Fostering conflict: Navigating the often frustrating proceedings in Philadelphia’s Family Court 

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When grandmother Tanesia Webb entered the chambers of Philadelphia’s Family Court Judge Daine Grey in May 2024, she faced two primary allegations: One, she’d been highly demanding toward her autistic grandchildren’s service providers, which caused delays in their treatment.

Second, she allegedly subjected one of the children to “inappropriate discipline.” 

A witness from the city’s Department of Human Services testified that Webb had allegedly kicked her grandson in the face for spilling food in an upstairs bedroom. The investigator told Judge Grey she found the accusation “valid” — industry jargon for incidents deemed worthy of deeper probing. 

As the hearing wound on, however, the accusation itself appeared suspicious.

For one thing, Webb notified workers herself of an accident, which triggered the investigation. Further, the boy — though DHS claimed she kicked him in the face — had no injury or bruise to show for it. Perhaps most strangely, the accusation itself had occurred almost three full months earlier. Under state law, investigations “shall be completed within 60 days in all cases.”

Why was no final assessment available?

The question was never asked. But after Grey invited the attorneys for both sides to make their final arguments, the discipline allegation took an unexpected turn.  “I just received an email from the administrator, who stated that the [discipline report] was just updated,” said the city’s attorney. “And they will be reflecting an invalid determination.”

Webb, it turned out, had not kicked her five-year old grandson. The city attorney, however, insisted that this didn’t alter her position. Webb’s grandkids, she said, still ought to be removed from her care. 

A judge might be expected to question a shift this drastic. Grey, in particular, might be expected to erupt. The Philadelphia Bar Association listed Grey, who declined to be interviewed for this article, as “not recommended” in last November’s judicial elections. The Inquirer also published a story that typified Grey as an outlier for the number of decisions he’s had overturned by the Pennsylvania Superior Court, his propensity to berate attorneys, child welfare staff and families and even for sending one woman to jail on a wrongful contempt charge. 

Given this history, the reversal of so important a fact hovered like a spark over a powder keg.  Grey, however, held a sidebar conversation, which leaves the how- and why- of the change out of the transcript. Then he ruled in the city’s favor anyway: Tanesia Webb would no longer be allowed to care for her grandchildren. 

What happened?

Even Webb, who was there in the courtroom, isn’t sure. She loved her grandkids, took them to therapeutic horseback riding, swimming school and therapy. “It doesn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “Those children need me.”

Some would question Grey’s decision-making. A closer look, however, reveals deeper ills: A family court system that is supposed to operate with the primary goal of keeping kids with families and kin whenever possible, yet can seem to function as adversarial — to the point that a woman can be denied her grandkids.

High ideals vs. practical frustrations

Pennsylvania Child Protective Services Law (23 Pa.C.S. Chapter 63, Child Protective Services) was established in 1975 to protect children from abuse and preserve and stabilize the family whenever appropriate. 

The Philadelphia DHS homepage states: “We work with families to safely care for children in their own home to reduce child abuse and neglect,” and even more pointedly, “The goal of foster care is to reunite children with their families.”

In practice, however, the relationship between child welfare services and families has been fraught — a problem that leading system observers have long acknowledged and tried to resolve. In fact, a 2014 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation called for a new team decision making model to defuse the “traditional agency versus family” dynamic.

In the Foundation’s vision, families and case managers should meet on a regular basis in a non-judgmental manner to make ongoing decisions about the child’s care, including medical or educational issues, come to know each other better and ease reunification or prevent separation in the first place.

Webb understood that caring for her grandchildren would be a challenge. What caught her by surprise was the system’s adversarial nature, which reared its head when her case manager’s new supervisor visited her home. 

“She said to me, first time we met, ‘Well you sure have come up in the world on their money, haven’t you?’”        

“What do you mean by that?” Webb asked.

Webb at this point had cared for her two grandchildren from birth, and for almost three years with DHS involvement as she sought adoption. She’d felt, prior to this, relatively well-supported. Certainly, no one had threatened her status as the children’s caregiver — or questioned her reasons for caring for them.

