When statistics clearly show that our country is safer than it used to be, should parents need to fear the trouble they might reap for letting their kids do things by themselves?
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were bucking the trend of helicoptering and mindfully allowing their kids some freedom, while the state mindlessly accused them of neglect and put them through the child protective services ringer.12 “I was kind of horrified,” Danielle Meitiv told the Washington Post. “You try as a parent to do what’s right. Parents try so hard. Even though I know [the State is] wrong, it’s a painful judgment.”13
Meitiv was referring to a finding of “unsubstantiated” child neglect stemming from their decision to allow their 10-year-old son, Rafi, and six-year-old daughter, Dvora, to walk home alone. Someone called 911, and police responded to seeing the children unaccompanied. And even after the kids explained that nothing was wrong, they were still hauled home, where police and child protective services confronted the parents for allowing their kids some freedom of movement.
Slate’s Hanna Rosin, who has written about the problems with overprotective parenting, like many others who commented on the case, was upset with the decision by Maryland’s Child Protective Services. Rosin has become something of an advocate for letting kids gain experience and deal with risk, and she argues these decisions should be up to parents. Here, the child-welfare authorities had a different idea.
“What they learned from the latest CPS decision,” Rosin writes of her discussion with Meitiv, “is that ‘teaching independence clearly IS a crime.’” As Meitiv explained it, “the charge means ‘something happened but kids were not at substantial risk.’ Why then, she reasonably asks, ‘find us responsible for neglect?’” Rosin correctly points out that “a charge of ‘unsubstantiated’ is not quite as definitively closed as ‘ruled out.’ (The third option is ‘indicated,’ the equivalent of guilty.)” And leaving that door open is going to put the Meitivs in a difficult position. Rosin rightly demands,
CPS officials did not say they would keep an eye on the Meitivs. But now they have a charge of child neglect in their file. . . . They believe strongly that children should be able to roam the neighborhood unsupervised. But they no doubt believe even more strongly that they don’t want to be at any risk of having their children taken away from them for a second charge of neglect. Why on earth should the state have any right to put them in that predicament?14
Rosin was clearly reading the tea leaves, because there was a second incident in April 2015, when the Meitivs’ two children were lured into a police cruiser just a third of a mile from home with promises of returning them to their parents. Instead, the kids were kept in the police car for hours and delivered to CPS while they were denied all requests to call their mother and father. When the Meitivs were finally notified that CPS had their kids and they went to pick them up, officials offered no explanation for why they’d been picked up or why the parents hadn’t been informed for five hours. Seems the nanny state doesn’t like dissent or challenges to its authority. (We’ll see another case of this type of vindictiveness in Chapter 5, “The War on Fun.”)
A group called Empower Kids Maryland was formed in response. The idea: To raise awareness among parents about encouraging “children to become independent, confident young adults with sound, non-fear-based judgment about the level of risk that will surround them in today’s world,” according to their website. Initially the group was focused on changing the laws in Maryland that were used to punish parents like the Meitivs. As cofounder Russell Max Simon explained it to me when we spoke in 2015, his kids play at the same playground as the Meitiv children, and he wants to raise independent children without government oversight or intervention. “Enough is enough,” Simon told me. “Our focus is going to be working through the legislative process” to change the rules about children outside unsupervised. “This [issue] should cross political lines. It is a parental-rights issue not a right-left issue. I would think that parents would have more control over their kids. And I would hope that the politicians would agree” that the response to the Meitivs was “a waste of resources.”
The case exemplifies the extent of the problem because Maryland authorities felt unrestrained enough to interpret the Meitiv’s “crime” from words that aren’t part of the applicable law. The rule had stated that children under 8 are prohibited from being unattended in a dwelling or car and that a person must be at least 13 years old to supervise a child under 8. There is no reference to being outside, and in this case there was no “supervising” going on. The 10-year-old was walking with his 6-year-old sister, not babysitting her.
On the bright side, the attention paid to the Meitiv case has been positive for the family; they’ve heard from CPS that they’ve been cleared of charges from the initial intervention. But any relief has to be tempered by the realization that it was only through very public and hard-fought resistance of the state authorities that CPS was pushed into doing the right thing. How many parents are going to have the self-confidence to reject state intervention? It is important to recognize that the Meitivs’ got more attention than most of these cases. More often than not, CPS isn’t forced to defend itself in the media, so reform is often slow or nonexistent. It is also good news that the advocacy group cofounded by Simon has now been renamed Empower Kids America and has broadened its mandate to include the rest of the country. The growth of groups and grass-roots activists in favor of parental discretion is all to the good. And there is other important work being done as well.
In Illinois, an organization called the Family Defense Center researched the issue of “inadequate supervision” child-neglect claims—similar to the charges against the Meitivs—and concluded that the Maryland case was both unique and typical. Unique because of all the media attention, which most families caught in an unnecessary CPS investigation don’t receive. And typical because there are so many of this same type of accusation. The Family Defense Center report effectively stated the problem:
The range of cases that may come to the attention of child welfare authorities is so broad that child abuse reporters, parents, and their advocates, as well as judges and policy makers are unable to clearly and consistently use existing law and policy to distinguish reasonable parenting from child neglect. . . . [P]arents are swept into the system and labeled at fault when they have made reasonable parenting decisions. Child welfare system resources are currently being devoted to the investigations of neglect allegations, such as inadequate supervision, where children are not at risk. This means fewer resources to investigate and indicate the serious cases of neglect or abuse.15
When definitions of a problem get too vague, more and more cases will occur; and when the laws are badly written or misapplied, innocent families are the ones who suffer. (We’ll discuss problems with CPS lack of transparency more in Chapter 6.)
Back in Maryland, criminalizing parents for using their own discretion seems like something of a sport. A woman named Anna from Rockville wrote to Skenazy about being threatened by her daughter’s school principal for letting the 10-year-old ride the city bus to school.16 As the mom asserted to the busybody administrator, hers was a thoughtful decision. “We did a lot of planning and preparation before we allowed L. to ride the bus. As a parent I feel that it is my job to advocate for her right to practice this new skill, for as long as she wants to do it and for as long as we her parents continue to feel it is safe.” But that wasn’t good enough for the school, and the principal threatened to consult with local Child Protective Services to decide if allowing the girl to ride the bus was approved by those authorities.
As this mother pointed out, the saddest part of this whole affair was questioning a decision that was important for their daughter’s development and growth. As a result of riding the bus each day, she’d developed a whole new set of relationships with adults who rode with her. As the girl explained to her mom, the adults she was referring to as friends weren’t “kid friends.” Instead, she defined them as “people friends.” The mom learned about the Chinese lady, the lady with a baby that cried a lot, and the grandma who got on at the next stop. “In a few short weeks,” the mom reported, “my daughter had surrounded herself with a community of people who recognized her, who were happy to see her, and who surely would step in if someone tried to hurt her.” Isn’t this