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Parents Investigated For Neglect For Letting Kids Walk Home Alone
HughPickens.com writes The WaPo reports that Danielle and Alexander Meitiv in Montgomery County Maryland say they are being investigated for neglect after letting their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter make a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. "We wouldn't have let them do it if we didn't think they were ready for it," says Danielle. The Meitivs say they believe in "free-range" parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of "helicopter" parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world. "The world is actually even safer than when I was a child, and I just want to give them the same freedom and independence that I had — basically an old-fashioned childhood," says Danielle. "I think it's absolutely critical for their development — to learn responsibility, to experience the world, to gain confidence and competency."
On December 20, Alexander agreed to let the children walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well. Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them. Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services which showed up a couple of hours later. Although Child Protective Services could not address this specific case they did point to Maryland law, which defines child neglect as failure to provide proper care and supervision of a child. "I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing," says Alexander. "We feel we're being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with."
On December 20, Alexander agreed to let the children walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well. Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them. Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services which showed up a couple of hours later. Although Child Protective Services could not address this specific case they did point to Maryland law, which defines child neglect as failure to provide proper care and supervision of a child. "I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing," says Alexander. "We feel we're being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with."
Not who or what you think they are.
All power to the Meitivs.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
The "child protection" services have all the apparent responsibilities of caring, without having to pay the price for the efforts they demand. That's why they are intrinsically biased in favor of perpertually inflating the needs of childs and the duties of caretakers... to the point of ridiculous extremes.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Think of the children! There could have been terrorists and socialists on that road, or even the big bad wolf. Any sensible parent would chip their kids and give them a phone with tracking apps hidden within...it's the only way to be safe.
... this is not
... to the long list of reasons i don't consider the US a good place to live in.
With rules like this, no wonder you have 40 year old virgins living in their parents' basements.
Either be rich and retire to raise kids or have them picked up by the cops just because you are at work.
...I ready to move out of my parents' basement.
for the COPS and Child Protective Services.
1.6
Hey Slashdot, fix your goddam markup. It took me all of 5 seconds to run a slashdot story through an HTML5 validator and see where you fucked up. If I can do that, how come you can't do that?
Oh, and BTW .. News, Nerds, Technology with this story? Obviously the glory days are over.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I remember back in the day playing miles from home in the hills up past the artillery range.
I also remember breaking my arm on such a trip, and having to push my bike home one-handed.
Not something I think Maryland CPS would have approved of, I suspect.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
How does this involve technology, science, sci-fi, or anything else in the nerd category?
Sure people might find this interesting but people find Soccer scores, weather reports, and "Entertainment news" interesting but really does not fit the areas that Slashdot covers best.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't know if letting kids this age walk home is the right thing, but I respect the right of the parents to make that decision. The world over child services staff are self-righteous twerps, who give all the signs of knowing very little about the range of problems parents face, and know even less about helping, rather than punishing parents trying to do the right thing.
A mile? That's still 1760 yards right? Geez, my walk to grade school was longer than that. The local grade school here in Massachusetts doesn't require the school to provide bus service if the kid lives within two miles of the school. Maybe Maryland should come up here and arrest the school board.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
this chart might have some value:
http://www.latchkey-kids.com/l...
it's about being left home alone, but the idea is the same: the age at which a child can be left to fend for themselves for a few hours, legally
the age of 8 for maryland listed here doesn't take into account the concept of a babysitter, which the 10 year old could qualify as
this suggests the parents should be fine, by legal precedent, rather than philosophical inspection, which of course immediately suggests the asshole busybody that called the police needs to get a fucking life, and the cops should have just given the kids a ride or asked how they were and then told to have a nice day and drove off
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you get the nanny state you asked for.
you want the government to make internet a public utility. you want the government to take over health care. you want the government to invent educational standards. you want the government tell companies what to pay. you want the government to tell companies who to hire.
and you are mad one day when the government decides it can tell you how to be a parent?
people have been busy handing over power for the last 100 years. for every authority the government has given itself, some motherfucker said "there aught to be a law!" just like all of you do when its something YOU want, like say... "net neutrality".
Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world.
Yeah, there are cops out there who shoot children. They might think the kid's backpack is a thermal nuclear device or assault rifle and shoot him on site.
So... we've managed to replace helicopter parenting with helicopter government.
This is the kind of story I think of when I hear that these agencies need more money. It seems to me they are overstaffed and overfunded if they have time for activities like this.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Fear is the mind killer. The fear of some vague threat is motivating CPS and the cops to do real harm to this family.
I grew up in a small town near a woods on the Illinois river. I was roaming through those woods and walking 1.5 mi to school when I was 7. At 14, I often toted a gun with me or went fishing by myself with dangerous knives and sharp hooks. I cleaned the fish I caught and ate them, too. If only CPS had been there to put me in a risk-free bubble, what a great childhood I would have had.
I was walking to school roughly that distance when I was nine. :-p
Ezekiel 23:20
When I was a child, you had to live at least a mile and a quarter from the school to qualify for the bus. Everyone else walked. This was considered absolutely normal. When I was in first grade, I went with some of the neighbor kids. I was six, and this was elementary school, so the oldest kid in the group was probably 10? Crime rates in the US are much lower today than they were then. Just dumb.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
They sound like reponsible parents.
I let you divide by 1e13
Slashdot has posted stories like this for more than a decade.
Did I get lost somehow and end up on MSN? How is this a tech/sci article?
More important to know is that how many football fields is it? It seems that at least in US the distances are measured in football fields and weights in cars or elephants.
I think a lot of us walked that distance to the school bus stop.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Per the NYC Department of Education children 5 and above are expected to walk up to 0.5 miles to school. Children between 5 and 11 are expected to walk up to 1 mile, and children 12 and above up are expected to walk or bike up to 1.5 miles to school.
Being run over by a car is by far the most likely tragety to occur to a child walking home from school so I looked up ped/bike fatalities in Maryland, and it is 1.88 per 100,000. This is actually lower than NYC, which had 2.00 such deaths per 100,000.
holy shit a 10 year old is more than old enough to get itself and a 6 year old sibling home for a small way of 1.6 km... We did it every day , every single of my class folk age 6-7+. Somebody with their parents waiting for them would have been so uncommon as to be ridiculed for it. That was back in 1978 in France. Yeah yeah cue the joke. But I cannot imagine a child of 10 + a sibling of 6 not being able to make a 1 mile walk alone... Unless the walk went thru the 5th circle of hell neighborhood which is different.
When I was a kid we all walked to and from school every single day. On the very first day, my parents walked with me. From 4th grade we were allowed to use bicycles. Those who lived more than 30 kilometers away from the nearest school were entitled to use public transport for free.
Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
I'm still alive. A bit crazy, but alive.
football
You mean handegg.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Local police, looking for things to do, kidnap 2 kids mind their own business, and have parent investigated. More on this story later!
Once again, I see CPS doing it's damnedest to interrupt a probably normal family. Well done local gov!
to raise your kids, is powerful enough to take them away.
I went to school alone since I was 7. OK, not alone per se, I went with one of my classmates (later lifelong friend), who lived close to us. And in a much worse city, in a much worse country. That doesn't mean bad things can't happen. But saying these parents are bad parents for doing this is crazy a** stupid. A lot of US people - even some I know - can be really weird when it comes to parenting issues...
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
From Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday
How much freedom or encouragement do children have to explore their environment? Are children permitted to do dangerous things, with the expectation that they must learn from their mistakes? Or are parents protective of their children’s safety, and do parents curtail exploration and pull kids away if they start to do something that could be dangerous?
The answer to this question varies among societies. However, a tentative generalization is that individual autonomy, even of children, is a more cherished ideal in hunter-gatherer bands than in state societies, where the state considers that it has an interest in its children, does not want children to get hurt by doing as they please, and forbids parents to let a child harm itself.
That theme of autonomy has been emphasized by observers of many hunter-gatherer societies. For example, Aka Pygmy children have access to the same resources as do adults, whereas in the U.S. there are many adults-only resources that are off-limits to kids, such as weapons, alcohol, and breakable objects. Among the Martu people of the Western Australian desert, the worst offense is to impose on a child’s will, even if the child is only 3 years old. The Piraha Indians consider children just as human beings, not in need of coddling or special protection. In Everett’s words, “They [Piraha children] are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults ... This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Piraha nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness ... Eventually they learn that it is in their best interests to listen to their parents a bit.”
Some hunter-gatherer and small-scale farming societies don’t intervene when children or even infants are doing dangerous things that may in fact harm them, and that could expose a Western parent to criminal prosecution. I mentioned earlier my surprise, in the New Guinea Highlands, to learn that the fire scars borne by so many adults of Enu’s adoptive tribe were often acquired in infancy, when an infant was playing next to a fire, and its parents considered that child autonomy extended to a baby’s having the right to touch or get close to the fire and to suffer the consequences. Hadza infants are permitted to grasp and suck on sharp knives. Nevertheless, not all small-scale societies permit children to explore freely and do dangerous things.
On the American frontier, where population was sparse, the one-room schoolhouse was a common phenomenon. With so few children living within daily travel distance, schools could afford only a single room and a single teacher, and all children of different ages had to be educated together in that one room. But the one-room schoolhouse in the U.S. today is a romantic memory of the past, except in rural areas of low population density. Instead, in all cities, and in rural areas of moderate population density, children learn and play in age cohorts.
