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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."
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. =====
It kinda is.
I attribute my total nerdiness to being raised "free range". I was mixing farm chemicals, putting together mechanical graders for fruit classification, architect and building water piping to get water from A to B (trenches go deep when dug by hand), etc. Parents were not around for large periods on time.
Mind you, this was a thousand kilometres from the nearest capital city in Australia. Right out in the bush. Shit was pretty wild there.
I'm a mathematician now. Well, with a good helping of computer science. Did ten years of supercomputing before starting my own tech company.
Yeah, lock those parents up for neglect.
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So... we've managed to replace helicopter parenting with helicopter government.
We lived on a mountain in Virginia. When I was in second grade the neighbor kid and I would go hiking up the mountain, following streams and looking for waterfalls. I remember one waterfall we found, probably 70 feet high. We found a way to climb up the sides, got to the top, and found these big boulders. We'd roll the boulders off the top of the fall and listen to them crack on the rocks far below. We'd be out doing that all day long.
Later we moved to a lake and I would just disappear for the day exploring the surrounding are. This was life in the country.
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
In the interests of discussing facts rather than emotional reactions, does anyone know:
(a) whether the CPS worker was actually authorised to act in that way (i.e., following official procedures and lawfully permitted)
(b) what legal weight the parents signing such an agreement in that situation would have had, and
(c) whether the CPS worker, or someone they immediately contacted, would have had the legal authority to immediately remove the children forcibly in that situation if the parents had refused to sign?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I a situation like that I would also write on the document that "I am signing this document under duress."
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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 and gets the parents to come in and help by watching the children from a distance. Adults are not allowed to help the children unless they get into serious difficulty.
By that age, many Japanese children are already walking home on their own. Granted, Japan is much safer than most parts of the US, but even so it demonstrates how in the west we treat children as far less capable than they actually are. It's not just respnsibilities and safety either, they consider children's emotions to be genuine and to be respected, rather than trivialized and ignored or even punished like the west does.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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
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.
This is just ridiculous. I used to walk or ride my bike to and from school every day from when I was in third grade onward, so about the same age. The distance was about a mile. I remember the library being within the limits set of where I could bike by myself, and that was probably about a mile, if not a little more. This was in a suburban area.
This relates to a previous story I posted in an unrelated thread about the police: I live in an urban area, and I've been stopped more than once by police who warned me that it was dangerous to walk alone, in the middle of the day, IN MY OWN NEIGHBORHOOD (I guess because I'm white). I'm clearly a grown woman, in my thirties. Let individuals make their own choices. Sheesh. We don't need all these danger mongers. Yes, bad things DO happen, but in reality it's just not that often.
No, the CPS will take your kids which is far worse.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
I have had the equivalent agency in my state threaten to take my children. They have never been abused, neglected, or mistreated in any fashion. However, in my state, it is illegal for you to have more than one child. Well, effectively anyway. It is illegal for you to be on a different level of your house than your child, and we had twins and another girl a year older. In order to obey the law, you would have to carry all three of them with you when you put one of them to bed.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
CPS doesn't beat the shit out of you, kill you and then say it was your own fault.
You are obviously someone that has never had the threat of having your hours old son taken from you on the word of a Nurse that heard something said out of context by a woman in the midst of a delivery that was not going as desired/expected and then misreported the whole thing. Then to have to start dealing with all of that when you haven't slept in 40 hours and your wife is still under the effects of the anesthesia and pain killers from her emergency c-section. I quite literally laughed at the CPS person due to the absurdity of it all and it took awhile to sink in how serious the situation was.
In the other case that I mentioned, just what type of bond do you think that kid is going to have with it's parents that it barely saw for the first two years of it's life. What long term impacts is that going to have on the kid's life and relationship with it's parents? What about the long term impact to the parents?
I'll take a beating or being killed by cops any day as there is at least a chance (however slim that might be) of justice. With CPS there is only misery if you don't play along (not that playing along is a treat) and there is zero recourse.
Sadly by this going public I expect CPS to be up in this family's affairs for years to come. They may not actually lose the children, but that won't negate the pain and frustration of having to deal with CPS with "if you don't do this, we'll take the children" being their goto response for any question.
Every town/city in the US is different as far as risk. That said, the risk that a child will be kidnapped is not zero.
My daughter was kidnapped*. She was 10 years old at the time. I feel I have "some" input to offer...
I feel the parents were stupid to allow their children at this age to walk that distance alone. My opinion of this can be argued to be colored by the events in my families life, yes. Yet I believe I'm right on this issue. I also believe that the decision to allow their children to do this was THEIR choice. The kids were together which is a plus. The eldest was 10 years old which fills me with concern. I do not believe they irresponsibility put their children in danger to the level of calling CPS on them. This was just over kill.
Background: At 10 years old I was getting up at 4:30 in the morning to deliver newspapers (1980's Los Angeles County). I would never allow my children to do this today. I also walked and/or rode a bike to/from school from 3rd grade-9th grade. The distances were all less than 2 miles. I got a ride TO high school (10th-12th) and took a bus back -- it was a hike. I'd be hard pressed to allow my kids to go to/from school on their own before high-school.
*My daughter was recovered some 12 hours later alive. The monster who took her is facing 3 life sentences + 300+ years on various counts and has yet to go to trial (probably will happen within the next 3-4 months)
I've seen Swiss kids go to school all by themselves - tiny little kids, huge backpacks, no parents - and everyone looks out for them. Switzerland has its faults (and a terrifying powerful currency), but , speaking as a non-Swiss, it's a truly great country. Also, good beer!
The idea that parents are unanimously treated like villains is overplayed. Anyone fucks with your parenting, and you're probably not going to report it as a good experience.
Having rased one child with sever emotional difficulties to adulthood, we've had a couple run-ins with CPS.
The 6'4 200# 15-year-old kid got in a pushing match with his 6'4 300# biological father outside the school. A teacher saw it and was obligated to report it. CPS talked to my wife in person and made a round of phone calls to everyone else involved including myself (stepdad). The person who called me asked some fairly simple questions about what our home-life was like, and satisfied we weren't alcoholic abusers, they closed their investigation with a finding of what I can only describe as "shit happens, but this isn't a problem."
Once I separated the emotion and nanny-state second-guessing of my parenting (in a situation I was barely involved with) from the reality of the situation, all we ended up having was a quick phone call with a woman who wanted to make sure our kid wasn't in any sort of direct harm.
So, no, I don't believe that parents are assumed to be villains until proven good.