Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Free-range Parenting vs. the Nanny State
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv want to teach their kids self-reliance and responsibility the same way parents have for millennia. By giving them a little space.
Their kids, ages 6 and 10, are regularly allowed to walk to and from a nearby park without mommy and daddy there to hand them fresh juice boxes, smother them in hand sanitizer, and re-adjust their safety helmets every five minutes. You know, the same way we were all raised.
But this won’t do in Silver Spring, Md. A “concerned citizen” witnessed the shocking sight of two children strolling through a neighborhood and called the police. The cops drove the kids home and notified Child Protective Services of what would have been called “parenting” in every generation but our own. That was four months ago but the local government upped the ante Sunday.
Once again, a neighborhood busybody called 911 because kids were caught walking without a permit. The police swung by, but instead of bringing the kids home, they turned them over to CPS. The parents weren’t able to bring their kids home until 10:30 that night and only then after they signed “a temporary safety plan saying their children would be supervised at all times until a follow-up visit.”
“This morning my daughter wanted to go play in the yard and I couldn’t let her out because I was making breakfast,” Danielle Meitiv said. “Are they prisoners? She’s 6 and she’s not allowed to play in the yard?”
“It’s beyond ridiculous,” Danielle Meitiv said Monday. “The world is safer today, and yet we imprison our children inside and wonder why they’re obese and have no focus.”
The Meitivs were notified in a February letter that they had been found responsible for “unsubstantiated neglect,” a ruling that’s made when there’s some information supporting child neglect, seemingly credible reports disagree or there isn’t enough information for a conclusion.
Capt. Paul Stark, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Police Department, said the agency and Child Protective Services are conducting a joint investigation of the Meitivs. Once that is finished, a decision will be made about whether any charges will be filed against the couple, he said.
“Child Protective Services has succeeded in making me terrified of letting my children out,” she said. “Nothing that has happened so far has convinced me that children don’t need independence and freedom, except that they’ll be harassed by police and CPS.”
I think these parents should be given a medal, not a citation. What say you, Ricochetti?
Published in General
I have many kids, some in that range. They walk around a lot, and my neighborhood is much tougher than Silver Spring. The risk is not, really, abduction. The risk is being mugged, and my kids are taught how to avoid getting into those situations.
I was raised the way you were, in Montgomery Co., MD, as it happens.
You offer the quoted comments as though they were objective facts. Actually, they are completely subjective, and probably hard to justify rationally.
Ryan: sorry. Am on my iPad so I can’t quote.
One sister got the knock on the door after one son broke his leg after being hit by a car and three weeks later her daughter broke an arm doing a cartwheel. Apparently two “traumas” flags a family. My best friend got a visit after being reported by a shopkeeper as her toddler had a bruise on his forehead. One flag, one phone call, andsomeone was at their door.
I’m not necessarily complaining that they got visits. I’m complaining because it’s not unusual for me to read stories about children being found living in deplorable conditions and there having been multiple reports to CPS. The family related to the young disabled man abandoned by his mother in the woods had been fighting for custody.
Good conversation. And Tommy—you’re right. It depends a lot on the individual kids, the neighborhood and, if I may say so, the circumstances of the parents. Had I not been widowed, the kids probably would’ve gotten a lot more attention and supervision than they did because there would have been two of us around to provide it.
Having said that, two notes;
1.) Bad things happened to kids when we were young. I was sexually abused by a neighbor/employee, a friend of mine was raped by a man who snatched him from unsupervised play in a park, kids got run over by cars (remember the bouncing-ball signs?) another playmate’s older brother was killed falling out of his treehouse.
2.) I do think that in the 1980s, horror stories made us particularly fearful of sexual abuse and the very sad part about that is that ordinary adults (especially men) are, or feel, proscribed from interacting with children except under very formal, supervised conditions. This deprives kids of the adult relationships necessary for their development, and speaking as the mother of fatherless children, discourages men from undertaking the informal, substitute “fathering” that my kids desperately wanted and craved.
The above “stranger danger” stuff also discourages people (again, especially men) from feeling they have the right and duty to intervene when they see children who might need help. The woman who stopped her car and told my boy to take his frost bidden fingers home quick was being part of that “village” that Hillary used to tell us was so necessary for rearing a child. HRC was right—it does take a village, but an actual village, one full of interested neighbors. Otherwise the CPS, police and other professionals become the first line of defense rather than the last.
