Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the 277th episode of Objectively Speaking. I'm Jag, CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have Darcy Olson, my friend, founder and CEO of the center for the Rights of Abused Children, joining us to talk about the center's mission to protect children, change laws, and inspire people to ensure every abused child has a safe and loving home. Darcy, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Oh, thanks for having me on, Jennifer. It's been a long time, so we.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Like to sometimes start with our guests origin stories. You grew up in Vermont.
Looking back, can you cite any early influences or experiences that shaped your trajectory and priorities?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Jennifer, I love that question. So I grew up in a very rural community in upstate New York and in Vermont for a few years.
And there was one point where my parents were divorced. I was living with my mom, and we had an outhouse and no outdoor plumbing, if you can believe it. And I just remember sitting five years old in this little outhouse and my little backside getting stuck in this wood and thinking, someday I have got to get out of here and do something different.
So I was always very driven and I wanted to change laws, as you know, from our shared background, and ended up going on getting a scholarship to Georgetown and so forth. But I think coming from a background where things were a bit scarce and maybe not always stable really drove me to want something better and to really want that American dream.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: So if I understand correctly, at age 11, you went door to door collecting signatures for a homemade petition to stop animal abuse. Sounds like you weren't shy. Is there a through line from that early advocacy to what you do today?
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Yes. You know, so some people, they, when you ask them what they do now and when they got the idea, they don't necessarily know, or if you talk to young people, they don't know what they want to do. I always had a sense of wanting to help other people. At that time, it was helping animals and knowing that in this country, the great thing is if you don't like the way things are, then it's up to you to change them. And that came from my parents teaching me that at an early age. And. And so it was petitioning then. And of course, my advocacy maybe has become a little bit more effective as I've grown up, but it's been in my bones. I think this is what I was meant to do.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: So you have fostered 10 children and adopted four. I can't imagine that just keeping myself together and everything I have to do sometimes seems overwhelming. So what is the secret for caring for so many children? Children while also leading a major non profit and everything that entails, traveling to speak, fundraising, the rest of it.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Well, first the, it was, it was unexpected. It was not something I intended to do, but one, one very important thing is to be ruthless, ruthlessly efficient with your time, obviously. But I think what, what keeps me going is the, that I felt inspired to become a foster parent and I thought I was going to take in teenagers. I thought most kids were delinquents. And when I went in to foster, they asked me if I would take a baby and I was very confused. And they said, we have babies sleeping right now in government office buildings and in homeless shelters downtown because of the drug epidemic. So if you could take a baby, we'd be so grateful. And I just.
Jennifer, I knew it was the right thing to do. And at every point when it felt hard or difficult for me personally, I reflected back on something more important, which is that it was much harder on the children I was helping than it would ever be on me. And so it was time to buck up and do more and do as much as I possibly could. And I'm very grateful that I pushed through those 10 kids and was able to do that and then adopt four.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: What are the ages of those children now? And can you point to anything that makes you particularly proud of the time that you were able to care for them and raise them?
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Right now they range in age. They're 14, 13, 12 and 9.
So it's very busy.
I am.
There are highs and lows, as any parent will, if they're being honest, will tell you.
Some people are like, oh my, you know, they're. My kids are such treasures. And I call mine my Four Little beasts because they're, they're a lot of work and they're children and it's our job to, to civilize them. But I am most proud that each of them has at least one interest or talent that they can pursue.
And through that they're bringing a lot of good into the world. So this Thursday, for instance, my oldest daughter is a singer and she is performing at the 100th birthday of a Holocaust survivor. And she's singing beautiful songs about that period of time.
And so she's developing her talents, but she's also sharing and uplifting people. And I'm very proud of her for making that choice.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Sounds like the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
So, you know, on this show we've had various guests come on to talk about parenting One was an author of a book that was definitely more on the side of gentle parenting and then also more free range parenting type guests.
Where does your parenting style fall on that spectrum and has it evolved since, since the time that you were handed a baby to foster?
[00:06:29] Speaker B: It's definitely evolved. When you start off, you think, I'm just going to be so peaceful and I'll be joyful and there won't be any conflict in my home and it'll be all of the things, right? You think of your own upbringing and you think all those things you didn't like and yours is gonna, you're gonna, it's gonna be better. And then you soon realize every, every child has their own personality and, and has their own needs. And one child might do really well with gentle parenting, but another child, and this is certainly the case in my home, needs much more firm discipline grounding that goes longer and feels more severe to me. And what I've done is just look at each individual and try to parent the child that I have. So, so I learned from all of these different places and things that I read and other parents and try, you know, trial and error and trial and error, and hopefully in that I've been able to figure out some of the better parenting styles that, that match what my children need to be able to become their best.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: So you and I had similar roles at the Cato Institute.