The supervisor allegedly referenced the stipends Webb received from DHS to help care for the children. “I mean this house, this furniture,” she allegedly said.

The supervisor refused to be interviewed for this story.

A conversation like the one Webb describes shouldn’t happen. Philadelphia has adopted the family team meeting model while dramatically reducing the number of kids in foster care, a development predicted by the Casey report. Holding such regular family meetings, however, doesn’t put a stop to personality conflicts or participant biases. 

“I can show you the receipts,” Webb responded. “I bought the house 10 years ago and the furniture right after that, way before I had these children,” who are now seven and eight.

“That’s what they all say,” she alleges the supervisor responded. 

“She had just met me, and she acted like she knew me,” said.

In October 2025, Webb’s attorneys Yalonda Houston and Aaron Mixon sought to secure her visitation rights, even acquiring a compelling witness: her former case manager. The worker, who requested anonymity because she still works in the child welfare industry and fears retaliation, had been the children’s case manager since birth and worked with Webb that whole time. She departed just weeks before the children were removed from Webb’s care. “You don’t see this sort of thing often,” said Houston in an interview, “but she essentially came in to testify about her supervisor, with whom she’d disagreed.”

The old case manager testified that Webb should be allowed to visit her grandchildren. Would such a disagreement between a case manager, with years of direct observation of a family, and a supervisor with almost none, yield a ruling in Webb’s favor?

At the conclusion of this hearing, however, Webb won only virtual visits and felt defeated. “I want to hug my grandchildren,” she said, “to sit with them, all those normal things.”

Numerous research studies have shown that virtual visits should only serve as a supplement to real-world interaction. Kids can be difficult to engage through a computer screen, causing child-caregiver bonding to suffer.

All too common

According to local activists, the kind of treatment Webb has received is all too commonplace.

The experience of a woman we’ll refer to only as E.C. — because she fears retaliation in her ongoing case — provides another example. In that case, the mother was keeping up with all of her court-mandated mental health therapy and parental counseling services. The only concern presented was that her son, after returning from visits with her, would proceed to act up in his foster home.

No evidence was presented that the mother was doing anything to set the boy off. The same behaviors had also been noted when the pair had visits supervised at the agency. But the city asked the family be relegated to supervised visits — a step back from reunification, which typically requires a period of unsupervised visitation first. 

Was it possible that her son acted out in his foster home because he wanted to be back with his mother? Or for any other reason?

Though E.C.’s attorney pointed out that the boy had displayed the same behavior after supervised visits, that question was never actually asked. And in fact, within the transcript there’s no sign that anyone had investigated why the boy was acting out when he returned to his foster home. Still, the judge ruled in the city’s favor. 

Reunification was set back by a matter of at least three months, say city dependency attorneys — without any justifiable basis and no significant fight from the parent’s attorney. 

In another case handled by Houston, a client suffered from postpartum depression and her house was in need of a deep cleaning. She’d let dishes stack up. The only thing she could summon energy for was her child, who was in perfect health. But there was no talk of bringing in a cleaning service and helping mom with therapy. Instead, the child was swept into foster care. Months passed before mom could prove herself and get her child back — important time in the life of an infant. 

Fighting back

What happens when families do have access to the means to fight back?

In Philadelphia, a subset of families receive a model of representation from Community Legal Services known as holistic or interdisciplinary family defense.  This same model, also used more extensively by New York’s Center for Family Representation (NYCFR), provides parents with an attorney, social worker and a parent advocate.

Every attorney is supposed to be committed to their client, and present the most vigorous defense that they can. In Family Court, however, that typically doesn’t happen, as most attorneys are appointed by the court and function much as court officers — limiting the number of witnesses they call and evidence they enter, to protect the judge’s calendar and time.

Holistic family defense has a different approach, ensuring attorneys fight for each individual client rather than the judge. “I think what you sometimes find in family court,” says family attorney and author Meg Groff, “is that judges do have this thing about how ‘we have to move along,’ so you can’t call all of your witnesses.”

A committed attorney, says Groff, would see that as grounds for an appeal. 

