Tag: Documentary

In 2015, nine-year-old Maya Kowalski developed an illness that immobilized her and left her in excruciating pain. The new Netflix documentary Take Care of Maya begins with her family’s desperate search for an answer. They visit specialist after specialist until they finally find a doctor with a diagnosis and a miracle cure; the family travels to Mexico for an experimental treatment, and Maya emerges with her life, ready to begin healing.

In a different movie, this might be the end of the story. But a tragedy is set into motion when a 2016 trip to a new hospital for a relapse of pain, when Maya is 10 years old, leads a team of doctors to decide that Maya’s mother might be guilty of medical child abuse, also known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Maya is separated from her parents, who are interrogated by doctors and police officers, and the hospital even resorts to video surveillance of Maya for evidence that she is faking her illness.

We’ve become accustomed to stories of monstrous mothers and horrific maltreatment of children, but Take Care of Maya asks if that pop psychology has led to false accusations and medical disregard for a family’s real suffering. Director Henry Roosevelt keeps a tight focus on the devastating story of Maya’s time in state custody—which ended after her mother, Beata, took her own life, writing in an email that she could no longer bear the pain of being apart from Maya and treated as a criminal—and the legal battle that ensued. Still, the documentary eventually makes the case that the Kowalskis were far from the only family to be torn apart by the child welfare system.

“At a certain point, you have to stop filming,” producer Caitlin Keating recently told Vanity Fair, noting that even Maya’s story hadn’t yet come to a conclusion. “But this is their truth, that the trial [against the children’s hospital] hasn’t happened yet. And we think that’s important to show that they are still fighting.”

Of course, the fight is too complex to fully capture in just one documentary. If you finished Take Care of Maya and are still curious about the forces that converged in that Florida children’s hospital seven years ago, these recent books, podcasts, features, and documentary series are a natural next stop.

“Bad Medicine,” USA Today (2020) and “What Happened to Maya,” New York magazine (2022)

After Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Daphne Chen wrote her first story about the Kowalski family in January 2019, other families contacted her about their own experiences with the Pinellas County child protection team and its lead child abuse pediatrician, Sally Smith. In “Bad Medicine,” a later investigation for USA Today, Chen delved deeper into other cases that Smith had overseen, illustrating the sway her medical judgments held in the county’s courtroom and hospitals, even when other experts disagreed.

In 2022, reporter Dyan Neary used a trove of new documents and interviews to tell Maya’s story more fully in New York magazine. Her story explored how Maya’s admission to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg escalated into an accusation of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and why the state doubled down on the fight against the Kowalski family even after further evidence indicated Maya’s mother was not responsible for her condition. Neary also reported that Smith and her employer in the privatized Florida child welfare system had settled their part of a suit with the Kowalskis for $2.5 million.

NBC News’ “Do No Harm” feature series and podcast (2019)

After Maya Kowalski’s story inspired Chen to investigate the system in Florida, NBC News and the Houston Chronicle released a gripping series of stories examining the child welfare system in Texas and the plights of parents mistakenly accused of abuse. By analyzing abuse reports that were later judged to be unsupported by evidence, the writers document the close links between hospitals and the agencies that often fund their child protection teams. One mother in the series made harrowing recordings of her interactions with the doctors and social workers who decided that her child’s head injury must have been caused by abuse, and her tapes form the backbone of a companion podcast about a byzantine system that seems to especially punish the parents who want to prove their innocence.

In 2020, a joint Marshall Project and Atlantic investigation examined the cooperation between doctors and the child welfare system, with a close eye on the small but influential field of child abuse pediatrics. That subspecialty has existed only since 2009, when the American Board of Pediatrics first certified doctors who had been trained in diagnosing abuse-related injuries, and now certified child abuse pediatricians work closely with prosecutors and testify in high-profile trials across the country. By examining two heartbreaking cases in which doctors dismissed potential genetic causes of health issues in children or preexisting conditions, the investigation asks whether close ties to the legal system can lead doctors to villainize parents instead of searching for the truth.

Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way by Mical Raz (2020)

In her comprehensive history of the child welfare system in the late 20th century, Mical Raz, a professor of public health and policy at the University of Rochester, illustrates how a movement that aimed to support families in need began to emphasize prosecutions and family separations. Though the book focuses on the racial and class dynamics that shaped the system as it formed, it also tells the story of the doctors who first tried to get the nation to focus on child abuse, and the policymakers who turned that rising awareness into a harmful legal strategy.

The Battle for Justina Pelletier (2022)

In this Peacock documentary, director David Metzler tells the story of 14-year-old Justina Pelletier, who was taken into state custody in 2013 after a fight between her parents and a hospital system. As in Maya Kowalski’s case, one team of doctors believed she had a rare disorder, but another had decided that her parents were fabricating or causing her symptoms. Ultimately, Pelletier spent nearly a year in a locked psychiatric ward as her parents fought the court—and promoted her case ceaselessly in the media. After she returned to her family’s care in 2014, questions still remained about the true nature of her illness and what really happened behind the scenes at the hospital. By revisiting the Pelletier family, the journalists who covered the case, and a handful of her far-flung supporters nearly a decade later, the docuseries tries to answer them.

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s by Richard Beck (2015)

Throughout Take Care of Maya, the filmmakers depict many paradoxical moments in which doctors and social workers claim to speak for Maya’s best interests while disbelieving her description of her pain and her pleas to be reunited with her family. In We Believe the Children, Beck tells a history of child protection that focuses on the group psychology of adults who come together with the best interests of children in mind—and all the ways that concern can go awry. Though the book is centered on the lurid day care abuse trials of the 1980s, Beck connects the lessons of that moment to ideas about abuse and protecting children that still ring true.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (2022)

In her best-selling novel about a dystopian reeducation program for substandard mothers, Chan hauntingly dramatizes the aftermath of a report of child neglect. Inspired by a feature about the traumatic experiences one mother faced in family court, Chan began writing about a fictional mother named Frida who, after a lapse in judgment, is sentenced to time at a facility where she must practice mothering with a robot baby under total surveillance. “After I started reading more about these issues, I learned that her story is one of many,” she later told PEN America. “The injustice I felt on that mother’s behalf, as well as my own intense ruminating on motherhood, fueled the development of Frida’s story.”