I then went on eventually to go into the private sector working for David Murdoch at Dole Food Company. You went on to lead the Goldwater Institute.
So I have visited Goldwater. I think it's a fantastic organization.
And I was also pleasantly surprised to find it was a bit of a hotbed of objectivists.
Of course, the Sandfords are one great example of that. So I can't help but ask you if you have any Ayn Rand story or read any Ayn Rand and whether her novels are ideas influenced you in any way?
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Well, yeah, yes, I've, I, I, I will delight your audience in one way by saying that in graduate school, a, a friend introduced me to the art of selfishness, if I'm getting the title correct. I remember thinking, that is so obnoxious. And then of course I read it and thought, this woman is right on. And I, I see where she's going with this.
At the same time, someone else gave me the Fountainhead and I couldn't get past 10 pages. So some people may hate me for that.
Others may say she has great ideas, you know, and it depends on her writing, but I love what she brought to our country, I love her origin story and her love of freedom was born out of having lived the opposite. And I love that about her. And where I feel that Objectivism and some forms of libertarianism and fall short is that those philosophies are really wonderful if you're 18 and you're rational and you've got a really sharp mind. But they don't answer a lot of questions about children who are orphaned or abused or whose parents really harm them. And they're supposed to be the protectors, but. But they're not. And so then what do you do? Are you just a slave until you're 18 and parents can do whatever they want? Or at what point point do you have those rights and can we step in?
And Objectivism hasn't answered those. And a lot of what I do in applied public policy is figure that out, because I believe that every single one of us has the right to life and to liberty in the pursuit of happiness.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: I think that's fair. And that's why here at the Atlas Society, we ascribe to open Objectivism, which of course is consistent with the key principles and key branches of Rand's philosophy. But also in her own words, as she acknowledged a few years before her death, she said that the job of elaborating a complete philosophical system is one that no philosopher can complete in his lifetime. There's still a lot of work to be done. And as you correctly point out, you know, there are really no or few other than a few flashback scenes, depictions of children in her literature, and not a lot that Objectivism has to say about parenting and about children and the responsibilities towards them. So I fully ascribe to what you are bringing to the table, not just from a philosophical and ideas perspective, but also from a practical one in terms of changing these laws.
Now, we mentioned the Goldwater Institute.
There you were championing the right to try, and then you went on from there to lead the center for the Rights of Abused Children. Can you tell us about that journey from your time at Goldwater to what you do now? Is there a through line connecting those two chapters of your career?
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Absolutely. And Jennifer, that through line goes all the way back to when we were at the Cato Institute in our youth and I was working on educational choice for children.
And when I went to the Goldwater Institute, one of the reasons I went there was because I wanted to get out of just doing the theoretical work and into the implementation and seeing some of these school choice programs put into into law and so when I was at the Goldwater Institute, we spearheaded the Education Savings Accounts, which are now the, have become the largest school choice program in the country. And they're universal and my kids have even used them. It's, it's really neat.
So I was able to do quite a bit that way, quite a bit for federalism and really beefing up state constitutions because as you know, the U.S. constitution provides a floor for our freedom, but states can expand freedoms beyond that and do more to protect religious freedom, for instance, or more to protect free speech.
And that's what we were doing with the right to try. And we argued that if the Supreme Court has upheld that states have, you know, the right to let you terminate your life, that they also have the right to let you fight for your life. And that is, those are some of the grounds that we built the right to try on. And ultimately I think we passed it in 35 states and then it became a federal law. And I was there when President Trump, during his first term, signed it into law so that people with terminal illnesses can access some of these investigational treatments and experimental medicines before they clear the fda. Because as you know, that is a very long and laborious process and many people die during that, you know, during, during those waits. And I realized in advocating for patients with terminal illnesses and for their freedoms at that time, that something that felt very joyful to me was being able to give a voice to those in the freedom movement who needed someone to speak on their behalfs. And when it came to terminal patients, they didn't have a lot of time. They needed to be with their families.
And I loved being able to help carry that banner.
And when I started fostering and I went into court and realized, oh, the criminally accused have a constitutional right to an attorney and the state agency is armed to the teeth with taxpayer funded attorneys. But here's this abused child with no attorney and no, no way to enforce any rights that may or may not exist on their behalf. And I thought these children need what I like to bring. And so there is a through line there. And I am advocating for them to be, to be free on a most basic level, to be able to live, to survive these horrible circumstances that they're in.
