Slashdot Mirror
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 ?
... 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"
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. =====
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.
A: Because it's programming. Duh.
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.
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.
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
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 sad thing is that this probably happened in a mid-level neighborhood. If it was a poor slum the police wouldn't care if the kids walked 5 miles under snow and surrounded by gang members.
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 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.
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.
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.
There's a neighborhood "liveability" metric called the Popsicle Test: can a kid get to a store on her own, buy a popsicle, and get home again before it melts?
Today, unlike before WWII, most residential neighborhoods in the USA probably won't pass this liveability test. What's worse is we simply aren't allowed to build neighborhoods like that anymore because small neighborhood corner stores violate single-use zoning laws, and because we've decided that moving auto traffic quickly is more important than pedestrian safety. (In fact, they removed roadside trees because motorists kept hitting them. Now motorists hit pedestrians instead. How's that for progress?) So we've legislated our own independence away.
"So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause."
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.