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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.
... 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.
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"
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
Your parents have been ready for long time, now.
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.
.
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.
Matters to me.
I read this site for news about technology and my rights.
When society imposes upon me the way in which I choose to raise my children, especially when that imposition results in a legal liability, I think that sort of thing matters.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
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.
A: Because it's programming. Duh.
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.
Slashdot has posted stories like this for more than a decade.
It's been broken and invalid for at least 13 years. No one gives a shit, at least those that can fix it.
Well someone fucked it up good and proper in the last 2 days. The layout is now totally borked on Safari 6.1, whereas at the start of the week it was perfectly fine.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
football
You mean handegg.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Works great in Internet Explorer!
That's not really a compliment.
But what if it was the systemd which threatens the poor children on their walk?
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...
Guess your one of those smarter than the rest of the world techs, nerds etc. A colleague confining with others on his life matters and you want to bust balls about how tech Davy you are. 15 maybe? Damn man grow up.
The irony is strong with this one.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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...
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?
Yeah, but it's different in Australia. By they time you're ten, you've survived dingoes, death adders, recluse spiders, great white sharks, and deadly post-apoc race-cars covered in spikes. To the average pedo, you're not low-hanging fruit.
The is this really cool invention we had way back before it wasn't cool to let kids play on your lawn. It is called don't fucking click the link.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
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
Go in any of those "evil socialist" countries that have all those things, and see if parents get in trouble for letting a kid walk a mile. It has nothing to do with it.
This is a state of black/white strong opinion. Thats where the problem lies and why shit like this happens.
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.
... this is not
I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that the curiosity that led me to "explore" my neighborhood as a child also led me to explore tech later on.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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.
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.
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'm a little sad that Free Range parenting is a "thing" now. When I grew up (in the 70s), almost every kid was raised free range. From a very young age we walked or cycled to school. If we wanted to go swim, play soccer or see a movie, our parents wouldn't take us; we'd cycle there instead. The notion of "play dates" didn't exist except perhaps for toddlers; most of our after school time was unstructured and if you wanted to play with friends, you just went. Our parents taught us early on how to take the train to see our grandparents. The one rule our parents imposed was "home before dark". And all of this was the norm; parents didn't drive their kids anywhere unless the route was very long or dangerous.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I think this is more suited for Facebook than Slashdot
Well, a pedo and a bear, that's a dangerous combination...
Ezekiel 23:20
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
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.
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.
apparently nothing, or did anything bad happen to you? as violent crimes have about halved since then, it should be okay to do this more than ever.
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...
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.
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*)