We’re back! The EPPiC Broadcast , the official podcast of the Parental Rights Foundation, launched its 13th season on Tuesday, September 8, with Albany Law School Associate Professor of Law Dale Margolin Cecka. (EPPiC stands for our motto, slightly reordered: Empowering Parents, Protecting Children .) This week, Professor Cecka and I spoke at length about the anonymous Child Protective Services (CPS) call that was used to traumatize the family of former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg earlier this summer. Cecka is an expert on the topic, having first come to the attention of the Parental Rights Foundation with an article she wrote for the Catholic University Law Review in 2015, “Abolish Anonymous Reporting to Child Abuse Hotlines.” As we discuss in the episode, today 47 states allow anonymous reports to their child abuse hotlines , where a single allegation of wrongdoing can lead to intrusion of a family’s home by eager, well-meaning child welfare investigators on a fishing expedition. As Secretary Buttigieg discovered for himself, the investigation alone can be severely traumatizing for both parents and children. Next week, my conversation is with Jim Mason , president of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) , and a former president and board chairman of the Parental Rights Foundation. In the episode, Jim speaks about the recent setback that homeschooling suffered in Connecticut , which passed a law restricting homeschool freedom, the first such “step backwards” since the modern homeschool movement began in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. He also speaks of the reasons to remain optimistic, and how homeschooling has now moved “beyond being a movement” to “an enduring American tradition.” Each episode lasts about 30 minutes and highlights one facet of life where your parental rights might be involved. As these two episodes suggest, this season will stay the course set out in the first twelve of finding and balancing experts from both sides of the political spectrum . We’ve found that this helps every listener to find someone they are comfortable with—and to be challenged by someone or something with which they are not. Most importantly, it demonstrates that, regardless of one’s political orientation, we are all in this together. Parental Rights are vital for everyone! Looking ahead, this season will include discussions on reinstating parental rights after their termination (TPR, or Termination of Parental Rights); a poll about educational freedom; a study on Hidden Foster Care across all fifty states; a new book on child welfare reform (not even out yet!); and more. We’ll look at bipartisan legislative issues from Pennsylvania to Texas to Illinois, and follow parental rights in U.S. federal courts. The season runs roughly three months, through the end of November. So, I invite you to take a listen today, and pass it on to your podcast listening friends, too. The EPPiC Broadcast may be just the parental rights coverage you and they have been looking for! Thank you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents!
In this episode, Albany Law School Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic Dale Margolin Cecka joins us to discuss anonymous reporting to Child Protective Services and the investigation involving former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his family. Dale also discusses her recent law review article, Don’t Just Ask the Kids: Toward a More Deliberate Approach to Child Advocacy , and her longstanding work examining the use of anonymous reporting in the child welfare system. The conversation explores how anonymous allegations can trigger intrusive CPS investigations, the constitutional questions raised when investigators arrive at a family’s home, and what happens when parents refuse entry or interviews. Dale also discusses how common these investigations are, whether anonymous reporting actually helps identify child abuse, what parents can do if CPS arrives at their door, and what reforms could help prevent the misuse of the child welfare system. The EPPiC Broadcast is hosted by Michael Ramey, President of the Parental Rights Foundation. Stay informed on parental rights news by signing up for email alerts at https://parentalrightsfoundation.org/get-involved/ .
Sometimes success looks like somebody else’s news article. Such was the case last week when Lauren Peace and Teghan Simonton of the Tampa Bay Times released their investigative report, “Hillsborough’s Foster Agency Celebrates Keeping Families Intact. It Separated Hundreds Off the Books.” If you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know a lot of the work of the Parental Rights Foundation happens in coalitions, and a lot of it happens behind the scenes. Part of that work was drafting a model bill with the Coalition to End Hidden Foster Care to preserve families’ rights when they’re facing the kind of separation Peace and Simonton wrote about. See, while Hillsborough, Florida, celebrates having fewer children in foster care, it turns out they’ve only lowered those numbers by sending children to live with relatives instead. The parents had no more say in it than if the children were taken to foster care, although it happens under a guise of “consent.” Parents sign the paper, but only because they’re threatened with losing their children to foster care if they don’t. And who wouldn’t choose to send their children to live with grandma or an uncle if the only other option is a stranger? But this form of “Hidden Foster Care” robs families of crucial legal safeguards. They don’t ever get their day in court. The caregivers don’t get supports that regular foster families do. And often there is no exit strategy, no path by which the kids eventually come home. All of these problems are highlighted in the Times article. They’re problems our model bill seeks to address. And they’re problems we’ve been highlighting for years, both in this email newsletter and on our EPPiC Broadcast podcast, which launches its thirteenth season on Tuesday (September 8). In fact, three of the experts quoted in the Times article have been guests on our podcast already: Listen to Andrew Brown’s episode on Child Welfare Reform bills in Texas Listen to Josh Gupta-Kagan’s Child Welfare analogy from Star Wars Listen to Shanta Trivedi’s talk on the hidden harms of family separation That these experts have been on our podcast and are also featured in the Times article is no accident. No, I don’t mean that the Times writers came to our podcast site looking for experts to quote. (I suppose they could have, but I have no evidence that they did.) But these experts, like your Parental Rights Foundation, have been working tirelessly for years to call attention to the problems of Hidden Foster Care. Just like us (and in concert with us, as it were), they have been working to change the narrative. Now, this article in The Tampa Times is the latest proof that our efforts are working. See, so much of our work in the field of child welfare reform is about shaping the narrative. When I started here, “everyone knew” that if CPS came knocking on your door, you must have done something wrong. There was shame in just being investigated. But over the last decade and a half, more and more people are waking up to the reality: five of every six CPS investigations nationwide are ultimately closed as unfounded or unsubstantiated. Five times out of six, the family that was investigated had done nothing wrong. That’s what changing the narrative looks like: it’s taking us from “everybody knows you must’ve done something wrong” to “everybody knows innocent families get investigated, too.” Only, with hidden foster care, it’s a little different. With hidden foster care, it takes a change of narrative for there to be any narrative at all. The practice is, after all, hidden. It’s off the books. And it’s off the public radar. It is a major win that a paper the size of The Tampa Times is talking about it at all. And that’s just the kind of change we’re looking for every time we invite Andrew, or Josh, or Shanta back on our podcast. Every time we talk about the problems of hidden foster care, it’s with the hope that an investigative reporter might hear something worth looking into and find it happening in their own backyard. I can’t claim that’s what happened in this case. But I can promise you we will continue to do our part, both to call attention to the problem on our podcast, and to offer solutions through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and in your state legislature. Thank you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents, and by bringing hidden foster care into the light of day.
Last week I attended the policy summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an association of conservative policy organizations, private sector organizations, and state lawmakers, to present the need to take up reform legislation. Specifically, I presented the need to replace “anonymous reporting” with “confidential reporting” to child abuse hotlines. The following is taken from…
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Ideas that take root in the United Nations have an unsettling tendency to eventually make their way into America’s courtrooms. That’s why the Parental Rights Foundation submitted a comment to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Child Privacy last month, urging respect for the privacy of the child’s family and home, and not just the…
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The second season of the Parental Rights Podcast launched Tuesday, under a different name: the EPPiC Broadcast. Launched in January of this year, the Parental Rights Podcast’s first season featured such guests as the Jennifer Pelletier family, law professor Maxine Eichner, New York City activist Joyce McMillan, and constitutional law professor William Wagner. Season one…
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