School classrooms are age-graded, such that most classmates are within a year of each other in age. While neighborhood playgroups are not so strictly age-segregated, in densely populated areas of large societies there are enough children living within walking distance of each other that 12-year-olds don’t routinely play with 3-year-olds.
But demographic realities produce a different result in small-scale societies, which resemble one-room schoolhouses. A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen preadolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characte
So Child Protection Agencies have nothing better to do than go after kids walking home at the age of 10???? I mean I could see at 5-6 but 10 is old enough to be trusted alone. I mean it's not like there are lots of other cases for the Child Protection should actually be doing stuff about...
By the time I was 10, not only did I have a paper route that took me a few miles from home, I had a bike that gave me greater range. This was the late 70's to early 80's. Was normal. Today we have cellphones, gps and people are tripping because a 6 & 10 year old was walking home together?
I don't believe the USA is more violent then it was before, I believe that people are just more aware of bad shit that happens because you have a non stop stream of information, pictures and videos coming from various sources. Bad shit happens, yes, but it doesn't mean you need to lock your kids in your house and never let them out of your sight.
Be seeing you...
No, rugby.
well our bus stop was 7km away. And there was a lot of broken glass, and of course bare feet and snow and stuff.
On a more seruous note. The city must be very safe if the police don't have anything better to do than be a Chief Wiggum level dumb arse.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I look at my nephews when I think of stuff like this. They grow up in an uber protectionist household. The most independent of the three was stilling calling my mother to pick him up from the public library five blocks from his house when his parents weren't home. It's a suburban neighborhood that hasn't seen a murder in over 20 years....
When you give the nanny state free reign you end up with a generation of emotional cripples who fear anything that isn't done from the safety of their home.
So we can give these kids expensive cell phones and yet they cannot walk home? The media fear mongers have totally messed up people. You become paranoid of seeing these school shooting, and constant news coverage. I don't know the kind of area these kids walk in? But to me it does not sound like its rampant with gang warfare and rapists and pedophiles. Also, ever kid is different, thinking about the girl in the Kentucky plane crash that had killed her parents and family and at 7 she was able to survive and get help. I agree, its wrong to coddle kids in a bubble because it does not allow their natural defenses to develop.
Teach your kids what to look for, how to react, and have a phone to call for help. I myself was one block from qualifying for the bus so I rode my bike through all seasons of weather. No cell phone, no parent following me. Its sad that the media and massive coverage of isolated incidents creates such panics in America.
Its just like some parents suing the Sandy Hook district for not protecting their children?? Really, who can plan for a crazed kid to pick a school and go in and shoot people? Are they suing the school because they have nobody else to blame? because the shooter is dead? Its a tragic event but so are traffic deaths and
I don't see people suing the alcohol companies. Life is not perfect and yet our best way to live is to live and not cater to fear of what might happen.
In the absence of obvious abuse, the simple test should be: is the child fed, clothed, sheltered, and schooled?
The sadder state of affairs is that a child justifiably separated from his/her parents by the State is unlikely to do much better in the foster parent system.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Hmm.. I walked that far when I was 10 years old. It was a while ago, I guess it depends on the neighborhood. I lived in a rural area, school bus stops were not exactly near our house. We had to walk about a mile. it was good for us. My dog would follow us to the bus stop, then walk home when we got on the bus.
on rainy days my grandfather would drive us to the bus stop an wait...
we would walk home from the bus stop... sometimes my grandfather would be there.
If they are in an urban environment then maybe walking isn't a good idea but it should always be up to the parent.
As a proper Soviet patsan, at the age of 10 I was building shit which could put me on the no-fly-list in the People's Republic of America.
I lived in Las Vegas for a while, my kids' bus stop was 1.1 miles from our house. Somehow a 3rd grader and 1st grader managed to make the journey for most of a year without being abducted, accosted, or otherwise traumatized by the journey! Apparently the ninja training must have paid off so the kids managed to stay under the radar of the authorities.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
At four years old, starting in the kindergarten, in Switzerland children MUST go alone at school. It is enforced by the school and the other parents to do so.
Just one example: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-my-child-will-be-your-childs-boss/
AC
What? At ten? FFS, that 5 year old should be able to find the way back home if he is only 1 mile away. That 10 year old should be old enough to get himself back home (by asking for help, at the least) if it's the same city.
14.6 football fields. (If you count the endzones)
Wow, what a strange place the USA apparently is! :(
Meanwhile, here in Switzerland kids walk to school starting kindergarten. Granted, they go in groups at first, and perhaps with an adult tagging along, but it doesn't take long for them to ask the parents to "go". Our school even sent out a letter to the parents here telling them not to drive (as to not endanger the others who are walking).
My wife is Japanese and we spend a lot of time in her home town of Kawasaki (we live in NYC). Elementary school children generally walk to school without their parents... it's considered normal. Families will also let their kids go visit other children and even have them run small errands unescorted. NHK even has a TV show about it where children are given challenges to complete (though they are followed by a camera crew, they try not to interfere).
They can do this because they really don't have any reason to worry about their children's safety. Child abduction is relatively rare (and a national news event when it happens) and people are generally better/safer drivers than they are here in the states. Maybe if the government spent more money on reducing real crime and enforcing traffic laws we could let our children explore and grow in peace.
I walked around NYC by myself all the goddamn time in the late 70s and early 80s. I walked from my parents' apartment at 102nd and Riverside all the way to my private school at 112th and Amsterdam every goddamn morning.
I was never kidnapped once during that time.
We need look no further than this incident to understand why we have an entire generation of completely helpless, incapable 20-something year old children.
So when do you think pedophiles came into being and made modern society too dangerous for children? It seems to have been some time in the '80s from what I've gathered, I'm trying to narrow down their origin.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The problem is not about kids being alone, but that they walked. That's plain unamerican! If they walked to any house, their parents should be investigated by the House Un-American Committee. Luckily the kids didn't ride a pennyfarthing, that would have been chinese communist provocation! On the other hand, kids can travel alone as long as they drive a car or fly. Those are american patterns of behaviour as taught to us by the legendery Mr. Ford and the Wrights. God bless internally combusting America!
After leading me there for a few days at the start of school, my parents then let me walk to/from school almost a mile, by myself. Pretty much all the other parents in the neighborhood did the same because busing wasn't routinely done until much further than that. In winter, it was in snow, so I remember the first few times there was a big snowfall my parents led me there so that I understood the extra dangers with steep snowbanks and cars having a tougher time seeing little pedestrians. I was 5.
WTF, Maryland? Grow up. More precisely, let your kids grow up.
What do police and child protection want? GPS tagging on kids so that when they call and ask the parents "Do you know where your children are?" you can say "Yes, I know exactly where they are. Now go away."
Between the Stranger Danger and NIMBY and Snoops in the neighborhood a kid can't develop outside infantilism.
Which explains society today. Me - I was a latch key kid. Both parents worked so daily I'd do a sixth of a mile trek to and from school. Or school to my grandparents house which was also a sixth of a mile from the school. By age 7 I had my own key to the house.
I was biking triple that distance when I was 11 in 1997 (obviously without a cell phone). The world is not so dangerous that all minors need continuous monitoring.
Yeah, but these kids weren't in Texas.
Maybe the community they live in should be investigated for neglect. If their environment is so hostile a 10 yr old kid can't walk a mile to school, there is a problem.
I used to work with my dad starting at age 3 (not every day, but 2 days a week or so, just to spend time with him). I would wire up electric outlets (he would inspect before I'd push them in and plate them) By age 5, I was using a circular saw to repair a fence. By age 8 I was using heavy equipment (bulldozer and backhoes), and I was driving trucks at age 11. When I was 5, he would send me with $20 bill to the convenience store or to McDonalds to buy lunch for us and his worker. ($20 sure did go a lot farther in 1982, lol, i'd even bring back change) This was usually a few blocks away. Also at age five, i'd ride bikes on a 5 mile circuit of back roads with my two cousins age 6 and 10. Of course, we'd also ride in the back of a station wagon with faces pressed against the back glass, or in the backs of pickups, with no seatbelts. Sigh, kids today.
If your kids are not allowed to walk one mile from school to home your country is sick (provided they are not walking on along an interstate highway or railway tracks).
the simple test should be: is the child fed, clothed, sheltered, and schooled?
Nothing in law is as simple as that. You must first define each of those four factors. Let me give you an example related to "schooled": Some countries are known to haul homeschooling parents off to prison unless one parent has an accredited education degree and a valid teaching license. In fact, most political debates can be rephrased as debates over defining words.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that notices this. If you know how long a football field is, then you know how long 100 yards is. Or is it 120 yards- do you include the end zones?
While I don't think it's right, the fact of the matter is that Maryland law does explicitly state what age a child can be left alone. The issue isn't with the 10 year old, it's the 6 year old. Maryland law says anyone under 8 must be cared for by someone at least 13 years old (see below). We need to change the law, not complain that it's unfair that this happened. The police and child services ARE following the law.
From: http://www6.montgomerycountymd.gov/content/frs-safe/resources/parents/childcare.asp
Maryland Child Protective Services Procedures (SSA95-13) define an "unattended child" as:
A child under eight left alone or in the care of a person who is not reliable or who is under 13.