And you know, the goal is to get them from out of these really unsafe and dangerous situations of, you know, incest and horrible things we don't really need to get into, but into safer families, whether that's their own extended families or in some cases, you need a new family like my children. Did. And that's the goal, right, is you don't want them in the government system any longer than they have to be. You hope it's a transition point and they get into a wonderful, loving home. And that is the goal. And, you know, we've helped a million children at this point, so we're on our way.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: All right, we're going to talk a little bit more about that work at length. But first I would like to get to some of the audience questions that have come in so far.
Deepak Gosha asks constitutional. Well, he says constitutional rights generally apply to all people from birth as they are considered fundamental and human. That's not really a question. Okay, Alan Turner, what is the biggest barrier preventing states from placing more foster children in permanent homes?
[00:15:30] Speaker B: The biggest barrier, that's a tough one. Let me narrow it down.
Number one, many children still do not have attorneys in their cases.
So that is a problem trying to get any kind of equal justice at all. There's no one pushing to expedite the case in those cases, no one making sure that the few laws that we have for kids are being enforced and that what happens is the parents are given attorneys. And these, let's assume that these are guilty. I'm talking about guilty parents and heinous crimes.
They're trying to stretch out these cases as long as they can so their rights aren't terminated. That's what they do. That's what the state tells them to do. And so you've got this pressure to extend cases and no voice for the kids. So kids are in limbo five or six years, and by the time they're freed for adoption, they have been so traumatized that it is very hard often to find an adoptive home. So getting counsel so their rights are before the judge from the moment they've been hurt and they're taken in is really, really important. And another thing is that for every two children going into the system, there's only one family that can take them in right now. So there's a huge shortage of families.
And we, we need more. I mean, that's why I took in 10. And I get, Jen knows I was single when I was doing it. That is not ideal.
But I just, I couldn't leave children sleeping in shelters when I had room. And so getting more people to understand that these aren't delinquents, that these are children who have been abused who need loving families, sometimes for six days, sometimes six months, and sometimes forever is really, really important. So the recruitment element is another really.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Big piece what does it mean to you to say that a child has rights?
For example, they can't enforce contracts, those aren't legally binding. But from your perspective, what does that mean?
[00:17:45] Speaker B: I like to quote my friend Bob Levy, who's now the chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute, and he says children may have a diminished capacity to exercise their rights, but they do not have less rights. Right. They don't have fewer rights than the rest of us.
And so the, the challenge though is that if you don't have an attorney or if there hasn't been a Supreme Court case vindicating a particular right, say your right to, to live or not endure rape, then it's not enforced on your behalf. So, Jennifer, one thing I, I mean I'm learning as I go and I think most of your listeners will not know that it is standard operating procedure in cases of incest, proven incest. I'm not talking about like just an accusation. I'm talking about proof, due process, all of those things. The standard operating procedure is to reunify children with their abusers. And there are manuals on this of how a child, it's safe when a child now knows to speak, speak up perhaps to a grandmother or someone else.
And it's safe if the doors on the house are alarmed. And I would argue that in most of these situations, these children are not safe. They will never be safe with a pedophile in the home. And that they have a right to bodily autonomy, that you have a right to seek protection.
And we want to get that before the judge as opposed to just this default assumption that, that your parent owns you no matter, no matter the cost, no matter what they've done to you.
And there's this saying in child welfare that you hear all the time that you know, no parent should be defined by their worst moment. You know, and I, as a mother of these children, I think, you know what, sometimes you do need to be defined by your worst moment if you, you know, are raping your 8 year old.
So that's a little bit of insight into the, into the rights that we think think a child would have over their body, their autonomy, their safety, their well being that they don't have. That is that at this point takes a huge fight to get them safe.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: What would you say to those who assume that protecting children means expanding state power? How would you explain to them the distinction between protecting children and controlling them?
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think I look at like, you know, policing. I mean, you can say like abolish the police, right? That's people saying, abolish foster care. You know, I don't think that's the solution.
I think you need enough officers, right, to cover criminal areas. And then you limit the powers with transparency and rules and body cams and things of that nature.
And that's the situation in the foster care system as well.
We want to prevent as many children from having to go into that system as possible.
But ultimately there are children who have to be brought to safety and they need somewhere to go and say, it's your sister. You know, you can't just kidnap your sister's children. Right. The rule of law has to apply, and that's why you have a system. Right. Foster care is nothing but a system of laws. And one of the reasons it's so ineffective is that the laws have been poorly written or are unenforced, are or are enforced only on behalf of one party and not across the board.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: All right, we've got a question here from my modern Gault. Always good to see you.
