In the fall of 2019, Judge Williams Owens came to an important realization: In child welfare cases, he had focused too much on protecting children from physical harm at home, leading him to remove them from their families. He hadn’t thought enough about the emotional harm caused by family separation, about options to improve their safety while keeping them at home. He pondered this matter one day as he was driving one day from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, two hours back to Ottumwa. He had attended a lecture in Cedar Rapids by child welfare expert Amelia Meyer, which started him on this train of thought. Meyer’s lecture had set Judge Linnea Marie Nelson Nicol of West Union, Iowa, on that same train of thought. Nicol had come away from it with the understanding that removing children from their families creates a primal wound that no social services can fix. “It really …