A child aged eight through 12 left alone for longer than brief periods without support systems which should include phone numbers of parents, other family members or neighbors, information about personal safety, and what to do in an emergency. Children in this age group may not be left to care for children under the age of eight.
A child 12 or over who is left alone for long hours or overnight or with responsibilities beyond capabilities or where there is some special risk factor such as mental retardation or physical handicap that would indicate that the child may be in jeopardy.
A child who has been abandoned.
A child of any age who is handicapped and left alone, if the handicapping condition constitutes a special risk factor which indicates that the child is in jeopardy.
Maryland Family Law, 5-701(p) states that NEGLECT is "the leaving of a child unattended or other failure to give proper care and attention to a child by any parent or other person who has permanent or temporary care or custody or responsibility for supervision under circumstances that indicate: that the child's health or welfare is harmed or placed at substantial risk of harm."
The Montgomery County Child Protective Services defines neglect as "the chronic failure of a parent, caretaker, household or family member to provide a child under 18 basic needs of life, such as: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, attention to hygiene, educational opportunity, protection and supervision. Cultural standards which differ from those of most of the community are not necessarily neglect." To make a report call 240-777-4417.
I walked to school all the time. It was probably less than 1/2 mile, but I started at 5 or 6. I don't remember how old I was when roaming the neighborhood alone, but it was younger than 12, and I probably did a lot of it younger than 10. I went a lot of places I probably shouldn't have, did things that could have gotten me hurt but didn't, and I'm glad I got the chance to do such things. In the modern era, my mom would have been jailed for neglect, and I would have been a ward of CPS.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
When I was 11, my friend and I rode the bus downtown 15 miles each way, missed the start of "Star Wars", hung around for an hour and a half for the next showing, watched the movie, and rode the bus home.
30 mile round trip, 6 hours unsupervised, and we had no trouble at all. And as many have pointed out, the world is even safer now.
Yes, I know that "Anecdote is not Data". However, it is clear that:
* The Meitivs did NOT break current law, which does not cover outdoors (Why? The ones who made the law wanted to let their kids go to the park, that's what I'm thinking...);
* The police will not accept the word of a child that they do not need any help and are on their way home;
* The government will interrogate our children without our permission or presence because they are in school.
I'm on the Meitiv's side here, obviously.
I had my daughter brought home in a police cruiser no less than 3 times when she was between the ages of 6 and 8, simply for playing outside unsupervised in broad daylight. (Admittedly, she was small for her age). After the third time we got a visit from child protective services, which basically ended with us being instructed to buy a key operated deadbolt to lock her in the house so she couldn't escape.
...advice that was promptly ignored. That's a serious safety issue in a fire, which is frankly far more likely of a disaster. When I was a kid we were told we should have household fire escape drills, and now I'm being told to lock em in so they can't "escape" to play outside? What a f'ed up time we live in.
To contact Chief Manger:
By e-mail: MCPDChief@montgomerycountymd.gov
By mail: Chief Manger
Montgomery County Police Department
100 Edison Park Drive, 3rd floor
Gaithersburg, MD 20878
Montgomery County Child Protective Services's hands were tied: Once there was a complaint, they had to go through the motions of an investigation.
Now, here's where I find fault with CPS: They should've realized very quickly this was a case of a well-meaning citizen who was over-reacting and put the case on a "close as unfounded ASAP" track.
I also fault the state legislators and/or whatever state agency made the rules for not realizing that well-meaning citizens will see possible neglect where none exists and failing to write the rules with that in mind. A well-written rule will give CPS or for that matter any investigative body the authority to "quickly close" a case when it's obvious to both the initial investigator and at least one supervisor that there is nothing worth investigating.
But to the extend that their hands were tied, I can't fault the front-line investigators in Montgomery County Child Protective Services - their only choice was to do their job, not do their job and risk disciplinary action, or to resign in protest for being made to do something that they knew was harmful to the family involved.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Stuff that matters". Just because it doesn't matter to you, we should all capitulate to your demands? FFS, don't click the link and downvote the story. No more issue. See, there are little sliders up in the top right of the story section. Move those back and forth and stories that get downvoted disappear.
If that doesn't work, go find stories that you think meet the criteria and post them. Apparently, the /. mods give less than a fuck and any kind of story can make it to the main page (at least that seems to be what you are implying).
Disliking the fact that a story is posted that you don't want to read, reading the synopsis, commenting on the need to eleminate these types of stories and doing so as AC? sheesh, the hubris.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
I had a neighbor family who had free range kids. They climbed on top of my garage and played in my car among other things.
Free range doesn't work nowadays since other adults cannot yell at kids and kids don't fear adults.
Times are different!!
I'm not familiar with the area, but it's Silver Springs, north of Washington, DC. Here's Woodside Park, and the Discovery Building (labelled "Discovery Communications" on Google's map) is just a few blocks to the SE. I'm guessing that their house is probably to the south of downtown Silver Springs in the residential area that starts beyond the downtown. There are plenty of sidewalks, bus stops, etc.
Unless Silver Springs is some kind of special crime hell-hole that's very well disguised, I really don't see the problem for a ten-year-old with 6-year-old in tow. The streetview shots look utterly mundane. Well-marked crosswalks, plenty of streetlights, well-maintained, good visibility, modern buildings, trees, people going about their ordinary daily business. If the parents were sending them through some kind of questionable slum neighbourhood late at night, maybe there would be cause for concern, but I don't see it.
1.6 light years.
WOW those americans are tough.
When the news figured out sensationalism and fear sold better than good journalism.
No sir I dont like it.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that notices this. If you know how long a football field is, then you know how long 100 yards is. Or is it 120 yards- do you include the end zones?
100 yards is the metric field... following the easy to multiply tens standard.
I think you know 120 yards is only used popularly in the USian scale
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I use "overrated" when a post has been modded up and I think it shouldn't be or modded up higher than I think it should be and there's no more specific reason to down-rate the post. I generally leave 0's and 1's alone. I'm also a bit careful about using overrated if the post is marked funny, because "+1 funny/-1 overrated/lather-rinse-repeat" will hurt the poster's karma.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The police in the DC area appear to have very strong beliefs that children should be accompanied very closely by parents at all times. About a year ago, my wife and I were walking to the air and space museum with our 8 year old daughter and her 8 year old cousin in DC. We walked by a park and the children thought it would be fun to walk through the park and meet us on the other side. They were stopped in the middle of the park by a police officer who demanded to know where their parents were. They pointed at us, about 50 feet away. The police officer first demanded that we come meet him in the middle of the park to pick up the children and, after we refused, settled for escorting them the 50 feet to meet us.
We felt like the officer was acting ludicrously and a royal jerk. It's discomforting to see that this problem is more wide spread, so I hope these parents are able to get the police and CPS to back down. I completely agree that children do not magically become grownups on their 18th birthday, they need to slowly expand their boundaries and comfort zone over time as they grow into adults.
I lived in northern Canada and walked about 2km to school each day (the school was on the other side of town) from when I was 8 and up. While there was only ever one confirmed pedo in town I had to walk through a forest trail to get there. Going north and south on the trail got you to each part of the town, east and west and you could find yourself lost pretty quickly. The dangers you ask, the occasional bear/wolf/moose sighting in the area.
My primary school was twice that distance and I walked it alone back and forth every day since the age of six.
Granted, a large city is more dangerous, but this over-protection is becoming ridiculous.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If the majority of us didn't think it was strange that they where not allowed to walk a mile it would not have made the news.
I took the subway to school every day when I was in second grade (8 years old).
I'll jump in here for no reason.
I rode my bike 3 miles to school from 2nd and 3rd grade until we moved closer to the school and then walked after that. Sometimes I would come home, realize I had forgotten my jacket or homework, and ride back up to the school to retrieve it.
Nothing special about that, lots of kids did the same thing at the same distances.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
In Japan they have something called "first errand". Young school children, say 5 or 6, are given a simple task to do such as go to the local shop and buy a specific item, then bring it home. The school organizes this [emphasis added]
We shouldn't need the school's help to do this. This is the kind of thing every parent should do at a time when they feel their kids are ready for it.
My mom with through a fairly "big deal" plan for me to walk to school for the first time. She drew maps and I think we walked it together at least once before the 1st day of school. I have no idea if she followed me "from a distance" that first day but in retrospect I would expect most mothers to do so for emotional reasons if not just for safety reasons.
I have heard of other parents who let their kids walk to school but they follow at a discreet distance.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Good thing you didn't read the whole thing and only brushed past the synopsis. Glad you came to give your boring opinion. Sorry, I should have phrased that better. Thanks for telling us you are bored.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
I think this is more suited for Facebook than Slashdot
When I was 7 years old, i:
1. Walked 1 km to the bus.
2. Took the bus to the boat (10 mins).
3. Took the boat to the harbor in the capital of my country.
4. Walked through the city center to the underground (15 minutes, 1km).
5. Took the underground for 20 minutes.
6. Walked another km to school.
Then did the reverse after school.
Every day. I was transporting myself through the city center for a total 3 hours every day. With no supervision whatsoever, and I cannot ever remember being afraid.