Is there a specific reform that you believe every state should adopt immediately?
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Well, immediately would be, I would say, counsel for all children. That, that is something, you know, we, we give the criminally accused an attorney in their cases. It's a constitutional right, and we do it because their lives and liberty interests are on the line.
And in children's dependency cases, they're not just their lives are on the line, but whether they, you know, whether they see their parents ever again, whether they live with their siblings, whether they, where they go to school, every decision about a child is on the line in one of these cases. And so to not have an attorney is just a horrible oversight on our parts and is something that needs to be remedied. And we think we can get that up to the US Supreme Court and win it for children on the same grounds that we have attorneys for the criminally accused.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: So you've said that children in the foster system are often abused by the system itself. What are the fundamental failures that allow that to happen and how can a rights based framework correct them?
[00:22:41] Speaker B: One of the. So let me give you my godson. My godson went into care when he was three years old, and by the time he was adopted and I became Godmother, he was 17 and he had been placed by the state in four, 47 different homes. Okay, how does that happen?
There are a number of contributing factors. Number one, these agencies operate with almost no oversight whatsoever.
The court cases are closed, records are redacted, journalists can't see them.
So all of the normal rule of law and things that we try to bring to government agencies in general to ensure they're operating in, you know, out of the dark, in accordance with the law.
Those things in general do not exist for these agencies. And so some of the reforms that we're trying to promote are things like body cams on social workers. So if you go to a home and you're falsely accusing someone, it is on the record. At the same time, if you say that you're investigating after There have been 10 hotline calls, but you're really just sitting outside eating donuts, we're going to know that, too.
So I think the rule of law is. It's imperative. And we do not have, you know, these agencies are operating in the dark, no accountability whatsoever. And that has to change. We need to get. We need people to be able to review these court records, redact the child's name, the identifying information.
But that information needs to be released. And I'm going to just give you one point that shows you how great this is.
Most children who are killed by their parents are known to child protection authorities, about 80%. So these are not kids who are in closets we don't know about. These are kids who are in closets or going to school. And there have been reports over and over and over again, and authorities leave them to die anyway. We just had a little girl in my state, Rebecca Baptiste. She was on the radar screen from the time she was born.
She was moved all over the school, called multiple times. Lots of mandatory reporters, not, you know, not like cranky neighbors, but real bonafide reports. She had strangulation marks, all sorts of horrible things.
And investigators either never went out to her house or when they went out, reportedly didn't see anything.
And when they finally found her, you know, she didn't make it to her 11th birthday. There were signs of torture, you know, all over this, this child.
And our agency issued a statement that said, you know, we're, you know, this is really a shame, you know, but even the best system sometimes we're going to lose kids. And to this point in time, no reforms, no calls for reform, nothing.
And that's pretty standard. These kids can't fight for themselves. Their parents who have done the abusing aren't going to go to the headlines and reporters can't dig out information. So it's a real black box. And we need the rule of law and we need scrutiny of these government agencies from start to finish.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: So we had Spike Cohen on the show a couple of weeks ago. And he shared examples of how bureaucratic quotas incentivize child protective services to be overzealous in taking kids who are being abused or who they believe are being abused. When I raised that, the conversation I would be having with you, and concerns about cases of actual abuse that are being missed or ignored, he argued that both problems are actually two sides of the same coin. In other words, by incentivizing agencies to look for things like fractures in hospitals, you're diverting energies and resources away from the harder job of tracking down cases that abuse which aren't being brought or for medical care. What do you make of that argument?
[00:26:48] Speaker B: I, I have not seen this argument about quotas. I, I, I'm, I'm not sure. So it's, it's a little bit hard for me to, to, to analyze that, but I don't, I, in, in generally speaking, child welfare investigators only investigate when someone has made a report to the hotline. Most hotline reports are either teachers who see children every day or hospital workers who see things like, you know, we had a client who had been a child we helped pro bono who had been raped, and the hospital found signs of that and they were, it was just a horrible, horrible situation.
So that was reported that way There, you know, investigators aren't, they don't just walk around looking for people. They, they're going off of tips. Now, you know, sometimes the, the, the tips are not good, sometimes the information is bad. You know, the, they're not using.
