the county began considering splitting them up. I stepped in because I remembered exactly what it felt like to lose a sibling to the system. Yet even as a resource parent, I discovered what so many kin caregivers already know: the role is nuanced, emotionally complex, and systemically unsupported.

There is no standardized training for resource parents or social workers on preserving sibling relationships. No guidance on the practical realities of nurturing these connections. No data collection on how kinship caregivers navigate the responsibility of keeping siblings together. No structural acknowledgment that siblinghood itself is a complex need—one the system has a duty to protect.

Meanwhile, the data we do have, including from counties like San Diego, show what happens when sibling relationships go unmeasured. Recent entry cohort analyses reveal significant sibling separation at removal, inconsistent contact after placement, and divergent permanency outcomes for children with siblings compared to those without. None of this is surprising. What is surprising is that the state has no required mechanism to track, analyze, or respond to these trends.

The federal initiative makes clear what must come next. If California is going to modernize its data systems, it must modernize what it chooses to measure.

A true strengths-based system cannot continue ignoring the child’s strongest source of strength. A prevention-oriented system cannot continue severing the relationship that most reliably stabilizes youth in crisis. A data-driven system cannot continue making billion-dollar decisions based on incomplete information.

Sibling connection is a complex need. CANS refuses to see it. California cannot afford that blindness any longer. If the state is serious about protecting families—if it truly intends to use data to strengthen kinship, prevent separation, and advance relational permanency—then it must build tools that measure the right things. Tools that treat siblinghood not as an afterthought but as a core protective factor. Tools that help counties track, preserve, and repair sibling bonds the same way they track mental health, education, and trauma.

California has the opportunity. The federal government has extended the invitation. What we measure determines what we protect. It is time for the state to finally measure what matters most.