Agreed. I walked to school and it was about 1 mile. I also rode my bike to the baseball fields and that was about 3 miles. Its sad to see things change like this.
The response seems a little extreme. When I was that age I was in the woods all day, getting banged up and dirty. Somehow I survived it without CPS taking an interest. And pretty much all the kids on our road did the same. CPS and government are getting just a little too involved in things they are better left out of. Letting a kid walk a mile is just not an issue that needs government busybody concern. Beats the hell out of keeping them cooped up or under mommy and daddy's thumb all day.
I was biking triple that distance when I was 11 in 1997 (obviously without a cell phone). The world is not so dangerous that all minors need continuous monitoring.
At 12 I was allowed to take the train to London for a day out with school friends. We had all been walking home from school alone since about 7 or 8.
True of any president. We should be careful.
Back in the 80s, I had two very easy rules.
1. When to be home
2. How far I could go
And I never had a problem with that, walking to school and back every day, playing with mates, and roaming around.
Rules broken from time to time, but mostly not to bad.
What is dangerous for children in the world?
Answer: Not really much.
well our bus stop was 7km away. And there was a lot of broken glass, and of course bare feet and snow and stuff. .
You forgot, "uphill both ways."
Are those cops have nothing to do? Fire them instantly..
Well, a pedo and a bear, that's a dangerous combination...
Ezekiel 23:20
Maybe I'm old, but when I was in grade school kindergarteners on up had to walk to and from school if they lived less than a mile away unless there was some major road in between or they had a parent or babysitter ready to drive them.
Wow, in my home town, if you lived a mile or less away from the school, you had to walk to have parents transport you. I walked to school each day, as did my brother who was 7 through 10, while we lived there. Four years he walked half a mile each way. Parents now a days are going over board, as are police and CPS.
I've lived in Maryland. It is a cesspool of corrupt politics and many other unpleasant
things which I will not enumerate here because if I do some knee-jerk politically correct
person who has never even lived in Maryland will mod my post down.
I'd sooner live in hell than live in Maryland again, and I have lived all over the United States.
When I was 12 my parents a couple of times put me on a NJ Transit train in Central NJ. I would ride it alone to Penn Station in New York, where my grandfather would pick me up and take me back to my grandparent's apartment in Brooklyn where I'd spend the night, and travel back home the next day. I guess today that could be child abuse too. Having to walk up the stairs from the platform and meet me Grandfather in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in a city (NYC) that wasn't really quite as safe back then (80s) as it is today.
Oh yeah, I walked to school too for awhile, and used to wander the woods behind our neighborhood with friends.
I'm not sure I'd let me kids (currently a touch younger than the kids in the article) have quite as much free range, but that's just my own paranoid parenting self. I don't want to see other people who believe otherwise lose that freedom.
It seems like >95% of the posts here are in support of the parents. The next logical question should be "what can we do about this"? Sure, there are political avenues, but those are slow.
I think there might be a much faster way - we already have a special class of people who can mistreat their children by most of societies standards and get away with it - I'm thinking here of the Christian Scientists who deny almost all medial treatment to their children, and the Jehovah's witnesses who deny a smaller but still measurable subset (anything requiring blood transfusions).
If you can use religious freedom to justify clearly life-threatening decisions for your children, then I suspect so called "free-range parenting" could also gain protection given the right scripture. Perhaps the religion that offers this already exists; if not it shouldn't be so hard to create....
Down with presidents. Long live the queen!
Yeah, I had to walk a mile-and-a-quarter to school everyday, by myself! During Summer vacation, my mother would force me to go outside, and stay outside, until suppertime! With no supervision! Wow, I'm only realizing now, I really was neglected as a child. Of course, all the other kids were neglected in exactly the same way. It's a miracle we weren't all abducted!
In all seriousness, I can only pity the way kids grow up today. And everyone wonders why they're so fat.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
My wife and I and our kids were just talking about TFA this morning. The reaction that I got from my kids (8 and 10) was something like "huh?". We live just a few doors from a park where all the neighborhood kids play together, unsupervised, when the weather is nice. I love being able to give them unsupervised play time! That's time when then can just be themselves and interact with their peers without adults there interfering. They get to explore and do all kinds of stuff.
My wife and I are even considering allowing our older child to take the Metro (public transit) to ballet by herself next year when she's in middle school.
It frustrates me that our parenting style is probably considered illegal and/or immoral by the county's standards. I'd say that obesity from spending too much time indoors in front of a screen instead of getting out there and mixing it up are greater dangers to our children.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
No, we mean American football, which originally had play started by kicking (or "snapping") the ball with the foot, the field goals and tries were worth more than the touchdown, and the forward pass was illegal so the ball was rounder. Perhaps if Walter Camp had anticipated that ignoramuses would make stupid jokes, he would have proposed renaming the game.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The term for this is soft despotism.
It was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville and first described by him in the second volume of De la démocratie en Amérique, first published in 1840.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
A) I support the parents, I was allowed to walk home from school as a kid, it's ridiculous to think that every kid is dumb enough to get into a stranger's van.
B) The older is 10, not 4. It's fine. If you raise your kid right, they should be trusted home alone, maybe not overnight, but for at least a couple of hours at least, by age 10.
C) Why is this on Slashdot? How is this a tech story?
I hope those parents are teaching their kids how to be a huge pain in the ass for the government.
You joke, but I remember working in Dublin - there was a pretty steep hill I used to cycle down on the way to work - one day it was so windy I had to pedal hard to get down the hill. Was the wind the same direction that evening - like hell it was. So, does that count?
These were relatively young kids walking, alone, through downtown Silver Spring on one of the busiest streets in Montgomery County. These parents are morons for thinking that the cops wouldn't eventually show up at their doorstep with the kids in tow. Was the police and CPS response overboard? Yes, but the parents should certainly have expected that this would eventually happen. While I would certainly allow my kids to walk a similar distance to the park, I would also teach them to take residential streets to avoid the traffic and headache of navigating the horrendous drivers in the DC area.
Sea kelp.
Would all of this been a moot point if the parents had gps tagged the kids? thus you could claim to CPS that the kids were always under supervision?
I don't personally have kids, but I've heard that kids are required to walk to school (distance permitting), so that they get used to the traffic.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I grew up 30 miles from here, in N.VA, Fairfax.
In kindergarten, I walked over a mile to/from the school every day unaccompanied. So did all the other kids in the neighborhood. There wasn't bus service and at the time, we would probably have still walked unless it was raining.
Oh - and it was downhill to the school, uphill back home.
CPS is out of control, IMHO. When a 7yr old cannot walk themselves to/from school that isn't across town, that is going too far.
The irony here is that the police are now one of those dangers of the world.
When did the police become so adversarial where they threaten use of firearm when interacting with citizens? I think that should be investigated as well.
My son is 30. He was raised by a very protective Dad. That said, he was allowed lots of latitude, including walking home from school.
He also trained at our dojo with mostly law enforcement and military folks from age 9. When he was 12, he got his arm broken at Black Belt class...by me. It was an accident in a close combat drill.
Based on the knee jerk BS from CPS and the police in the article, I'd be in jail and even worse, separated from my boy.
At this point, I'm looking for the exit....
I am my own gestalt.
These folks are pikers.
Back in 1971 when I was 5 my parents dropped me and my 3 year old brother off at the theater to go watch Dumbo.
6 months later I went to go visit my grandmother. They loaded me up on the greyhound bus for the 12 hours drive and asked the driver to make sure I did not get off the bus till it got to the Los Angeles station.
I look back and think WTF? What was WRONG with my parents?
vi +
No, Tackle Football, not to be confused with Futbal as in Association Football, nor Rugby, nor Australian Rules Football, the man;'s game.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
to remove all those child supervising rules https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/
and see how many people will sign up.
It is impossible to grow responsible adult, without giving kids unsupervised time early.
Dear Nanny-State,
Butt out.
I know its horrible. I stopped driving with my kids after a child in my city was killed in a car accident. Then I read that some kids were killed by a gunman at a school and decided to pull them out. Sports was next when I heard that some kid was hit in the chest by a soccer ball and died from cardiac arrest. I am currently thinking about covering my kids with bubble wrap and locking them in their rooms, but then again there was a house fire last week and I saw that someone choked on bubble wrap. I'm not sure what approach I should take to guarantee my children a 100% risk free life. You do realize, that by every measure "Modern Society" is safer for children (and adults) than at any other time in human history. A child has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being kidnapped. We're creating a whole generation of children that are so fragile, they will crumple at the first sign of adversity.
... CPS in any state to get right a decision of whether or not to remove Children from a home. Either the Ones in need of removal are left behind or the Ones not in need of removal are separated. CPS is an out and out joke, one which is not funny.
Make sure you hold your 17 year old's hands and walk them home from school.
I was all over town on my bike when I was 7, I traveled alone on airlines at 8, and I walked home from school at least a mile when I was 5, by myself.
Just because some busy body thinks it's her business to call the police on everything she sees does not mean the police need to go along with it.
Police are LAW ENFORCEMENT, and they had no business picking these children up if no law was broken. Protective services are way over reaching while at the same time, they cry and whine that they need more money.
The event with the police probably traumatized those kids, and if it were mine, a multi million dollar law suit would be the least of the cities worries. I would keep them in court for the next 10 years just to make a damn point.