We encourage them to use predictive analytics, to use AI to try to figure out which children really are at risk. And if you really do need an investigation so there's less subjectivity involved, you know, which leads sometimes to, as we've heard, there can be overrepresentation in certain neighborhoods of certain kids because of assumptions. So we're trying to make it more objective as much as possible. But in general, there are far more children, at least two times as many children who are being, you know, molested in their homes than are ever reported to child welfare or whoever get taken into the foster care system. And we, we know this because we know about what 20 and 30 year olds will say about their childhoods. And most, most kids never report incest until they're much, much older and things like that. So I think if anything, we're under protecting, but there are cases where, you know, really good parents are invested. I was investigated once because I had five of my kids in a doctor's office and one of my children roamed into one of the other doctor's offices, like in the same little hallway. And someone said that was like neglect, that I wasn't keeping an eye on my child, you know, so it was really annoying. And that's not how the laws are written. And nothing happened other than they were interviewed and investigated.
But it is a waste of resources when that happens. And that is something that needs to be addressed. But I think the bigger problem is, you know, the thousands of children who are dying, who we should be bringing to safety, like Rebecca Baptiste or the 20,000 kids a year who literally go missing off the foster care rolls. The states never search for them, rarely report on them. And then, of course, those are the kids who are sex trafficked in America because they don't have parents who are going to go looking for them. So those are some real problems that need to be remedied in a big.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: Way to the extent that laws in this country are moving toward not removing children from families until they are in, quote, unquote, imminent danger.
Talk about why this is a dangerous trend from your perspective.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: So, Jennifer, a lot of it sounds good because none of us want the state going into good homes when nothing is wrong.
You can't be like, well, that dad looked angry. And I think something's going to happen. No one wants that. But what is actually happening, where the rubber meets the road on this, is that most of the children who are brought into the system, ultimately they are there because their parents are addicted to drugs. Over 90% of these cases, the parent are parents. But usually it's a parent is on a very hard drug. Like you're talking meth, fentanyl, things of that nature. Nine out of my ten children were.
And so when they, when they're talking about that, that's really where the definition has to come in. Like, well, what is, what is the risk? And we know with kids under one that if your parent is on meth, they can't take care of you. And a lot of these children end up dying in all kinds of horrible ways.
So we love the idea of preserving families when it's truly safe.
But there's a lot of misunderstanding. People will they use that. They see that neglect category and they think, oh, that just means the child is barefoot. They're not barefoot. And there was a huge study in California done, and they found that in 99%, 99% of the neglect cases, it was more than a material deprivation. No one wants to take kids because their parents are poor. That's what, that's what welfare is for. Right? That's when people, people, civil society sets up. We give washing machines, clothes, food, banks, all of those things. The kids that are going into this system, they're coming out of crack houses, Jen. I mean if you look on the street and you see a woman who is pregnant and on drugs, where's that baby going?
That baby, most likely, if she's not in touch with her family, is going to go into the system so someone can take care and feed the baby.
I think it's really important for people to understand that it's going to be hard to bring the roles down or hard to solve this problem if we don't get after drug abuse because that is the number one contributing factor to the danger that these kids are in.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Iliacin has a question that reflects something that you and I were talking about before we went live and that is with so many hot button issues that politicians focus on, how difficult is it to convince legislators to prioritize child welfare?
[00:32:51] Speaker B: That's a great question.
What we found, to my really happy surprise, is that legislators, like any nor any human, we, we did, we hate child abuse. No. 1, everyone wants kids to be in safe homes. That's across the board. It's not a partisan thing.
And they just don't know what to do. They don't know how to fix these problems. And so when we've gone in with reforms, we've really been met with open arms. And so We've passed almost 50 laws in eight years across all kinds of states, some federal, some have been, you know, through federal executive orders and such. But we've had things signed by Democrats, things signed by Republicans.
And overall there really is an embrace of having a system where there is greater accountability, fewer child deaths, where foster care becomes the temporary safe refuge it was meant to be right. Which is just a pass through until a child can be safe either at home or with family.
So people generally agree on the goals and they just haven't known what to do. So we're really thrilled and we're thrilled at the support and the supporters who have made it possible for us to do this work.
[00:34:08] Speaker A: Well, that's very impressive, number one. But I'm curious, where do you find the opposition comes from or does that tend to dissipate once you're able to educate people about the facts?
[00:34:20] Speaker B: I think your listeners are really going to understand when I say that the biggest opposition comes from the Department of Child Safety or Child Protective Services, whatever it's called in your state because they do things the way they do things. They do them in the dark, and they like them. And they don't want anyone peeking under the hood. They don't want anyone. They don't want transparency and they don't want change, and they want to do things the way that they do them. And so we have found that most, most often the opposition comes from the people who are running the system who like it the way that it is. And then the second biggest form of opposition comes from all of those people who are making money off of the current system.
So we would say, for instance, you know, if you don't get clean in two years, you know, a child needs to be in a home where they can be fed and be loved, right? So it would be time to terminate parental rights. That's federal law.
