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April 3, 2025

The dangerous myth that poverty is the cause of child abuse

Why does child abuse happen? A new public service announcement says most people think it’s a “bad parent problem,” but the ad suggests “the root causes may be different than you think.” This message from Prevent Child Abuse America goes on to explain that child abuse is the result of families’ lack of financial resources — a…

April 1, 2025

Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Dangerous Radicalism on Child Welfare

Socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has made a splash in the race for New York City mayor. A relentless social media campaign has helped him raise big dollars, despite his long-shot odds against incumbent mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani has also adopted a platform of terrible ideas. His campaign materials portray him as a Robin…

April 1, 2025

Did Maltreatment Fatalities in Texas Really Decline?

A drop in the number of children entering foster care and fatalities due to abuse in Texas is, on its face, welcome news, and some stakeholders in the well-being of children are heartened. “There have been more net positives than any negatives that show up,” Brandon Logan, executive director of the Texas nonprofit One Accord…

March 31, 2025

Putting Children First: Child Welfare Priorities for the New Administration

Event Summary On March 31, AEI hosted a discussion on child welfare priorities, moderated by AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley. Experts Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, Rachel N. Morrison of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Darcy Olsen of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, and Tom Rawlings of Child Welfare…

December 14, 2024

Why the Riskiest Situation NYC Foster Kids Can Face Is Visiting Their Birth Parents

Between 2020 and 2023, there were 2,154 cases of substantiated abuse and/or neglect of foster children in New York City. When New Yorkers read that statistic — taken from a recent City Comptroller’s audit of the Administration for Children’s Services — they might be shocked. Indeed, it might confirm their prior assumptions about how terrible foster care…

December 11, 2024

The Often Overlooked Link Between Drug Use and Family Decline

Who are the victims when it comes to “deaths of despair”? Recent research has focused on the racial makeup of these tragedies — drug overdoses, alcohol-related deaths and suicides. According to a recent study, the number of Black people and Native Americans in this category has been growing while the number of white people has…

December 9, 2024

Helping Parents to Help Kids: How to Reduce Addiction Among Families in the Child Welfare System

Event Summary On December 9, AEI hosted an event exploring innovative treatments for parental addiction, particularly within the child welfare system. Allegheny County Department of Human Services’ Alex Jutca presented on child welfare practice regarding parents with substance use disorder (SUD) in Allegheny County, where the majority of investigations and the eventual removal of children…

December 3, 2024

The ‘Fentanyl Election’ Is Over. Now What?

Was 2024 the “fentanyl election”? A recent article in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells suggests that the effect of the drug crisis on certain communities made their residents more likely to vote for Donald Trump. Perhaps this was another so-called sleeper issue. Though voters didn’t mention it like they did the economy and democracy, the issue…

November 14, 2024

The Rotting of the College Board

n 1947, the College Board opened an office in Berkeley, California. Previously, from the turn of the century onward, the organization had been administering entrance examinations for schools in the Northeast, and in 1926 it created and began using the original Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. The Board’s western expansion after World War II was…

October 14, 2024

Another Terrible Idea: Abolishing Child Welfare

The only thing surprising about Dorothy Roberts winning a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” earlier this month is that it took the organization so long to do it. Roberts, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been a darling of the critical-theory Left for her writings advocating the abolition of the child welfare…