One of the pillars of Western civilization has been the mutual and communicative relationship between family and church. Prior to the 60s, there was very, very minimal involvement by any level of government in the disciplining and/or protection of children who had parents. There were orphanages that received some slight federal assistance to help the orphaned, and some limited social welfare programs to help the poor, and that was it.
The 60s...ah yes...the decade where the morals of America came under direct and concerted attack by the anti-Americans of all stripes, led by The Tavistock Institute in Britain, and the various Rockefeller tax-exempt "think tanks" here at home. Dr. John Coleman points out succinctly in his seminal work "The Committee of 300" the horrific influence of Tavistock-supported and funded "The Beetles" tours here in the 60s, when they passed out psychedelic drugs FREE at their concerts, helping to usher in the drug culture. The 60s was also the era when the family began to breakdown, and where "free love," the movement to eschew marriage, communal relationships, etc. all began to take their toll.
Let's face it, a lot of ex-hippies thus became thoroughly unqualified parents. People who are high a lot are not safe parents. People who lack basic morals make even worse parents. Drugs and lack of morals CHARACTERIZE the hippy movement of the 60s--along with a forgivable/lovable insistence on rejecting "the man" without ever figuring out who "the man" really was.
Prior to 1960s, children who were suffering in poor homes routinely were helped by church and neighbors without government involvement. Of course, sadly, there were some who were never helped--who fell through the cracks, as it were--but that is still the case today...fifty+ years later, and billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars later.
The current milieu of big brother family interventionism began in 1974 with the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment
Act (CAPTA). The focus of CAPTA, at least initially was on better investigating (i.e. snooping) and reporting. The act paved the way for regional centers for focusing attention on child abuse and neglect and for "demonstration projects." This is all Walter Mondale (DemonRAT) stuff. Of course, "mission creep" was already built into the process from the beginning.
(Image courtesy of arizonadailyindependent.com.)
Child abuse reporting laws and enhanced awareness of child abuse led to a quick and sudden increase in government intervention into the family structure. Something which, if it happened at all in earlier times, was always a strictly local affair. The trend became so noticeable by the late 70s that alarm bells went off everywhere and the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (AACWA) was soon passed, which was supposedly designed to curb the interventionism and to insure that the goal of intervention was to reunite and restore families as quickly as possible.
Now, of course, some parents are incorrigible, and some families, sadly, can only ever be miraculously restored, and so those cases (especially where sexual or physical abuse was manifest) began to gradually become exceptions to the goals of AACWA, and certainly families were simply taken apart to never be restored--or even lined up for any attempted restoration. Over the years, since the 1980 AACWA, more and more families are simply adjudicated (or not even adjudicated JUST ASSUMED) to be incorrigible, and the children are simply removed, never to be heard from again. AND, of course, as you might suspect, the "obvious and manifest" criteria for sexual or physical abuse began to become weaker and weaker, until now, where it is often just plain OUTRIGHT IGNORED.
In other words, there was no seminal moment when the government said, "Okay, we are going to begin seizing children without recourse." In fact, the stated goal of the original AACWA, to restore children and families, is still "on the books," and still given some lip service in many state departments of "Child Welfare." But, we all know how well that is NOT going.
"Forty years ago, child protection pioneer Vincent De Francis lamented, 'No state and no community has developed a Child Protective Service program adequate in size to meet the service needs of all reported cases of child neglect, abuse and exploitation.'" (Source: https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/insights_law_society/ChildProtectionHistory.authcheckdam.pdf, pg. 14.)
Today, I would think all patriots/conservatives and Constitutionalists would probably say. "Today there is no state or community where good parents are safe from false allegations of child neglect, abuse and exploitation." Why? BECAUSE...big government's sole goal and raison d'etre is to maintain itself and to expand it's powers. It was always inevitable that once we allowed the federal government to step into the realm that used to be strictly that of church and family, that what has happened would happen.
Now, of course, there is also the financial incentive that these "protective" agencies live with. They have a financial incentive to have children in their custody as it means more federal dollars coming their way. THIS NEEDS TO BE ELIMINATED. What we need is a revision of AACWA that has TEETH...i.e. agencies get federal money for HIGH RATES OF FAMILY RESTORATION.
Can you dig it, man? Far out.