But those people who are providing the services, like the drug services or the parenting classes, they want that to go on for five years because that's how they make money. And so they often oppose anything that makes. That shortens a child's time in the system because it means fewer services and less of a red carpet for the parents.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: All right, another interesting question here from Kingfisher. How can we strengthen the role of churches, nonprofits, or local groups in supporting kids before they enter the system? Is that even a good alternative?
[00:35:56] Speaker B: That is a great question. I love it. There's a wonderful organization called Careportal right now, and they are serving in just that function. They connect churches and organizations with families who are in need. Usually these are material items that they need, and that is very, very helpful to the. The biggest problem is the drug use. So that's really where, if you, you know, when we have a sibling or an aunt or an uncle and we know they have a drug issue, if you can help take care of the kids for a while while someone goes into rehab, you can do that before a child would enter the system. And that, and that, of course, is ideal if you can help someone to get clean. So that's wonderful. You know, preventing pedophilia, that's, that's a, that's obviously a much tougher one. But those, you know, I would look at the care portal. I really like what they're doing on the civil side. I also, you know, I stepped into the game and I fostered babies when I was single and didn't think I could possibly do that job. And I would encourage anyone listening to think about what you might be able to do yourself.
There are a hundred thousand children right now on the national waiting list to be adopted. They need a forever home.
Most of These kids over 16 have a statistical chance of basically 0 of being adopted. So maybe you give a child that last six months or a year of your church, your synagogue, your network, your neighborhood, get them into a ge, get them, help them graduate, maybe they get us. You can help them get a scholarship somewhere. Maybe they go into the army like my godson did. So I think thinking about ways that you can step in too is really, really valuable. And I will tell you that no matter who you are, whether you are old or young, have a lot of means, or just a little bit in a studio apartment, you can help a child somewhere. And if you want more information, reach out to JAG or reach out to the center for the Rights of Abused Children. And I will help get you sit. Because there are hundreds of thousands of kids right now who need someone to love them and provide safety.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Tell us about how the experience of fostering and adopting children was in your self interest, how it benefited you, how it gave your life meaning, how it made you wiser. So there's one thing to be altruistically motivated to help somebody else, but maybe talk a little bit about what the blessings are for people that decide to undertake those responsibilities.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: So. Right. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do. And I think there's a Friends episode about this. Like, can you ever really do anything altruistically because you end up feeling so good when, when you do something. And you know, right now I have four beautiful children, you know, for whom I, I am the world, right? We help them one at a time. You know, that's how we change the world, one child at a time. But for those children, I did, I changed their entire world.
And I think nothing I do will ever be as, as valuable or as precious to me as, as their love and their trust and the responsibility that I, that I have to them.
And I, I just never expected that. I didn't know half of the children went up for adoption. I just, I was just there to help, you know, I. That's it. I was just there to help.
And I would say one of the most valuable lessons that I have learned in having so many children is to really give people more grace in my day to day and to give their children more grace because we really do not know where children come from or what people have come from. And three of my kids have special learning needs, even though they've been with me a long time. And that comes from drug exposure and other things. And sometimes they'll act out and, you know, people will look, and I don't need to, I'm not going to explain, you know, but it has made me really, I think, be more open, armed to children who are different or may appear to be misbehaving and to really try to give grace and try to give love and realize that we don't, we do not know what is going on that we cannot see. And instead of being there to rush with judgment, be there with a little bit of love, support, discipline, teaching, you know, whatever it is that that child needs.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: So I've been looking forward to talking about this, and you have written about it. Last week, President Trump, along with the first lady, signed an executive order expanding resources for teens in foster care.
I'm just curious if you could break that down for us and what you think the next steps ought to be.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: Well, I am thrilled. And this was an historic first to have a president and a first lady sit together, to come together to do more for children who have been abandoned and abused. And it was a beautiful moment.
And I, I love this first lady. This was in her first term. These were the children she was focused on. And now here in the second term, there's a lot in the executive order that, that we really need to wait and see, see how it unfolds. But some of the biggest components were making sure that families who are religious or have faith of any kind can continue to practice their religions. We need those families. They constitute the bulk of families who do this foster care.
And that's really important because there have been a lot of moves to cut out families who are not politically correct and not using woke language and all of these things that we've seen coming up in this zeitgeist in the last 10 years. So, so that's very important, that any family that can provide a safe and loving home that is safe and loving, that they can help. That's how it should be. And it's okay if you're single, that's okay, too, right? Like, we want that. So the President and the first lady fought for that.
Also in this is a recommendation and I think will come with.