BTW—I just talked to a grandmother from church who volunteers at the elementary school helping little kids learn to read. She tells me she isn’t allowed to touch the children. At all. Even though the most natural way to let a child read to you is to sit beside that child, or even have the child on your lap, she isn’t allowed to do this. They have to sit at a table, no touching. When one of the kids asks to sit on her lap, or leans against her, she has to discourage the kid. If he or she asks why, she’s supposed to say “because it isn’t safe.”
I think, Busy Body Neighbor often had an eye on the kids in the bad old days too.
And in the main, that was a very good thing.
The difference is that BBN (who was usually a stay-at-home-mom, with kids of her own, in the days when that was the norm) was an extension of the parents and her relationship to the kids was authoritative. She didn’t need to call child services or the police if she saw the kids playing peacefully in the park where she was walking the baby. And if the little turds were throwing stones at the dog or running out into the middle of the road after the ball, she didn’t need to call the authorities then, either–she could wade in and take care of it herself, safe in the assurance that society and the parents would back her up.
Try that now, and lawsuits against, and arrests of Mrs Busybody are the more likely outcome–for bullying, threatening, interfering, aggressing, terrorizing, and worse.
But back in the days when the vast majority of people were on the same page as to what was acceptable and what wasn’t, and what kids could do and what they couldn’t, people could be pretty sure that their values (note: not their race, their ethnicity, their religion, or their politics; rather, their values) would be quite similar to those of the parents, and they would know what should be done, or even if anything should be done.
In a perverse sort of way, the ‘it takes a village’ analogy worked rather well in bygone days.
Now, there’s only Big Brother.
Ouch!! That hurt.
Look – I know on all community standards you are going to be on a slippery slope, but you can’t have none when it comes to parenting. The scale has to slide sometimes.
Are you telling me you have 100% deference to all parenting decisions? I know you don’t.
If some parents decided to vacation for a week and leave a 3 and 2 year old at home with plenty to eat, you’d probably think an intervention was needed there.
A nice post on the legal issues below. I don’t think the parents should sue, they should file kidnapping charges, as that’s what happened:
“…Forcibly detaining elementary school-aged kids for walking by themselves in a safe, middle-class neighborhood doesn’t even come close to meeting the necessary standard. Statistically, such walking is extremely safe, and probably less dangerous than police officers’ actions in forcibly detaining the children and driving them to a CPS office. According to the Center for Disease Control, car accidents are the leading cause of death among small children; riding in a car as a passenger is far more dangerous for kids than walking in most neighborhoods. Far from “protecting” the two children, the police and the CPS probably put them at greater risk than they were exposed to before (though the risk was still very low in an absolute sense). The Meitivs’ parenting practices are also much safer than numerous typical childhood activities, such as participating in contact sports like basketball and hockey, or going downhill skiing. If the CPS can force parents to stop letting their children walk home from the park, it can similarly target every other comparably risky activity, including numerous sports, and even driving the children in a car.
“The bottom line is that the CPS’ actions here seem to be the result of exactly the kind of “mere disagreement” with parental choices that the Supreme Court specifically barred as a basis for overriding parents’ constitutional right to direct their children’s upbringing….”
Statistics do not support this assertion. In fact, stranger kidnappings have plummeted since the 1970’s. They live in our popular imagination, but really aren’t a reason to parent differently. In fact, the reduction would be a reason to be more lax, not less.
Yup. Sadly, this is an issue that has bipartisan consensus on the side of illiberal nanny state interventions, I read 85% somewhere. I have a 2 year old, and plan on some sort of free ranging, but my sister has a 15 and 9 year old and won’t let either of them stay at home alone. Seriously. I think I was watching her when I was 10. It’s insanity. The level of angst and intervention is nowhere near the risk.
Why a lone 6 year old? Why choose such an extreme example? Perhaps you’d like to clarify that this 6 year old is walking home form the park in the ghetto at night. *cough* straw man *cough* In Illinois, i think the legal age your child may stay home alone is either 12 or 14, both ridiculous. We’ve lost our collective minds. Even if you choose to parent in your own way, what right do you have to make a determination for my child?
I was watching my brother and sister when I was 13 years old, and babysitting other people’s kids when I was 15. Not giving the child any responsibility at all is going to have a big effect later on.