In an era where parenting is more scrutinized than ever, the United States appears to be undergoing a subtle yet profound shift: diminishing confidence in parents’ ability to raise their children effectively. This erosion manifests across key domains—education, online safety in the digital age, and juvenile crime—where state legislatures are increasingly intervening with laws that empower government while sidelining parental accountability. Laws in states like Louisiana already provide frameworks to hold parents responsible and empower them in guiding their kids, but recent legislative trends opt for top-down controls and “solutions” that contradict evidence-based research. This approach not only undermines family autonomy but also risks long-term societal harm by relieving parents and other guardians of core duties.

Consider the digital landscape, which offers children great opportunities for learning and meaningful connections with family and friends, but also poses risks of harmful content, addictive behavior, and cyberbullying. When children experience the latter, the response of many politicians is to crack down on technology platforms and providers, even as they hear testimony about kids spending hours unsupervised on their devices with no parental controls in use. Technology companies should take steps to prevent illegal and harmful activity on their platforms, and in some cases, failure to do so warrants a response from policymakers and regulators. But do parents who give their child access to the technology bear no responsibility?

Just as parents should know where their kids are at all times, who they’re with, and what they’re doing, they should exercise the same care and responsibility when kids are online. It’s not someone else’s job, and state leaders should be careful not to give parents false hopes that anyone else—government and/or private companies—can keep their kids safe so they don’t have to be as vigilant.

Louisiana law defines child neglect broadly, encompassing a parent’s failure to provide necessary care, supervision, or resources that could impair a child’s physical, mental, or emotional well-being. This includes inadequate oversight of online activities, which could be deemed neglect if it leads to harm. Parents in Louisiana, as in most states, have the unequivocal right and responsibility to monitor their children’s internet use without consent. These provisions should theoretically empower and compel parents to take proactive roles, holding them accountable for lapses that endanger their kids.

Yet, instead of reinforcing these parental duties through public education campaigns or enforcement, states are passing more laws that don’t address parenting at all. Over a dozen states, including Louisiana, have enacted or proposed social media regulations including age-verification requirements (which apply to users of all ages, not just minors) and design principles that attempt to hold tech firms responsible for minors’ privacy and well-being. California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, for instance, mandates online services to prioritize child safety by mitigating risks from harmful content, effectively outsourcing parental oversight to algorithms and corporate compliance teams.

Federal efforts, like the Kids Online Safety Act reintroduced this year after Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise rightly expressed concerns about the bill’s far-reaching implications last year, emphasize tech over parental accountability. While these measures aim to protect youth, they dilute parental responsibility, assuming families cannot—or will not—handle digital threats without government intervention.

This pattern extends to K-12 education, where parental involvement should be paramount but is increasingly supplanted by governmental decrees. Several states have enacted education freedom or “education savings account” (ESA) programs to empower families to choose the school or program that best fits their child’s needs, but many of them are drowning in government red tape, bureaucracy, and restrictions on what parents can purchase. “Government knows best” and policies that pre-approve certain schools, curricula, assessments, educational services, and products, while excluding others, undermine the very purpose of such efforts to empower families—those who know their children better than anyone else—with abundant options to meet very diverse needs and promote healthy competition in the marketplace.

Utah, for example, just enacted new restrictions for its new ESA program before the first audit of the program was even completed, banning parents from using funds for certain expenses. Other states are considering requiring participating private schools to be accredited, allowing only state “vetted” tutoring and other service providers to participate, restricting the amount of money that can be spent on certain uses, and outright banning certain items or services from being purchased with ESA money. Instead of empowering parents, it looks like states are forcing parents to adhere to the public school model they’ve already determined isn’t the right fit for their child.

Nowhere is this abdication of parental rights and responsibilities more evident than in juvenile crime, where evidence-based research overwhelmingly points to behavioral and educational rehabilitation as the best strategy, yet states are escalating criminalization of youth to show they’re being “tough on crime” instead of enforcing and enhancing laws already on the books. Louisiana law holds parents liable for damages caused by their child’s offenses or quasi-offenses, creating a direct incentive for active supervision. Nationwide, parental responsibility laws in nearly all 50 states impose civil or criminal penalties on parents for failing to prevent foreseeable harm by their children, from property damage to serious crimes. Some cities have juvenile curfews, forcing parents and guardians to keep kids from getting into trouble at night; Baton Rouge recently announced it is considering the same. Instead of treating juveniles as young as 14 as adults and passing up the opportunity to intervene in problematic behavior early through evidence-based programming, state could strengthen policies to promote greater accountability through family interventions, aligning with research showing that effectively addressing root causes is the best way to reduce recidivism.

These legislative pivots signal a broader societal retreat from trusting and assigning parents as primary caregivers. By relying on government to raise children, we risk creating dependency on external systems while ignoring tools to strengthen families and hold parents accountable. Evidence suggests empowering parents through existing laws—via tools and supports, not mandates—yields better outcomes. Reclaiming parental trust requires reversing course: trust parents, invest in family resources, enforce responsibility statutes, and prioritize research-backed strategies over reactionary policies. Only then can we foster resilient children without eroding the family unit.