In family court, however, attorneys can appear in front of the same judge, several times in a day, and to avoid conflict, some attorneys may wind up picking and choosing which clients they’re going to fight harder for.  

Both the NYCFR and Philly’s CLS follow the same core model and define success in similar terms: keeping children safely at home whenever possible, prioritizing kinship placements when separation is unavoidable, and stabilizing families by connecting them to treatment, income supports, and civil legal help across areas like housing, utilities, and public benefits. They also engage as early as possible — often during the investigation stage, before any court case is filed — because decisions made in that window about services, petitions, and removals heavily shape the trajectory of the case.

Research shows this holistic model works by safely reducing foster care and improving family outcomes. A large evaluation funded by the federal Children’s Bureau compared New York City’s interdisciplinary family defense offices (including NYCFR) to traditional solo-attorney representation.

Parents with the holistic defense teams secured their children’s safe return from foster care about 43% more often in the first year and 25% more often in the second year than similarly situated parents with solo lawyers, without any increase in repeat-maltreatment of children; children in the holistic-defense group also spent significantly fewer days in foster care overall. CLS reports similar statistical success, including an increase in kinship placements when parents are separated from their children — a valuable way of keeping family bonds intact.

One of Webb’s current attorneys, Houston, worked in CLS’s holistic defense system before starting her own practice — and may represent Webb’s last, best shot at getting her grandkids back. 

The attorneys’ plans include calling several witnesses — five of them professionals in the child welfare system who had worked on her case — that Webb had identified but who were never called to testify by her previous attorney.

One potential witness, Michelle Faison, who runs Precious Angels daycare in Ogontz, came to court last winter in hopes of testifying. “I was going to say, she brings the kids in every day, on time, hair combed, clothes are clean,” and if there were any problems in the house with inappropriate discipline, they “would have told me” and ”didn’t have any problems with talking with me.”

She was disappointed when she was never called to the stand because she has seen children from troubled homes before, where she’d developed concerns about a caregiver, but this wasn’t one of them. She wanted to testify that Webb was an appropriate caregiver. “I thought… at least let me talk to the judge.”

During that experience, Faison says Webb’s former attorney never even spoke with her.

Uncertain resolution

In Webb’s case, the primary reason that the government took her grandchildren appears to have been her disagreements with her grandchildren’s city service providers. Throughout the 1,000 pages of documentation that Webb shared, she complained a lot.

Between 2022 and June 2024, Community Behavioral Health reviewed 23 allegations made by Webb of poor service, 13 of which they validated. This means that in addition to being highly critical, Webb also appears to have been right at least 56% of the time.  

Another one of Webb’s old service providers, who also requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said “I know some people had problems with Ms. Webb, but I didn’t because I didn’t take it personal. She loves her grandchildren very much and wants what’s best for them.”

This service worker also plans to testify on Webb’s behalf at a future hearing.   

The timing of when her case might be resolved is uncertain. Judge Grey won re-election but got transferred out of family court. In the meantime, Webb tries to pick up the pieces. 

Through Houston and Mixon, Webb petitioned for adoption, to be heard in front of a new judge, beginning this month. They also filed a contempt complaint against the city for failing to provide Webb and her grandkids with court-ordered visits. 

While all this played out, Webb had serious worries. At one point her grandson was placed in a foster home where he complained that the foster parents refused to take him to school and abused him. He has since been placed back in the same foster home. Houston says a DHS investigation of that incident came back “unfounded,” but the child is still not supposed to be placed back in the same house where they made a complaint. 

Webb also feared that the system could prove stacked against her. At her first hearing this month, before a new judge, DHS presented new testimony that she had allegedly abused both grandchildren.

The testimony was unexpected — and came after Webb had filed for adoption.

Court documents indicate that this new investigation consisted of an interview with the child and Webb herself. Webb says she was helping him clean up and clipped him with a bracelet as she reached for food that he’d spilled. 

By the time he was interviewed, he was no longer upset. He reported no previous discipline or ongoing abuse from his grandmother. Service providers and teachers had been seeing him and his sister on a regular basis and for years while in Webb’s care, with no previous reports.