Send this man back to school
Yards is an 'imperial' measurement.
Metres is the S.I. or metric unit.
Mixing the two is very common all over the US.
You, Sir, are a fucking moron. Adult women get abducted, raped and killed, too. I refuse to live in fear. I refuse to let my child live in fear. Montgomery County CPS can go fuck themselves for thinking they are entitled to take children out of a home simply because they disagree with parents who have done nothing against the law. Fuck off, commie.
Age 9 I had a walk back from school that was either 1.5 miles along the road or 1 mile shortcut through the woods. Never did me any harm.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Their ass off" did not fit into the subject.
I mean: for the 6 year old that might be a bit "tough" if he was alone, but he had his 10 year old sibling with him.
I walked to the kindergarden and back home as soon as I was like 4 years old, that was not a mile but roughly 1000 yards.
Of course that was:
o in Germany
o the early 1970s
o in a small village
On the other hand, judging form the news the USA are really dangerous for children alone on the streets ... so who am I to have an opinion?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Letting kids go outside is cruel and stupid when it can be so easily avoided in our modern society. Have you people not heard of lightening? This is not paranoia, it's verifiable fact. On average 50 people are killed each year in the USA from lightning. Thankfully the average is going down, and we less now... thanks probably to more people staying inside. But it's still more than are killed in the average terrorist attack or school shooting, or pedophile rampage, which people seem to be very concerned about. Since irresponsible parents historically have not seen fit to make sure their children are properly shielded from lightning each and every time they leave home, it would seem there is no choice but for a society who cares about children to make sure the children are secured indoors.
I would mention the actually astronomically greater threat posed by automobiles, directly and indirectly, but I understand that our society has made the conscious decision to holds cars sacred. So that's fine.
I'm not a US citizen, but it seems like a few hundred specific FOI requests will ensure that the officers will have enough to do to stop doing stuff like that...
I was in elementary school (K-6) from 1987 - 1994. I lived in non-rural Southern California for all that time. I lived in high crime areas. From 3rd grade (age 8) all the way through graduating highschool, I found my own way to school. It was walking, taking the bus, or riding a bike. The shortest "commute" I had was in walking in 3rd grade-- 1.0 miles as Google Maps reads it now.
For 4th grade (age 9), I bused half the year until it was too expensive. Then I walked and biked for half of 4th grade and the rest of 5th and 6th (ages 10 and 11). That distance was 1.9 miles each way. There was never a problem. I knew how to cross a major intersection and a 2-way stop. I knew my way home and I knew how to ask old people which way a particular street was if I ever got lost trying to find a short cut.
I'm sure most of us know that crime in California was at a relative high in the late '80s to early '90s. Crime is very low today. Moreover, the risk of kidnapping by strangers (what everyone is actually afraid of), has never really been a genuine risk.
"Only a tiny minority of kidnapped children are taken by strangers. Between 1990 and 1995 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children handled only 515 stranger abductions, 3.1 percent of its caseload. A 2000 report by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Programs reported that more than 3/4 of kidnappings were committed by family members or acquaintances of the child. The study also found that children abducted by strangers were harmed less frequently than those taken by acquaintances." (http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/stranger-child-abductions-actually-very-rare-130514.htm)
Now let's contrast this with a genuine danger: automobiles.
In 2003, the 0-14 age group accounted for 2,136 of traffic fatalities. In addition, children under 15 years old accounted for 1,591 of all vehicle occupant fatalities, 253,000 of all the people injured in motor vehicle crashes, and 220,000 of all the vehicle occupants injured in crashes. (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809762.pdf)
Before we put irrationally short leashes on children thus stunting their maturation, let's put speed limiters and automatic breaking on automobiles so they actually reach maturity.
From the ripe old age of 7-11 I hopped on my bike everyday and rode it 2.3 miles to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon. In the summers I rode 5-6 miles out to the municipal airport to hang around planes and generally goof-off. From age 6 on, my friends and I trick-or-treated alone, camped out alone, etc...
I can't imagine the trouble my parents would be in now for allowing such behavior.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
If you are accused of somehow neglecting or abusing your child - immediately get a lawyer with experience in these matters. Do not talk to CPS (or equivalent) - you are not legally obliged to. All they are looking for is for you to say something that they find incriminating so that they can build a case against you. If you don't talk to them, they have nothing but an accusation. Getting a lawyer is not an admission of guilt as some would have it - it is simply good sense and you owe it to your family to have a legal professional protecting you from these corrupt state agencies. Say nothing. Sign nothing. They will try their best to get you to admit to something, anything to get that case up and running. Stand your ground.
On fear, talking specifically about how children's worlds are shrinking.
It's a new podcast, seeing how it turns out.
... to the long list of reasons i don't consider the US a good place to live in.
With rules like this, no wonder you have 40 year old virgins living in their parents' basements.
Yeah, but you still can't find a better place to live.
"parents ... help by watching the children from a distance." Why doesn't CPS do that if they're so worried? I mean, it's good that people are looking out for kids. That's fine. So when two smallish kids are reported out by themselves and the cop spots them, why doesn't he or she just watch from a distance to make sure they're okay? Or if cops don't have the time for that, call in CPS who just watches from a distance.
That way they don't have to fix anything that's not broken, AND the kids are definitely safe. Win-win. What am I missing?
This is what happens when liberalism takes hold. The god damned nanny state is what needs to be investigated for abuse of power, and interfering with parental rights. Hell, when I was 10 years old I would be gone all day long (summer time, no school). I grew up learning how to be an independent individual, understanding how to cope with the realities of life, unlike the vast majority of today's whiney babies.
Back in the 1960s, my 6 year old brother and my ten year old self walked almost a mile every school day to our bus stop. Rain or snow or high winds or freezing cold we walked it. Two other families on our bus route had to walk just as far.
An older gentleman I knew liked to tell the story of the day in the 1930s (when he was ten years old) he was allowed to walk by himself for the first time cross country through woods and farm fields, 5 miles to the Southwick General Store and Post Office. And back. All in the same day. He would end the story by saying: "I felt like a man that day."
He was still proud of it, 30 years later.
Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
anyone who is here should know that wapo is short for washington post. Its been used for years now
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Child "Services" in Massachusetts has been out of control for a while now:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/20/its-kidnapping-hospital-takes-custody-of-teen-because-her-parents-were-too-active-in-pursuing-her-care/ [theblaze.com]
About 100 children get "truly" abducted in the US per year: http://www.pollyklaas.org/abou...
Sadly half of them get killed or vanish.
http://www.pollyklaas.org/abou... Not sure how accurate that is, but I saw similar numbers during my googleing.
Regarding lightening the we sites are not as conclusive here it is 400 hits per year: http://news.nationalgeographic...
On others it is about 300. Likelihood of survival is between 70% and 90%.
However: I'm surprised that you are right. People get more often hit by lightening than children get kidnapped (per year).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As a parent, I think this story is lackin a lot of critical context before I can pass judgement on anything. The route the kids followed is critical to understanding if this was responsible parenting or not. 1 mile is pretty far for a six year old, especially if it's in a high traffic area. Seems more prudent for the parents to tail the kids from a disttance, at least the first time (and it sounds like this was the first time), when they do something like this.
I wonder how far their school district makes children walk when they live close to the school. In my district, any child in 1st-12th grade who lives within 1.5 miles of their school does not get a bus. it is quite normal for a 10 and 6 year old brother+sister to walk to school in that range. I live in a normal suburb outside Philadelphia.
The risk of negative health outcomes from a lack of exercise + bad diet are real. The health benefits from having them walk 2 miles a day getting to and from school most likely far out way the risk of anything bad happening. Never mind actually riding in a car there is far from risk free.
Truth be told you are generally much better of doing "risky" physical activities like riding a bike or god forbid skiing than staying at home and watching TV all day.
Growing up I had a 1/2 walk to the bus stop every day, since kindergarten (they claimed they could not turn the bus around on my street)
So sexual assault and rape: no big deal? Detention at gunpoint?
Read the examples of so-called "non-stereotypical" kidnappings. They sound pretty fucking brutal, and scary for many of the kids.
Yes some are a "joyride" by a stupid adult, but most of the examples include force, violence and frightened or terrified children. 17 and 13 year olds are children.
Sorry, but 58,000 is a very large number of crimes, and if multiplied by the number of years a typical human is a child yields a roughly 1%+ chance of kidnapping during a child's lifetime. That is a disturbing statistic in a so-called western, civilized society.
When I was ten years old I traveled many miles by bicycle and on foot both night and day. The simple truth is that we needed to have no fear of sexual preditors or sadists. In Ft. Lauderdale we had quite a population and it was not a tiny town by a long shot. But crime was simply pretty darned rare. In the 1950s and sixties we only locked the house doors if we were going on vacation. Nobody felt at risk of a burgler in the night. These days one needs to be right on top of their kids and that goes up to an age of about twenty when one simply can not be present at almost all times. We do have psychopaths stalking and nightmares walking. And if akid goes fishing in remote places there is way too high a probablity of them being molested or murdered. The question is why. Just why do we have so many depraved people about? We certainly have way too many people in prisons. Then as now we had no real mental health help for most of the population. And back then prison was easy to go to and very hard to survive including forced labor on chain gangs. The one single change that is so striking is the publics acceptance of getting high. Drugs were absolutely absent in our schools and getting caught with a pinch of any drug including pot pretty much was a life ender. Florida had a reform school that murdered many young boys. They are still recovering bodies from that closed facility. One little bit of pot was enough to send you there until you were 21 and you would be unemployable for life. Even at 11 years old we knew not to get sent to Marianna. Getting stoned was simply not an issue. A few teens tried getting drunk in high school. I wonder if the anti-social molesters and creeps are showing some sort of dope related, long term behaviours due to brain injuries from youthful drug use.
