Parental Rights Podcast Launches Twelfth Season

This week, the Parental Rights Foundation’s EPPiC Broadcast podcast launched its twelfth season with a discussion of a recent study on  “Foster Care and Child Maltreatment Mortality Rates in the US.” 

Released in late 2025, the study challenges the decades-old narrative that taking more children into foster care reduces the number of child deaths due to abuse. Two of the study’s three authors, Frank Edwards of Rutgers University and Kelley Fong of the University of California, Irvine, were my guests for this season twelve premiere. Robert Abel, a colleague of Edwards at Rutgers, was also an author on the study.

A Brief History (and Shameless Name-Dropping)

“EPPiC” stands for “Empowering Parents, Protecting Children,” which is the purpose and heartbeat of the Parental Rights Foundation. The podcast, which was launched in 2020, features two (approximately) twelve-episode seasons each year. Its twelfth season launched Tuesday at iTunes, Spotify, and the Parental Rights Foundation website.

Throughout its history, the EPPiC Broadcast has sought to feature voices from both sides of the aisle to discuss the importance and current state of parental rights. Guests have included such eminent scholars as Martin Guggenheim, Vivek Sankaran, Josh Gupta-Kagan, and Shanta Trivedi, who hail largely from the left side of the political aisle, as well as Michael Farris, Robert George, Melissa Moschella, and William Wagner from the right.

We have also hosted frontline family law practitioners from across the spectrum, including Jim Mason, Kathleen Creamer, Matt Sharp, and Judge Ernestine Gray, as well as family policy experts ranging from Emilie Kao and Andrew Brown on the right to Joyce McMillan and Angela Burton on the left.

I strive to maintain a healthy left-right balance so that in our splintered culture of “us-versus-them,” we can show that parental rights really are a common ground. People from all sides agree that parents, not bureaucrats, are in the best position to raise and protect our children.

Upcoming Episodes

In our second episode, coming March 17, I talk with Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Family Rights Campaign about the recent Supreme Court preliminary ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta, a case about secret gender transitions in California’s public schools. I’m especially excited about the timing of this one, because she and I were already scheduled to talk about two related cases; the Mirabelli decision came out just days before that conversation, giving us an amazingly timely opportunity to discuss it.

Our third episode will look at state legislation that affects the liberty of parents to homeschool, featuring Will Estrada of the Home School Legal Defense Association. (Will is also a former president of the Parental Rights Foundation and a member of our Board of Advisors.)

And episode four will feature Sharon Balmer-Cartagena, the directing attorney for child, youth, and family advocacy at Public Counsel. Sharon and I will talk about projects in California designed to reduce the number of children taken into foster care.

The rest of the season is still taking shape, but I can tell you this much: Each roughly 30-minute episode will feature another scholar, lawyer, or lived-experience expert on parental rights and family law with words to inform, educate, and encourage you in your stand to protect your children.

So let me invite you to tune in to this newest season today and share it with your family and friends.

Together, we can spread the word to educate and empower other parents to protect their children, too.