Apparently if your walls arent freshly painted, you have a half a sink load of dished and stacks of books, toys and odds and ins in places, yoru home is filthy.
And yet I've been "inspected" by CPS in Florida and in Illinois on different occassions without any problem (and my home sounds about like yours - although I try to fit my packratness into rubbermaid and cabinets). Illinois was for an in-home child care license and Florida was because my son (in first grade) had a fight with a girl where he'd allegedly poked her inappropriately and the school called me to tell me that he'd told the counselor that his biological father had sexually abused him. So, I called CPS to have him interviewed and get to the bottom of it. It turns out that he never said anything of the sort to the counselor (she'd just made it up), and the girl he'd poked identified to the CPS worker that she'd been poked in the stomach, not below, and wasn't bothered by the incident at all. (For the record, I do regret not sueing. I so would've gotten a good settlement on that because there was two weeks left of school and they changed his classroom and treated him like he'd done something horribly wrong!)
Mind you, I'm not saying Illinois and Florida are perfect CPS systems. They are not! A few years ago, Illinois DCFS made police break into a home to steal a child and ended up with the wrong child from the wrong home! A few years ago, Florida had to overhaul their entire CPS system because they'd realized that they'd lost 200,000 children!
When it comes to investigations, I think it's (1) a matter of who calls them and why they're there - if someone else has called them, I think they look for any excuse to take a child and (2) the individual cruelty of the worker. Some get on crusades to steal children from homes for the hell of it. It's a power trip and it's really, really sick.
sorry to butt in, just two cents
And yet I've been "inspected" by CPS in Florida and in Illinois on different occassions without any problem (and my home sounds about like yours - although I try to fit my packratness into rubbermaid and cabinets). Illinois was for an in-home child care license and Florida was because my son (in first grade) had a fight with a girl where he'd allegedly poked her inappropriately and the school called me to tell me that he'd told the counselor that his biological father had sexually abused him. So, I called CPS to have him interviewed and get to the bottom of it. It turns out that he never said anything of the sort to the counselor (she'd just made it up), and the girl he'd poked identified to the CPS worker that she'd been poked in the stomach, not below, and wasn't bothered by the incident at all. (For the record, I do regret not sueing. I so would've gotten a good settlement on that because there was two weeks left of school and they changed his classroom and treated him like he'd done something horribly wrong!)
Mind you, I'm not saying Illinois and Florida are perfect CPS systems. They are not! A few years ago, Illinois DCFS made police break into a home to steal a child and ended up with the wrong child from the wrong home! A few years ago, Florida had to overhaul their entire CPS system because they'd realized that they'd lost 200,000 children!
When it comes to investigations, I think it's (1) a matter of who calls them and why they're there - if someone else has called them, I think they look for any excuse to take a child and (2) the individual cruelty of the worker. Some get on crusades to steal children from homes for the hell of it. It's a power trip and it's really, really sick.