As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we still “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We also believe these rights include the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their minor children without undue government interference. As we celebrate the first 250 years, we dedicate ourselves to the preservation of this fundamental right, to secure the vital role of the family in our republic for the next 250 and beyond. Happy Anniversary, America, and Happy Independence Day.

We’ve seen and heard about it countless times before. But this time, the target was someone famous. Last week, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg shared the account of recent events in which his family was the target of a knowingly false and malicious report of child abuse. “You’ve probably heard of ‘swatting,’” Buttigieg’s Substack account begins, referring to the “dangerous kind of hoax” in which “someone anonymously calls 911 with a false report” and then waits for chaos to ensue. “Now imagine the same concept, but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team. Hadn’t thought of that? Neither had I…” But at the Parental Rights Foundation, we have. (Consider this law review article by Dale Margolin Cecka , and this one from Doriane Lambelet Coleman , for example.) We’ve seen it, heard about it, and formulated a model law that states can adopt to prevent it from happening again. So far, New York and Texas have adopted our Confidential Reporting model, which requires anyone making a report of child abuse to identify themselves first. Buttigieg and his family didn’t have that kind of protection. When a child welfare investigator and a police officer arrived at his home, he naively showed them in, surrendering his Fourth Amendment rights without a fight. When they told him his adopted children would need to sleep elsewhere that night, somewhere away from him, he complied. When they demanded that his children be brought to the agency’s offices the next day to be interviewed with no family members present, he complied with that, too. Finally, late the next day, the police and investigator sat him down again and explained—for the first time—the allegations that had been leveled against him: “An anonymous caller had contacted CPS. The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were at risk,” Buttigieg said in his Substack. “That was all.” Now, there are so many problems with this, from the sudden emergence of “imminent risk” for the children based on information from “several years ago” (it was fine for several years, but now suddenly the children are in danger?) to the fact that the whole thing is at best a second- or third-hand account. But all those problems would have been negated if only the system had required the caller to identify themselves. Had they done so, most callers would have declined to share such a far-fetched and clearly contrived “concern.” And if one had made the call anyway, he or she would themselves be under investigation by now for the false report, and likely facing jail time. Instead, the perpetrator will slink away under the veil of anonymity while Secretary Buttigieg and his family are left to clean up. “Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement,” Buttigieg again shared in his Substack, “I still worry about the harm it has done.” I have never met Mr. Buttigieg, but I am sure he and I disagree on many more issues than we agree on. He and I lead very different lives and hold many conflicting values; we are definitely on opposite ends of the proverbial boat. But the Fourth Amendment is intended to apply equally to every household . And that means his home should not have been invaded without (1) a warrant based on probable cause, (2) a credible imminent threat, or (3) his free and voluntary consent. This “threat" was years old, which discounts any chance of “imminent threat.” Instead, perhaps the government could have taken a couple more hours to get a warrant—if any judge would give them one. (And, sadly, there are bad judges out there who would have.) Instead, the police officer and the investigator used coercion and the threat of family separation to secure “consent” that is neither free nor voluntary. This violation of the Fourth Amendment should never have happened. The sad truth is that people use anonymous reports to weaponize the child protection system because they can . And if we don’t close that gap, the next story may include another of your political adversaries—or it may include one of your friends. It may even include me or you.

June 30, 2026 // Washington, DC – The United States Supreme Court on Monday granted cert to hear International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson on appeal from the Ninth Circuit. The constitutional question in the case is “[w]hether parents have standing to challenge a law or policy that deliberately displaces their decision-making role,” according to the SCOTUSblog website. “This is an important and welcome decision by the Supreme Court,” says Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus William Wagner, Vice President of the Parental Rights Foundation. “For more than a century, the Court has recognized that parents, not government officials, hold the primary responsibility and constitutional liberty to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children. When a state policy deliberately interferes with that relationship, parents should not be turned away at the courthouse door.” This case will settle a dispute between the Ninth Circuit and other circuits, as well as existing Supreme Court precedent, regarding whether parents can be denied standing when policies are adopted that threaten their right to make important decisions for their minor children. “The constitutional injury occurs when the State displaces fit parents as the rightful decisionmakers for their children,” Wagner said. “Parents do not need to wait until irreversible harm occurs before seeking judicial protection. The Constitution protects the family precisely because some liberties are too fundamental to be left to bureaucratic discretion.” The case arises from State of Washington policies allowing state actors and shelters to withhold critical information from parents when a child seeks gender-related services. “The Supreme Court’s decision to hear this case reflects the seriousness of the constitutional issues presented,” Wagner said. “A free constitutional republic must respect the family as an institution that precedes the state. Government exists to protect children by respecting the rightful role of loving and fit parents, not by secretly replacing them.” Wagner added that the Court’s review comes at a critical time. “Across the country, parents are asking whether the Constitution still protects their ability to guide, nurture, and care for their children. By agreeing to hear this case, the Supreme Court has taken an important step toward reaffirming that parental liberty remains one of our nation’s oldest and most fundamental rights.”  Media inquiries can be directed to Media@parentalrights.org .