It will be tied to federal funding for states to get with modernizing their systems and actually use artificial intelligence to use predictive analytics so that, you know, we can tell when a phone call comes in, you immediately know, oh, my gosh, we have had six phone calls about, you know, this toddler roaming, like, literally roaming the streets in a diaper. We've got to get out there, and we've got to get out there fast. Right now, one call might go to the report or to the police, one might go to dcs. And a lot of times they're missing children and unable to help because they're so antiquated and because there has been opposition to putting anything into these formulas that would have to do with single parenting, drug use, race, any hot button. But those things really do help the workers to know which children are in danger and who we should be looking at first. So there's a lot of modernization in there and then there are a lot of programs for the older children. Now we want to help older children before they become the older children. Right. Like, like Isaac was three when he went into the system. So a lot needs to be done upstream. But for those kids that who haven't been helped, oh my goodness, they need all the help that they can get. They're 18.
Most of them, you know, most of them will not graduate from high school.
My godson couldn't order from a menu. His skills were so delayed from all those years in foster care. So it really is not reasonable for us to expect these kids can go out on 18 and make it. And that's why they're poor and they're homeless and they get pregnant and all of these horrible outcomes. So the president and the first lady said, hey, we're going to try to catch you, even if it's at the tail end. We're going to try to scholarship you. We're going to try to make sure you have housing, food, and really get a chance you've never been given. And it's a beautiful thing and I hope it works out as well as good as the intentions behind behind the executive order.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: So this is an issue that so many people want to forget and put behind them. And that is, of course, the damage done to children during COVID by these school closures, mask mandates, all of these other interventions. I would love to get your perspective looking back on not only maybe what that was like for your own family and how it made your job as a parent more challenging, but increases in abuse and neglect that you saw happening during that time and problems with a system that wasn't versatile and flexible enough to address them.
[00:45:23] Speaker B: It was really a heartbreaking time for anybody who works in this space because we know that for most children, they will be rescued when they are in schools.
That's when this sort of thing is noticed. Or they might talk to a teacher or a coach or something like that. And we knew that if they weren't getting out of the house, there were going to be fewer eyes to spot them and help protect them. They had less chance, you know, fewer chances to go to people. And we also know that as you know, when the economy goes bad and people increase their drug use and drug abuse, that it gets much worse for children. And so we did, we saw terrible, terrible increases in emergency rooms. And you know, this was everywhere from Texas to New York.
It was just an awful, awful situation.
And social workers weren't doing the visits to, into the homes. And we left, you know, a lot of children were, were left suffering and to die for, you know, when they shouldn't have been.
And I wish, you know, we, we were just a brand new organization. We were only about a year old at that time, and so we were not able to do, to do much.
And if I, if I have any regrets, I don't know that I can, can regret that we weren't older, faster, but, but I do because I wish we could have done more for those children at that time.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: So, of course, many of us in the educational choice community and libertarian community celebrate this explosion of homeschooling that grew out of school closures and also a lot of the woke indoctrination that we're seeing in public and private schools, frankly.
Any concerns at all, given that you mentioned that a lot of the abuse gets spotted in an educational institutional environment, Any concerns that homeschooling could possibly lead to, you know, less opportunities to spot this abuse? Or would you say that in general, most of these people that are opting to homeschool their children are already pretty deeply committed and conscientious parents?
[00:47:47] Speaker B: Yes. I mean, people who homeschool, I think you're right, generally are the most conscientious, wonderful parents who are working extremely hard in order to educate their children and raise them at home. I mean, it is a lot and is 24, 7.
And they're wonderful people. What we have seen though, is that really villainous people who get accused of something in the, in the public schools will then homeschool so that they can continue to do terrible things to their children. So it's not homeschoolers who do these things.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: It's.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: It's generally, you know, regular folks. And then they're like, oh, well, we go off the radar screen if we, if we homeschool.
There was a situation, I think a lot of people watch this about seven years ago of a lesbian couple who had adopted six children and drove their van with all their children in it over a cliff in California. And what they had done is moved from State to state to state. And when they would get caught in one state, they would move and then they would homeschool. And so, you know, I don't think there have been people have said, you know, does this mean we need to go like, investigate all the homeschoolers? And that's like, absolutely not.
But we do, we do want the, you know, these child abuse registries to read across state lines. So if that, you know, parent moves into another state and the child is at risk, that, that people know about that.
And that's very, very important.
But, you know, most abusers are not homeschoolers. If that answers the question in most homeschooling schoolers do not abuse that. That is not the problem. The problem is drugs, number one. And then, and then just people who, who are quite dark.
