This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 1st, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When state agents decide that a parent isn't doing the job of parenting well enough,

what stands in the way of those agents, taking

the children away and flipping the burden of proof onto the parents and away from the state.

Daniel Greenberg is president of the Advanced Arkansas Institute.

We spoke at the State Policy Network annual meeting about what can be done to assert that

yes, parents have rights too.

For the most part, children don't have a lot of rights that we recognize.

So we look to parents to assure that children are behaving properly, that they're not out there engaging

with the world in ways that they shouldn't.

And for whatever reason has been decided upon, we have government agencies that make sure

that parents are not overstepping some bounds in taking care of their own children or doing so in a way that society would view as awful.

Yes, well, so like so many problems this problem began in very good intentions. It

began with a series of articles by a doctor who discovered that he'd seen a number of children that

appeared to have injuries that were almost certainly created by other people.

And this set off a kind of wave of child welfare laws.

The articles appeared, I think, in the decade of the 1940s.

And by the 1960s or 1970ss you had in just about every state child abuse and neglect laws and

again this is all born with good intentions,

but some of these laws are so broad

that they culminated.

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