I've never had problems in Minneapolis, but I've had CPS called on me in Indiana for stuff that wasn't my fault. One of our children was born with a really rare disorder, but we didn't know it at the time because he'd come out healthier than his brother who was premature. The first time they were called was because there was confusion over where I was supposed to go for his first checkup. Even though his peds' office was in one town, the hospital was in another, and he was scheduled with their clinic there for whatever reason -- plus, the scheduling was done wrong; he was supposed to be seen at two weeks, but they scheduled it for a month out. It all didn't even matter in the end because we ended up going with the clinic in the town he was born because we later found out that his pediatrician in our town wasn't even licensed to practice in the US, and no one caught that before letting him open shop.
Anyway, we started going to the other clinic and had more problems. He would drink his formula, and five minutes later, he'd have a dirty diaper. Sometimes he would have diarrhea while I was putting on a clean one. I knew something was wrong, but listened to the doctors when they said it had to be a food allergy. So we tried him on all sorts of different formulas, but they didn't work. He kept getting more and more lethargic, so we took him to the hospital. We went through his first year like that, in and out of the hospital for Failure To Thrive. His main pediatrician didn't see anything wrong with it though and kept stressing a food allergy. I asked if our son should be tested for something because surely it had to be something else. Nothing was done. Then one of the last times we took him to that clinic (we had to put him in the hospital again), one pediatrician who wasn't even our main one sat down on in my son's room with me and told me that they had to call CPS because I must be abusing him. With his chubby and healthy older brother sitting there, she dared to accuse me of not feeding my child. Finally, I'd had enough, and we took him to the ER of the area's Children's Hospital (while our main pediatrician protested, but later, he apologized and said he wished we'd waited for him to refer us). After a month of testing, we found out what his problem was and were pretty much told it can't be fixed, but at least we knew what was wrong.
He turned 10 this year, and we still have problems occasionally. He stopped growing at age 4, so he's now smaller than his 6-year-old sister. He can't do things for himself. Because he's so small, and he has an extremely high metabolism, he eats a lot and unless people know his condition, they think we starve him. Even the doctors here who are just learning of his condition (we moved to Minneapolis a year ago to get better care for him) have questioned us (something is wrong with his digestive system obviously, and it just hasn't been found out yet; his latest tests came back saying that -- besides his growth hormone level being low, which we already knew and can finally get him the shots he needs in this state -- one of his proteins is low, and all they could suggest was to feed him more, but he eats 24/7 as it is).
It would be nice if we could educate people, but unfortunately, that's difficult. People will always believe what they choose to believe, and people are competitive, so they will always think they can do a better job parenting than us parents.
