Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

Naomi Schaefer Riley. Naomi's a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she

researches child welfare and foster care, and she's a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.

She's written for City Journal quite a bit on the topic of today's discussion,

which is also the theme of her new book, No Way to Treat a Child, How the Foster Care System,

Family Courts, and racial activists are wrecking young lives. It's just out. Naomi, thanks

for joining us on the podcast again. That's great to talk to you.

The new book discusses, and this has been a theme of your city journal, as well, the state of the child welfare system in the U.S., as you see it in the book, the system is not adequately serving the interests of kids, but it's benefiting the adults who operate it.

So, you know, just to set some context, how bad are things in your view and how has the system gotten so messed up?

Well, I guess I would start with some numbers just to give people a little bit of context.

There are about 440,000 kids who are in foster care right now, like if you take a snapshot today,

about 600,000 kids who sort of come into contact and are removed from their homes during the course of the year.

There are about 3 million calls that come into authorities, child welfare hotlines,

that sort of thing, about abuse and neglect every year. And about 800,000 of those are

substantiated, meaning we have some reason to believe that there is evidence for that. That doesn't

mean that the rest of those calls are false or malicious or something, just that we don't have

enough evidence to say one way or the other. There are about 2,000 kids who die from

maltreatment every year. And I think that we are not serving these kids well. They're the most

vulnerable kids in this country. And unfortunately,

our child welfare agencies and our family courts have sort of decided that they're going to

revolve around the interests of adults rather than the interests of kids. So I think, you know,

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