On Monday, June 22, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed two bills touching on the termination of parental rights. Both bills now move to the Pennsylvania Senate. House Bill 133 (HB 133) would add a section to Pennsylvania law providing a pathway for the restoration of parental rights after those rights have been terminated. And House Bill 138 (HB 138) provides that parental incarceration alone shall not be grounds for the termination of parental rights. Both bills are championed by Rep. Rick Krajewski, a Democrat representing West Philadelphia. Under HB 138, an incarcerated parent can retain parental rights if their crime was not one of physical or sexual abuse against the child, and as long as they “mak[e] efforts to the extent feasible to comply with family service plan requirements and otherwise maintain a meaningful role in the child’s life during the time of incarceration.” This means a parent incarcerated for a non-violent crime doesn’t necessarily lose their rights to their children for life (nor do their children lose their rights to connection with their parents) simply due to their incarceration. Of course, the parents lose custody for the time they are in jail, but their relationship is not terminated and can be resumed when the incarcerated parent has served their time. This bill will result in fewer children needing permanent placements through the Office of Children, Youth, and Families (CYF), as many children can be returned to their parents’ care after the incarceration period. Reducing the number of family terminations is a very good thing, and the Parental Rights Foundation supports this bill to keep families together. Unlike HB 138, which aims to preserve families, HB 133 would restore families whose rights have already been terminated. As in other states with similar laws, HB 138 would only apply under certain conditions: Only a (former, rights-terminated) parent, a lawyer representing said parent, a lawyer representing the child, or the agency (CYF) can apply to the court for a restoration of parental rights; They can only do so after at least fifteen months have passed since the termination order was completed or once the child turns 17 years old; and They can only do so if either the child is still in the custody of the Agency with no petition for adoption underway, or the child has been returned to the Agency after a failed adoption. In other words, if no one else has claimed the child in the interim, their original parents can attempt to have them returned. As in other states, the restoration of parental rights once they have been terminated is an uphill climb for the parent. They have to show that the conditions which led to the termination have been significantly changed and that their child will now be safe with them again. But that is as one would expect, if the termination of parental rights was for legal cause in the first place, as the court must assume it was. (Every year, far too many families are permanently separated through the termination of parental rights, including innocent families who should never have been separated in the first place. But later courts do not have the luxury of assuming a termination was wrong; they have to assume that it was correct and make sure its reversal is safe for the children involved.) HB 133, then, will not be a silver bullet allowing parents whose rights were wrongfully terminated to retry their termination and be exonerated. But it does provide a path, albeit an arduous one, by which families can be reunited after a termination. For that reason, the Parental Rights Foundation supports HB 133, as well. (To learn more about the termination of parental rights and its impact on families, check out our EPPiC Broadcast episode with Alex Cinney and Toia Potts here. ) Both bills passed the House Appropriations Committee on Monday, and immediately went to the House Floor. HB 133 passed by a vote of 191-11, and HB 138 passed by a vote of 200-2. As a result, both bills have been submitted to the Pennsylvania Senate for its consideration. What You Can Do If you live in Pennsylvania , consider reaching out to your state senator (the one in Harrisburg, not the ones in D.C.) and urge their support of HB 133 and HB 138 when they come to the Senate for a vote. You can find your lawmaker’s contact information here. And if you don’t live in Pennsylvania , check your state’s laws, or check with your state lawmakers, to see if your state has or could use a law like HB 138 to keep families together beyond a parent’s incarceration, or a law like HB 133 to allow families to be reunited after a termination of parental rights. Together, we can bring good laws like these to additional states, preserving or restoring families all over the country. Thank you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents through these and other efforts in the legislature and in the courts.

For nearly 20 years, first as ParentalRights.org and now as the Parental Rights Foundation , we have kept you up-to-date on the rapidly changing landscape of parental rights across the country. Whether we were releasing new research, tracking legislative developments, or highlighting key parental rights issues making headlines, our goal has been to provide reliable information and analysis you can trust. Now we plan to do the very same thing in a new medium: text messages. Our regular newsletters will continue to come right to your inbox, and we can continue to send legislative alerts there, as well. But if you would like, you can now sign up to receive text messages from the Parental Rights Foundation. By subscribing, you'll receive timely alerts about significant parental rights developments, important Foundation resources, research publications, and opportunities to stay informed and engaged. Text messages will allow us to share critical updates more quickly than email when important events occur. We will not send ads. We will not blow up your phone with unwanted fluff. (And we won’t give your info to anyone else, either!) Instead, next legislative season, you can get alerts directly to your phone, complete with links you can use to take action, right there in the palm of your hand. Whether or not you sign up for this service, we will continue to update you by email just as we always have. But if you'd like to receive timely updates directly to your phone, this new service is for you! To receive these updates, simply sign up on our website today.

Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor won’t do families any good if schools continue to ignore it for want of official guidance from the federal government. That’s essentially the message we sent in a letter to the U.S. Department of Education last week. In June of 2025, the Supreme Court issued a favorable ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor , a case over whether parents have a right to opt their children out of materials in the public schools that the parents find objectionable for religious reasons. The litigants, including Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic families, argued that the Baltimore County School System violated their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children by undermining the parents’ religious instruction to their children. The Court sided with the parents. But a full year later, reports are coming in from around the country of school systems continuing the practice, pushing content on even their youngest students without concern or respect for parents’ objections. In a few places, like California, the pressure to ignore family autonomy and ride roughshod over parents’ rights comes from the state. But in most instances, these decisions are being made at the local level. And I am gratified to see parents battling at the local level to bring their own local school boards into line with constitutional parental rights. But the federal government has a key role to play in situations like this, too. A lot of education dollars come through the federal government, and those funds come with strings attached; only those states who play by the federal rules get the federal dollars. (The Parental Rights Foundation does not hold a position on whether this should be how the system works; we merely observe that this is how the system works.) And that means that states and localities alike need to be mindful of any official guidance that comes down from the Department of Education. Ignoring such guidance can result in a loss of federal funding. This is why the absence so far of federal guidance on the application of Mahmoud is so disappointing, especially from an Administration seeking to be favorable to families and to parental rights. What’s more, federal dollars should not be used to support education sources that are actively and intentionally violating fundamental, constitutionally protected rights, such as the rights of parents recognized in the Mahmoud case. “In some places, the response to the Mahmoud decision has been disappointing, at best,” says Parental Rights Foundation board chairman and constitutional law professor emeritus William Wagner. “Clear guidance from the federal government can help put these school districts back on the proper legal footing, one that respects the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.” In short, as schools and administrators seek clarity regarding parental rights and constitutional protections, we urged the Department of Education to issue guidance that those educational professionals can rely on to properly apply the principles set forth in Mahmoud . Parental rights are fundamental, Supreme Court recognized rights that deserve protection and respect. If such guidance is issued, as we hope it will be, we will let you know and celebrate the win together. Thank you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents.

On May 21, the New York Court of Appeals struck down a proposed state program to evade court oversight in providing an “alternative to formal foster care arrangements.” The case is Lawyers for Children v. OCFS . In 2022, New York’s Office for Children and Family Services launched a new program called Host Family Homes, creating a new pathway for separating families without using formal foster care. Opponents of the program, including Lawyers for Children, The Legal Aid Society of New York, and the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo Inc., argued that the legislature never authorized such a move and that the Office lacked authority to do so on its own initiative. The Parental Rights Foundation joined an amicus brief expressing concerns that the program’s absence of court oversight fails to protect families’ rights. The Host Family Homes program was announced in December of 2021 , and “the state describes the program as ‘temporarily supporting a family when a parent has made a determination that he/she is unable to care for their child’ and has made an informed agreement ‘to allow a host family to care for his or her child as a way to avert the need for more child welfare intervention’,” according to an April 2022 report from ProPublica . The problem, critics of the program argue, is that the program doesn’t include the rules and requirements for protecting children and family rights provided by the state’s existing avenues for placement. This includes existing laws allowing families to voluntarily place their children with others, as well as laws allowing the state’s agencies to take custody of children and place them in foster care. The Host Homes program provides no judicial oversight, no requirement to provide preventative services, nor any requirement to prioritize placement with kin when a child must be separated from a parent. The brief we signed onto, penned by Josh Gupta-Kagan of Columbia Law School's Family Defense Clinic, points out that “Hidden foster care is a coercive practice that strips parents of procedural rights and leads to unnecessary separations.” And for all its good intentions, “[t]he Host Family Homes regulation would create a new form of hidden foster care.” In 2025, the New York Superior Court, which is the state’s appeals court, sided with the agency in a 3-2 decision allowing the program to move forward. The two dissenting justices, though, issued a stinging opinion of their own in which they warned that “OCFS has gone rogue,” creating a program that outs children “in an administrative mousetrap with no way out.” The litigants immediately appealed to the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, which ruled unanimously (7-0) in their favor on May 21 (2026). Writing for the court, Justice Cannataro pointed out several problems with the program. “Under the program, courts need not approve placements lasting longer than 30 days, nor are they required to assess the well-being of the child if they have been left in foster care for over eight months. Because the courts are not involved, the State need not provide assigned counsel to the parents or children to advocate for them during these mandatory hearings. OCFS is likewise not required to identify known friends or relatives who might care for the child, nor offer any government-paid preventive services, before allowing parents to access host family care.” It is precisely this lack of court oversight and legal representation that concerned the Parental Rights Foundation and led us to sign on to the amicus brief. In the court’s conclusion, Cannataro added, “Respondents created the Host Family Homes program to offer parents an alternative means of temporarily placing out their children in times of difficulty. The governing law does not permit them to do so.” We are grateful for the opportunity to have weighed in on this case and gratified that the court ultimately heard our concerns and ended the state’s program. And I am grateful to each of you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents in New York and across the country.