Ditto. You weren't eligible for the bus if you lived within a mile, so you walked. Or biked. School yard had a tonne of bike racks filled, even in winter. Not a bike helmet to be seen (what do you think you're riding, a motorbike?). To think, all this time we were neglected abused children.
At 7 years old i was buying bus tickets and riding 150 miles to large city by myself, and I would also just as easily disappear to go play in a forest for a whole day by myself. By 10, if you asked my parents where I was at, they would be the last ones on the planet to know. By 12 I was getting thrown out of red light district bars in Mexico by the Mexican Federales (back when they had Ak-47's). O.k., perhaps that last one is a good argument for keeping an eye on your kids, but you get the point. I learned to handle myself, confidently, think things out, solve problems, at a very young age because my parents allowed me the latitude to test my limits while always being there to back me up when I got in to trouble. Now, that they are gone, I am more than able to handle anything the World throws at me with confidence and experience of having handled massive portfolio of very difficult situations. I thank them for that.
And we wonder why this generation of kids can not figure shit out on their own.
in prison.
Problem solved.
When we build a society in which government is the solution to every single problem, what else did we expect?
If smoking bothers us, instead of simply going somewhere else, we campaign for a massive national ban on smoking enforced by the government.
If eating too much makes us fat, we elect politicians who cheerfully try to ban large sodas and contemplate legislation against restaurants that serve food that doesn't meet "our" healthy standards.
If we're upset that people have made such crappy life choices that they cannot afford fundamental expenses to support their life & kids, we insist that the government take wealth from everyone to pay them.
I'd say the idea that police swoop in to intervene when we decide to parent in a way not narrowly defined as "ok" by the bureaucrats is *precisely* in line with this trend.
-Styopa
Every Wednesday evening, my friends 10 yr old son does a paper route that is just under 2 Km long. At this time of the year, that means working mostly in the dark and along streets that are pretty bare. It's supposed to be his older brothers route, but the elder got sick of it and was going to quit. The younger lad campaigned heavily for parental permission to sub-contract the job. (Since the newspaper company wouldn't hire anyone younger than 12) He's been doing it for a little over two years now with no problems except for one jerk who usually has a hostile and aggressive acting dog. The man tells the boy to just ignore the dog, to tell it to shut up and go on with his delivery. Both my friend and I have told the lad that controlling this dog is NOT his job. If there is any doubt, any cause for concern *whatsoever* he is to skip the delivery and let the jerk complain to the newspaper.
When I was a child in the major city of Toronto, two of my friends and I routinely made bicycle trips that were well over 3 Km in round trip length so we could explore a ravine city park/conservation area. Plenty of opportunity to get into an accident, get lost or encounter a person of bad intent. Lots of adventures, some minor accidents scrambling around in the ravine, but NO tragedies.
we moved when I was 11 and for the remainder of the school year (about 4 mths IIRC) I escorted my 5 yr old brother on the TTC to our old neighbourhood, dropped him off at the day care and then proceeded to my school around the corner. Our mother went with us for the first trip, just to reassure herself that I knew the route as well as I claimed. (a short bus ride to the station, several stops on the subway and then a 4 block walk above ground) But after that, it was all on me. The following year, it was a 1 Km streetcar ride, followed by a two block walk for my brother and I to attend school. His afternoon day care picked him up at lunch time, but after school I picked him up from daycare and took him home. We usually walked because there was a bakery we would mooch day old goodies from. I took care of my brother until our mom got home at around 5:30.
TL'DR version. Both my own extensive experiences at that age and my daily observation of kids that age today suggest that a 1 mile walk from a park IS NO BIG DEAL. It really does depend on the competence of the child(ren) involved and the character of the route being taken.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Good lord. I was riding busses all over Detroit at that age...
EVERYBODY walked to/from school alone or with their friends. There was a crossing guard at the major street closest to the schools, and "safety boys" and "safety girls" at other corners. (For street crossing.)
EVERYBODY just walked to the playground to hang out.
EVERYBODY just rode their bikes around the neighborhood, alone or with their friends.
Yea, I was bike-jacked, once. That's the only thing that ever happened. Period. My friend George's mother drove around until she found them, and made them give it back.
Today any of the above would get a call to the cops and a visit from Child Protective Services? And I suppose George's mother would be in jail...
Times have changed? Yes they have. We had riots back then (1967). Hasn't been a good riot in the U.S. since Rodney King. Maybe back then cops had more important things to worry about than imagining a pedo behind every tree. Like provoking riots... (before you make assumptions, I am caucasian.)
The commercial strip a block from our apartment burned. I was at my grandparents outside of the city, as I was every summer, so I did not experience it directly. When I returned that fall, we had moved to a different part of the city. Nothing changed about my freedom. I still walked to school, to the playground, rode my bike, rode the busses around the city. Thank God, my mother had a rational bone in her head.
Might bad things happen to unsupervised kids? They might. At statistically-small numbers. I think something more damaging happens when kids are arbitrarily restricted, at statistically-higher numbers.
Something bad might happen to a few kids left unsupervised. Something bad happens to ALL kids when they are taught, from an early age, that they are not allowed to be free, and taught that the world is a dangerous place that you should be overly afraid of.
Google Justina Pelletier
reasons why CPS took her? Bostons childrens hospital disagreed with the Diagnosis of Tufts medical center.
BCH claimed her issues were all in her head. "somatoform disorder"
Tufts claimed it was a mitochondria disease.
Both top 10 hospitals. 16 months it took to get custondy back, She is much worse for the wear due to her disease not being treated while at the hospital.
...participate in any childhood activities if a**holes like these cops and bureaucrats had been around when I was that age. Our Little League practices were over a mile away and we rode to/from the field -- sometimes as a group but often alone -- without anyone calling the cops. We rode bikes to the public pool -- well over a mile a way -- all summer long, crossing all kinds of busy streets along the way. Even at night. Again nobody called the cops.
Of course, this was a time before pins started showing up in Halloween candy and the kindly old lady down the block could still hand out homemade popcorn balls in your trick/treat bag without risking spending the rest of her life in the big house or on some predator list. I can't quite pin down the time frame when it began but, apparently, some disease began afflicting adults that caused them to hate children. And the unafflicted adults began overreacting to the sight of a child unaccompanied by a cordon of security guards by calling the police whenever they catch a glimpse of one.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I regularly used to take the shortcut through the cemetery, even after sundown. That scared me worse than the thought of bears.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The kids are probably less safe in CPS care.
About 15 years ago there was a case where a professor at the local university had her son taken by CPS because she tied her son's hands behind his back to prevent him from continuing to hit himself intentionally. He had some kind of condition that caused him to inflict harm on himself and she was trying to help protect him. Anyways, while under CPS care, the kid died because essentially CPS didn't take care of him properly. Whether or not you think that the mother took care of the child properly, you can't dismiss the fact that CPS didn't know any better.
I know this area very well, I live near it. I actually really enjoy downtown Silver Spring.
Having said that, it's not safe for a 10 and a 6 year old to be walking a mile down a heavy traffic area.
This is no suburban neighborhood, Georgia Ave. is one of the main streets taking people from Maryland directly into D.C. It is large, and it is ALWAYS busy.
I've had several friends who have gotten mugged in that area and I as a grown man make it a point never to walk alone or let my friends walk alone. I think people who currently live there forget what the city was like 5-10 years ago. It is and was gang infested and riddled with violence. Over the past 5-10 years a large influx of money was poured into it. That does not mean it is safe, it just means the outer layer is pretty.
Ask yourself, would you let your 10 and 6 year old child walk through a densely populated urban neighborhood with high rates of crime and gang violence? Most assuredly your answer is no.
Saying your kids were walking back from a park and picked up in front of the discovery channel building does not paint the whole picture of your neglect.
Then there is Canadian Football which has two "50-yard" lines resulting in a 110 yard playing field + two 20 yard end zones being 150 yards.
This, of course, is a result of Canada being a metric nation ;^)
But when you say football field, many folks think of a 100-110m FIFA compliant field which is just about matches American football field + endzones which seems to make some sense. On the other hand, I don't have any idea what the Canadians were thinking, except that nobody is going to play their sport except in stadiums in Canada.
Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world.
#1 on that list: Overreaching government and law enforcement.
If both the police and the child protective services both think that the town is too dangerous for children, then the family(and every other family) should definitely move somewhere else.
Children's Aid Society or Child Protection Services or whatever TLA is the style where you live, believe in guilty until proven innocent.
Fundamentally, all their abuses stem from that flawed assumption.
They are the best example of why presumption of innocence is so important. The fact so many people take it for granted changes nothing.
