What To Do With Kids Who Are Wards of the State

Summary: "You go into family court and it's the same experience as at the DMV, only there are children's lives on the line," says Naomi Schaefer Riley in today's conversation with Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. In today's podcast, we talk about parenting, policy, and what happens when the state gets entangled in the business of raising children. Riley is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies the foster system, adoption, and religious liberty. "There's a lot of evidence that pouring money into the system is not improving things," is a line you might hear in many Reason Podcasts, but in her work, Riley digs into the complex problem of what to do with kids who don't have parents and how to deal with the complications around religious freedom, voluntary association, private charity, drug prohibition, and welfare that arise.