Last month, the Parental Rights Foundation proudly announced the release of our first-ever State of Parental Rights in America (SOPRA) publication. Today, we are thrilled to bring it to the EPPiC Broadcast . EPPiC stands for “Empowering Parents, Protecting Children,” and the EPPiC Broadcast is the official podcast of the Parental Rights Foundation. Each week, I host a half-hour conversation with a scholar, lawyer, or thought leader in the realm of parental rights. This season , we have featured Kelly Fong and Frank Edwards, Vernadette Broyles, Will Estrada, Sharon Balmer-Cartagena, Alex Cinney and Toia Potts, David Kelly, Layal Bou Harfouch, Allison Green and Natalece Washington, and our new board chairman, William Wagner. Topics ranged from Fong and Edwards’ recent study on the connection between child abuse mortality rates and the number of children taken into foster care (spoiler: there is none!), to a discussion of parental rights cases then before the U.S. Supreme Court, to homeschool freedom, to the benefits of pre-petition counsel for parents, to children’s counsel in CPS cases. Now we’re finishing our twelfth season with two of the authors from this year’s SOPRA publication. May 12: Joyce McMillan The May 12 episode features Joyce McMillan, a left-leaning thought leader and parent activist, whose SOPRA article, “Common Sense Guardrails for CPS,” we unpack on the show. We discuss Joyce’s assertion that Child Protective Services, or CPS, is a carceral apparatus, not a social service system , and that as such, it should be subject to the same due process restrictions as law enforcement. Joyce also shares stories of parents caught in the system, and how recent legislative efforts in New York state are starting to move the needle in favor of keeping families free from unnecessary investigations and intrusions. Joyce is a straight shooter who turned her own tragic experience with the system into a thirty-year service to similarly-situated families. As the founder and executive director of Just Making a Change for Families ( JMAC for Families ), she has helped countless families navigate the treacherous waters of a CPS investigation while lending her voice to so many more. I am honored to have her on our Board of Advisors , and it was a privilege to speak to her for the EPPiC Broadcast . I hope you’ll take a few minutes this week to hear what she had to say. May 19: Emilie Kao Then on May 19, we’ll feature Emilie Kao, (pronounced “Gow,” rhymes with “now”) a conservative scholar and attorney, whose SOPRA article, “Preserving Childhood: Dependency, Consent, and Parental Rights in Healthcare,” fuels our conversation. Emilie shares with me how the “mature minor” doctrine arose in the twentieth century and why it should be discarded in favor of a return to the “parental presumption” that it replaced. It’s a move that would have far-reaching policy implications, but for those who support parental rights, Emilie says, it’s the right thing to do. Children, she says, are not yet ready to make such serious decisions on their own, and parents are their best and surest source of guidance. As senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy for Alliance Defending Freedom , Emilie is an eminent scholar in the area of parental rights, having professional experience at Heritage Foundation, the Office of International Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of State, and even at the United Nations in Geneva. Now we are honored to have her on our Board of Advisors . Emilie has spoken on the role of the family before the United Nations in New York and in Geneva, and before the U.S. Congress in Washington. Next week, I hope you’ll tune in to hear her unpack a bit of family policy just for us in this one-on-one conversation. It was a privilege to host her on the EPPiC Broadcast. What’s Next? After Emilie’s episode, the EPPiC Broadcast will take a break for the summer, starting work in just the next few weeks to bring you new and engaging episodes starting again in September. Please take a moment to share the EPPiC Broadcast with your friends and family who can benefit from serious discussion about the need for parental rights protection in law and policy. And consider making a donation to keep the program on the air. (Like all of the Parental Rights Foundation’s work, the EPPiC Broadcast is completely donor supported.) As always, thank you for standing with us, and with these thought leaders from both sides of the political aisle, in protecting children by empowering parents.

Pictured above: Parental Rights Foundation Vice President Patti Sullivan with January Littlejohn at a Florida event in 2025.