It's kind of fascinating to read all the comment flow on posts like these (which Slashdot has had a number of in the last few days)... Where the argument between the commenters eventually boils down to two sides:
1. There is a non-zero chance of badthing happening, and badthing is terrible, so it is my personal choice to give up freedomthing in order to reduce or remove the chance of badthing happening.
2. While badthing can happen, and is indeed terrible when it does, the chances are low enough and I find the benefits gained from freedomthing to be worth the risk, and it is my personal decision to continue doing freedomthing.
The meta discussion then becomes
3. I think person 1 and person 2 should be able to make their own choices
4. I think person 2 is irresponsible and should be forced to relinquish freedomthing because badthing
It's interesting but regardless of the issues it does seem like people who make choices based on their fears, seem to do so again and again. I'm not sure what would be required for person 2 to convince person 1 it is "Okay" and to embrace the freedom and forget the fear... Maybe a better understanding of risk analysis? I was lucky to have reasoning parents, who allowed me to take reasonable risk in search of the rewards of freedom, and taught me through example on how to judge those balances... but it wasn't until joining the Navy and being introduced to one of the few pieces of remarkably sane bureaucracy that they have -- The risk matrix http://imgur.com/kboHrxK
Basic concept here is:
1. Every risk is given a category based on two factors:
a. What are the chances of something going wrong
b. What is the severity of the thing that goes wrong
2. Once the the category is determined, then it is weighed against the value of the reward...
Basically, if the risk isn't worth the reward... Either mitigate the risk until it is within the reward value, or don't do it.
The case here, is Improbable chance of catastrophic result... Category 12... or medium risk. Medium risks are taken often, you mitigate whenever possible (short distance, they were together, familiar territory) and the reward here is children that are more independent and strong.
The world would be a worse place if people weren't allowed to make these kinds of choices for themselves...
But the world would be a better place if people were better able to find ways to understand and cope with their fear. All too often we are manipulated by it.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
This is too far, way too far. Attempting to charge parents for neglect when they absolutely did the right thing! If it were my kids, they'd be walking too. This world is becoming more retarded by the day.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
My mother let me stay home from school because I was always sick (i.e., overweight, high blood pressure, and ulcers) and I spent three years on probabtion for truancy. After I got off probation, the probation officer discovered that my family rented the really nice two-story house that we lived in. He told my mother he would have taken me away if he had known we were renters. Since we didn't directly pay his salary through county property taxes, we had less rights as renters than owners in his eyes. I doubt that would hold up in a court of law.
I think you know 120 yards is only used popularly in the USian scale
Or in Canada it would be 150 yards (110 yards for the playing surface, and 20 yards for each end zone). I still don't understand how the damned yanks can play on such a postage stamp of a field...
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I had to walk to elementary school, also in Maryland. The rule was if you lived less than a mile away, you had to walk. I lived .98. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever once had an issue. What's up with these pussies?
So I used to walk about 2 miles to school and back most days when I was between 8-10 years old. Never a problem. Sure, one person's anecdote is no preponderance of evidence, but I'm with the Meitiv's on this one.
At heart of this issue is that most people's *first response* is to fucking call the police. The "mandatory reporter" couldn't have, oh maybe, gone and talked to the children _first_, and THEN talked to the parents, instead of cowardly calling the police from the secrecy of their home & making it a legal issue.
THIS is was Soviet Russia was like, everyone snitching on everyone until no one had friends they could trust, and everybody went neurotic from the isolation.
The cops/CPS assumption that the caller is right and the parents are automatically at fault is *definitely* a problem too. Shades of the police state.
According to the Montgomery County school website, having the kids walk a mile with a sibling is within normal community standards, and in line with guidelines set forth by the county itself.
(See www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/parents/basics/transportation/ )
In Montgomery County where this occurred, school bus transportation is only provided for elementary school children who live further than 1mi from school, and for middle schoolers (11yo+) further than 1.5mi. The county's guidance for elementary school kids walking 1 mile or less is "Younger walkers are encouraged to walk to and from school with siblings, older children from their neighborhood, or parents. At many schools, Montgomery County crossing guards help walkers cross at busy intersections near the school. In most elementary schools, student safety patrols guide younger children in crossing smaller neighborhood streets."
I don't see how CPS has a leg to stand on here; the children were simply practicing what they are expected to do by the county school system itself.
I think not...(*poof*)
The Dutch redesigned their cities to make it safe for children to have independence and freedom. Why not the US? On *average *, Dutch kids make their own way to and from school from the age of 8 and a half: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/search/label/school%20travel
Wondered how long it would take for someone to play the Rape Card. Appeal to Emotion is a logical fallacy. Claiming the poster said that it was "no big deal" is a straw man and bordering on ad hominem. You cite examples of non-stereotypical kidnappings without actually citing them ("Read the examples of so-called "non-stereotypical" kidnappings."). There's a name for that too but I don't recall it. Statistics are statistics. 58,000 out of 72M children is an exceedingly small amount and is statistically unlikely. One could argue even statistically insignificant. Statistics are cold since they are devoid of emotion and this is why you try to derail the conversation by appealing to emotion since that is what humans operate on. Also, stating "but 58,000 is a very large number of crimes" & "That is a disturbing statistic in a so-called western, civilized society" is implying to the audience that "even if one life is saved by $whatever it'll be worth it" which has been proven time and time again to never be worth it.
I also have issues with the " CPS/DCFS is out to get you " line of thinking.
I live in Salt Lake City Utah, which as many of you know, is the home of the Mormon religion, with a greater majority of the populace being of this faith.
I also have two small children, a 6 year old son, and a 4 year old daughter, who I am primary custodian of. First off, It is nearly UNHEARD of in the great " Mother is a Saint " state of Utah for a Father to even land Joint custody unless its suggested by the mother in the divorce decree, and the likelihood of a father being granted primary custody of the children is only slightly more common then Unicorns.
I was accused of abuse of my children, not once, not twice, not even three times, but a total of 7 times JUST in the year 2014 alone. In January of last year I was served with a notice to appear before the court for a Protective order hearing. That same week, I was contacted by a DCFS investigator, who asked me a couple very basic questions, and then asked if I would be willing to provide the contact information for a few other people who could collaborate my side, Which I very politely provided. After everyone in my family, and many friends, along with the Custody case Custody Evaluator ( we were in the middle of a NASTY custody battle at the time ) were contacted, DCFS did something wonderful after that.
They went to my son's school, and pulled him from class, and questioned him without his mothers consent ( as they had mine ) as he was collaborating all of her statements of abuse with the investigators, and it came out during THIS questioning, that the mother had coached him on everything to say, how to say it, and how scared to act when being asked these questions. While sitting in the court room for the Protective order hearing the mother had requested, to say in the least that the look of shock and hatred she shot me from across the room when the DCFS agent reported that after having an uninfluenced communication with the child, and the child had not only recanted all statements of abuse, but stated clearly and honestly that his mother was the one responsible for the claims, was entirely worth the cost of having a good lawyer. The judge immediately dismissed the ex parte protective order she had already granted, and dismissed the protective order request.
A similar event happened in March, Mother reports abuse, I get a phone call from DCFS, turns out since this isnt the first time, the previous investigator has now permanently been assigned to handle cases involving my children, Child has " collaborated " the abuses again, Rinse and repeat the pull him out of class tactic, everything is recanted, and mom is the guilty party. In April we go to mediation for Custody, the Evaluator informs the mother due to the previous two false reports, that unless she accepts the joint custody agreement I wrote for her, that the evaluators own recommendations of father having SOLE custody will be entered into the court as the recommendation, and here in Utah what the eval says is what happens. So she agrees, as part of this agreement it is written that any false or malicious reports of abuse to DCFS by either parent will be contempt of the order if a Parent time coordinator does not sign off on the charges before they are made.
That threat kept her in line for exactly 4 months, In September, she reported me not once, not twice, but three times for abuse and neglect, stemming from made up accusations that had supposedly happened in June and July. There were 3 more protective orders filed and had hearings between Sept and Dec 2014, and a restraining order hearing. She then also filed an emergency request for relief asking that the children be remanded to her sole custody based on the DCFS investigation, and a Motion to modify the settlement granting her permanent sole custody.
All of this, was dropped or dismissed except the Motion to Modify. And the reason it was dropped, is because DCFS found in every single instance of reported abuse, that infact no abuse
Killing the leader is ALWAYS an option. Do you know how many lives, how much money, and how much reputation we would have saved if we would have simply snipered Saddam during the first Gulf War?
The fact that your sister-in-law is addicted to heroines is hawt. The fact her son is also addicted to heroines is normal. Carry on!
The reason they send children on first errands at 5 or 6 and teach independence is so they can start work right away in the sweatshops.
^^^thatsracist.gif
CITIZEN! HALT AND PLACE YOUR HANDS IN THE YELLOW CIRCLES! You are in violation of ordinance 237.4 subsection C- alcohol is not permitted within 50 words of minors. Your post placed "kids" and "beer" at 31 words apart. You will momentarily be escorted to an approved Justice Facility to await trial. Resistance will result in summary execution.
yes, and the name of that room is "the Basement"
Does that explains Flutie's success as a Stamp(eder)!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Has anyone else noticed we are taking advice about children walking alone from a user named "Jaywalk"? What's next? Taking security and travel advice from "TotallyNotaRapist"?
