Florida child welfare administrators have described Edward Bailey and Marsee Strong as loving parents who deserve to get their children back after a brief stint in foster care that began when their 9-year-old son was found wandering the streets of North Miami Beach — naked and emaciated.

They urged prosecutors to seek the couple’s release from jail, and have told a Miami judge that the couple had not harmed their five children.

What they didn’t say: The 9-year-old at the center of the controversy has told his doctors he’s afraid to go home.

The boy’s fears came to light Wednesday at a hearing over hundreds of pages of records in the case being sought by The Miami Herald. Two weeks ago, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman ordered the Department of Children & Families to release more than 700 pages of the family’s history with the agency. DCF asked the judge to reconsider the order, a request she denied Wednesday.

The state Guardian-ad-Litem Program, which provides advocates for abused and neglected children, fought the newspaper’s request for court documents in the case, arguing the media and public could gain information about the boy’s well-being by attending open court hearings.

The judge disagreed. Anyone who understands the case “must have super powers,” she said, “because I’m sitting here, and I do not know what’s going on.”

Lederman was referring to reports from the boy’s doctors — concerns that had not been disclosed to her in court, she said — that he was afraid to return home.

“He has told his physicians two or three times that he feels safe at school, safe at the hospital, but he does not feel safe at home,” the judge said. “He did not want to go back home.”

DCF’s attorney, Christine Lopez-Acevedo, dismissed the judge’s suggestion that the agency was withholding information — and cast doubt on the suggestion that the boy was genuinely fearful.

A court-appointed psychologist has reported that the 9-year-old is not always truthful, Acevedo said.

She added: “We are not hiding anything from the court.”

Tensions between DCF and Lederman — Miami’s most veteran child-welfare judge — have flared in the case since the judge suggested during a hearing in January that the boy looked like a concentration camp survivor.

“Judge Lederman was very attentive to the television camera and made it a point to look in that direction as she held the picture of the child and stated on two occasions that he looked like he came out of Auschwitz,” Lissette Valdes-Valle, the department’s Miami spokeswoman, wrote in a Jan. 30 email to bosses.

“I was able to see the photos afterwards and do not agree with her assessment,” the spokeswoman added.

Following that hearing, DCF asked the judge to recuse herself from the case, and lost an appeal before the Third District Court of Appeal when she declined.

DCF’s deputy secretary, Pete Digre, acknowledged in a private email with other agency heads that abuse investigators did not help themselves by their performance in court that day. “We have to prepare these poor [investigators] better for court. They panic and make every policy mistake possible,” he said. “They are like lambs before the slaughter.”

Agency administrators are convinced that Strong and Bailey are good parents who need help from the state, but are capable of caring for and protecting their children. In a Feb. 22 email, regional administrator Esther Jacobo cited the opinion of a court-appointed psychologist who concluded he had seen no evidence “the mother or the father intentionally neglected” the 9-year-old.