This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 3rd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The foster care system is broken, but how to fix it while preserving family unity remains a challenge.

Andrew Brown is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.

We discussed some options that give parents the security of knowing they won't lose their kids when they reach

out for help.

It strikes me that the foster care system and systems as they operate in states around the

country is a disaster that everyone knows is a disaster

and it affects the lives of tens of thousands of children and no one seems to have an idea of

substantively what to do about it that these children just pass through these

systems and you know it affects them mentally and emotionally

for the rest of their lives. Yeah, that's exactly right the Department of Health and Human Services actually released the latest foster care numbers on September 18th and they showed a sharp increase in the number of children entering the foster care system up about 15,000 from 2013.

This is the first time we've seen an increase

that sharp in nearly a decade.

And what it seems to suggest is we're possibly going through another cycle of

child welfare departments responding in much the same way that they've responded

in previous cycles. So with the child welfare system,

you tend to see this boom and bust cycle.

They'll err on the side of family preservation

and fewer removals of kids. And then eventually something will happen and they'll react to that negative

story and they'll start removing more kids and it's this back and forth between

these two extremes but it's all centered around the

...