You know, when people say we're going to prevent foster care, that means you have to prevent pedophilia. And I would love to see someone have the solution for that. Right.
So I think there are always going to be kids at risk and we always have to have a system that is ready to catch them. It's just like hospitals, right? You want to prevent injury, but some kids are going to need hospitals.
And we better get that triage. Right. And they better get the care they need when they get in there. And then they better get out safely and go on to have wonderful, productive lives.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: So making these registries be traveling cross state so that people just can't pop around and escape notice. What are some other legislative or policy reforms that could help more abused children find safe and loving homes?
[00:50:21] Speaker B: We can make it easier for parents to become foster parents.
It's funny, you know, the states are really good about letting, in general, they're very good about letting a grandmother foster. But if you're me and you want to foster, you know, you have to go through six months of classes and they make sure you have the right fence and you have to lock up, I'm not kidding, your essential oils and you can't have a gun in the home. And there are all sorts of regulations that make it very difficult for people to want to foster or to want to help. And in fact, most people only foster one time and they say the reason is the way that they are treated as foster parents. So we can make the regulations have more to do with truly the safety and health and well being of the children, you know, criminal background checks, things like that, so that we have more families. And then we can also, instead of calling them resource parents and treating them just like they're an ends to a means, treating them like the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters they are. Many of these families have children like I do, and they'll be taking in children, and their children love these children, and it's a labor of love. And, you know, a simple thank you from a social worker will go a long way. So I think treating families better is a part of this solution as well.
[00:51:48] Speaker A: So, Darcy, you have been described as both a policy entrepreneur and a moral visionary. Do you think the liberty movement today needs a more moral vocabulary, not just economics and, you know, outcomes, constitutional arguments to really change people's hearts and minds?
[00:52:10] Speaker B: Well, I do.
I. And, but I would. But. But Jag, to be honest, if you had asked me this before I fostered, I might not have had the same answer. Right. I did not know what I didn't know. I didn't know anything about these children. I didn't know that we had orphan trains, you know, and that that's how we took care of kids.
So I do.
I think it's critically important, you know, on a practical level, when it comes to abused children, these children disproportionately become our homeless, fill our prisons, commit suicide. All of the societal problems that you want to talk about disproportionately come not from poor families, but from these children who have suffered so much. So there's a. There's a practical reason to care, but I think there's also a moral one. And that's, I think, what your first caller said, which is all of us have constitutional rights. And, you know, we corrected that right when the country was founded. We. This was a country where people owned people.
And we look back on that now with horror. But we know, right, that everyone has constitutional rights.
And those, those, as we've expanded those constitutional rights, or I should say vindicated or recognized them, when it comes to voting or when it comes to owning, owning yourself, those need to be. That umbrella needs to be expanded to protect children in these very vulnerable situations.
[00:53:47] Speaker A: Anything else you want to tell us about the specific work that you are doing day in and day out at time, the same center for the rights of abused children and also maybe how people can get involved and help.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: Thank you. Well, we're easy to find. We're the centerforchildren.org and I'm easy to find. Darcy Olson. And you're easy to find. So we would love anyone who's interested to join us to learn more about fostering or adoption. That's like, I'll. I will text you all night and day personally about how to do that because it's so very important.
But, but the work itself, I mean, we have pro bono attorneys fighting for constitutional rights across multiple states. Right now we are in courtrooms day in and day out. So we know what's happening, we see it, we hear it, we protect those children and then we move reforms and we have blueprints for reform that at this point could go into any state. So if you have a small coalition, if there's something you want to do, we'd love to provide you and offer you something, some of those solutions. And one more thing I'd like to say too. We didn't even get to this jag, but we've also worked hard on parental rights too. I talked about how these agencies have so much policing power that they and they under protect children, but they also every now and then will take a child who doesn't belong in that system. And the parental rights aspect, their due process is very important. Making sure that they've got good attorneys is very important. So we've worked on some laws to be more to make sure that those constitutional rights for parents are really upheld as well. So we have our eye on that. It is not anywhere near the issue that it is for children because parents rights have been upheld under the Constitution. But there are abridgments and there are some things we can do under the law to protect good parents from overzealous agents.
[00:55:39] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Darcy. This has been really eye opening, I think. Very, very special interview. So a big thank you for all you are doing and all you will continue to do.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It was wonderful to see you and.
[00:55:54] Speaker A: Thanks everyone also who joined us today for your great questions. Be sure to join us next week when Atlas Society senior scholars David Kelly and Richard Salzman. And we'll discuss Kelly's new theory on concepts and propositions. We'll see you then.