You should have, and probably meant to, say "sight". In this context though, they may be shot on site. As a 1337 Grammar Nazi, you caused a cranial segfault and forced me to reboot. This has got to be a /. first!
So you are telling us that you have had far more than 3 fires? You have seen your daughter's escape demonstrated to you, personally, 3 times that you admit to, and you still think she's more likely to DIAF? You are dumb and should feel dumb for being dumb, dumbass.
captcha: interact
Society, obviously, disagrees with you, but then again it's always about yer freedumbs. We tried to do something about obesity, but then you guys screamed "muh freedumbs" when we limited soft drink consumption. Well what the fuck is it? Oh I know, we can trust you to do the right thing, but everyone else needs to be supervised right?
That's a non-issue, guy. See, children's brains are underdeveloped which causes an Out-of-memory crash with systemd. Minimum specifications to run systemd are at least 18MB of memory with optimal performance not occurring until at least 21MB. They have nothing to fear :D
/., how droll.
EDIT: Nothing to fear but the captcha: salami.....how droll,
I wish that DPRM would program you guys in the proper use of hyphens, commas, and capital letters.
Police showing up with kids, understandable, although still a bit over-the-top. But CPS showing up and making threats? Really? In any small, mid-west town, it would be perfectly normal behavior to have kids walk home from school on their own (if less than 1 mile). What is this world coming to? :(
I was walking 3 miles with my 7 year old sister when I was 9. Wow how the world has changed!
Here kids starting from 4+ must walk to and from Kindergarten or school. In kindergarten and first two grades no wheels are allowed. Later self powered wheels are acceptable (bicycle, skateboard)
Something a lot of readers may not realize is that Silver Spring is part of an unnamed multi-million person metropolis mostly packed inside the Washington DC Beltway like a kilo of shite in a 500 ml bag. It extends vertically by a dozen stories above ground and up to half a dozen underground.
If one in twenty Americans is a sociopath--and I think that's a very low estimate--then every day those kids have to walk home among a regiment of 450 Bundys, Dahmers, Limbaughs and Cheneys.
Now, the thing of it is that those kids ARE going to get out there among those monsters, whether the parents or Maryland's creaky bureaucracy say they can or not. There WILL be times when those kids are alone, vulnerable, and wide open to the criminals among them.
So preventing them from going out does not protect or prepare them for the monsters in their midst, either. Maybe learning life in the gutter does.
As an educator I see so many situations in which CPS is involved, but they seemingly do nothing that actually helps the children. They end up being stuck in homes with neglectful guardians, and CPS just checks in to make sure the kids are alive. It takes a lot...I mean A LOT around here to be removed. I have heard horror stories and the children are still remaining in the home. These people must be in an area where CPS agents have little to do.
ME TOO! Who invented this demented prayer? Does Jesus wants all childrens' last thoughts every night of their own death?
And what is THIS happy shit:
"But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven."
Was the rabbi a PedoBear?
I think the government needs to seize control of all child rearing and do what is in their best interest. I also think we need Universal healthcare, open borders, strict gun control and more taxes to encourage growth in the economy. This is the kind of sh..t most of you in the NE states elect your nanny state dictator democrats to do though,, so why would you whine about the obvious outcome when you voted the idiots in to do just that? They say leadership starts at the top, and look no further than your idiot n chief parked next door in the white house,, or the golf course. Reap what you sow.
This is fucking disgusting. We make a big stink about "letting parents be able to raise their kids".
Except when a handful of parents do the right thing. Helicopter parenting is borderline abuse.
My father, a Captain in the Air Force, was stationed at Sidi Slimane Air Base, Morocco, Africa, in 1953/1954. A Strategic Air Command base, the rules should have been much more strict, but...I rode my bicycle all over the Atlantic coast, at Media Plage, (French for White Beach). the French Algerian War was in full swing, the French Moroccan War was in the terror pre-war phase, with French Foreign Legion unitscamped in small tents, near our home. I rode for miles, gone much of the day on Saturdays, Sundays, playing with kids who were Arabs, Beduin, French. None of us spoke the languages of the others... When the two USAF MPs were 'accidently' murdered by the rebels, all the US military families were ordered to move into base housing, 30 miles away. New territoty for this 7 year old to explore, as I rode off base, right through the gates! One Saturday, I was met an hour away from home, by a Sirocco, aka, Hurricane! Cat 3 winds gusting to Cat 4, made me walk my bicycle, for about 15 miles, to arrive home very wet, but, happy! Never stopped my adventures, and did a 20 year USAF career, serving in 15 nations, and, with millions of others, caused extreme anxiety for all America's enemies. Now, I am olderthan most of you, and consider all the sissy rules as stupid paranoia, but, do have my many firearms locked and loaded, because rapid response, and calm resolve, from making a call, to taking out a perp or thug with one shot, one kill accuracy, is my forte. Not paranoid, just prepared. MOLON LABE! Now, back to fixing up computers with the install of Linux Mint, for all the kids, FreeNAS, PC BSD, and more, for all the newbies. FLOSS ONLY, since 1997!
what bothers me most is that often times the workers themselves are not married, much less parents themselves. they are full of 'book' knowledge on how things should be, but have never dealt with these situations in the 'real' world.
from parents to the State. no change in the actual legal status of children, only who gets to own them. just like the State more and more owns all its adult citizenry. Its the commodifying of everything, the end result of the ownership myth, key to patriarchy and capitalism (which of course includes "state capitalism", or communism). There is no way out of this trap, we will have to hit bottom, probably global warming, police states, and billions dead, before we can wake up. sorry, kids, that you were born in the Kali Yuga. hope you can forgive your ancestors for our inability to rise above our base instincts.
They love their children enough to let them walk home, things that were common enough in small town American a few years ago. Their was a time when kids were home for supper and that was the rule. "Go off and play but be back for supper!" Whatever happened to small town America? Whatever happened to a time when kids could play without fear and the fear of government oversight?
Are we so far down the road where child protective services has to be involved in every decision? I think not.
God bless America. As Tiny Tim would say, "God bless us everyone."
better known as Pudsey.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them
Who would call the police to report something mundane as children walking home from school? And what kind of police officer responds to such a report?
American football fields are regulation 120 yards long including the end zones. Canadian football fields are 130 yards. Soccer fields are 100-120 yards (yes, the FIFA regulations have that miuch latitude). You could actually chalk a soccer pitch on an American football field without marking down the length of the pitch and be FIFA legal.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
If this is justified the police department needs to
be sacked.
Just living in a neighborhood where a ten year old and younger sibling
cannot take a 20 min walk is scary to the extreme and tells me that
"protective" services are in order and that these parents qualify for
a concealed carry permit to supplement an open carry of a 12-Gauge
shotgun.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Only one president never signed a single executive order which was Harrison who went 30 days in office before dying.
So try a new talking point that won't make you look so stupid.
By the time I was in the 4th grade I was not only walking to school/home on my own but would scale the fence of the road where it passed 30 feet above a creek, sidle long the open side of the fence to reach the embankment of the creek and walk around to the backside of a park before crossing a field to get to the school playground. My Summers were spent in that very same creek, unsupervised, catching tadpoles and playing in the mud. No wonder recent generations lack self esteem.
Nanny State
http://petergraceonline.com/20...
We are all humans. We grow within our Mothers and are born and begin our development over time outside our mothers. Independence grows over time.
As a young person near Boston, I used to take myself into the Boston Science Museum on Saturdays each weekend. I was not accompanied by another family member. I used the Mattapan High Speed Trolley and Red Line and then the Green Line to get to Science Park. I did this almost every weekend between the ages of 7 and 13.
My Route.
At age 7, I once took my younger siblings with me to see Woody Allenâ(TM)s âTake the Money and Runâ. It was rated âMâ(TM).
I used to ride my bicycle around Milton, MA until the street lights came on during the summer. At Age 13 I rode my bicycle from Milton MA to North Falmouth MA. Later I participated in Centuries.
The likelihood of violence being inflicted upon any child is very low, but increases when the violence is being inflicted by another child. Bad stuff does happen, and the media does a terrific job of giving us the sordid details, but Iâ(TM)ve never seen them provide an analysis of the likelihood of the event happening to any individual. Itâ(TM)s sad certainly, but do we want to be total helicopter parents and restrict the development of the independence of our youth?
My kids are young people and growing older. They have their issues, sometimes not paying attention to their personal grooming. We had to visit DHS once when my youngest was reported for not changing his clothes and cleaning his nails. We have to pick our battles. Just getting him to bed can be a challenge.
Young people make mistakes. Thatâ(TM)s one way that they grow and learn. Kids even do criminal acts. Rather than imprison them or take them away from their parents, how about educating all parties involved. Itâ(TM)s now known that a young personâ(TM)s brain isnâ(TM)t fully developed till about 24 years old. Some consideration should be given to young persons and educating them about good behavior rather then reinforcing bad behavior by placing the in Prison .
Recent news show people calling police about a solitary child at the park or taking the subway by themselves. Donâ(TM)t they remember being children themselves? I do.
Please be Good, not Evil.
God Bless America, Please.
Adam Selene
Creative Commons License
Nanny State by Adam Selene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Peter AI6PG