A lot of posts in this thread are not understanding the point of the law. Sentiments such as:
"Why need a law? Just let your children be free and independent. They need that."
"If anyone threatens to call CPS on me I'll tell them to fuck off."
That's why the law is needed! Currently, in a lot of jurisdictions, do either of those two things and your kids can arbitrarily be taken from you, legally, by the government.
This law makes it so that allowing children normal independence is legal. Because slowly administrative agencies started to take a stricter view on what was "safe".
> "This law makes it so that allowing children normal independence is legal."
now we just need to make it normal (i.e., socially acceptable). it's hard because no matter where we stand in the sociosphere, we're always on the lookout for danger and enemies. that's the yang to our yin, the opposing force that elucidates our core identity.
while life is full of quite unlikely but life-threatening risks, it's crippling to be constantly finding, worrying about, and trying to mitigate all of those risks for our kids. we can't, and it shouldn't be expected of us.
parents need to provide the broad strokes (don't jump off a cliff, swallow random pills, or run blindly into the street) but kids need the room to test the minutiae of those boundaries (can i jump off the monkey bars? is this rural dirt road ok to run into? is it ok to eat 10 of these flintstones vitamins at once?). that's what growing up is all about.
otherwise our kids won't be able to cope with the inevitable dangers they will face later in life. on some dimensions, they need to be tested in minutely-increasing increments so they develop confidence in emergency situations ("camp" in the living room, then in the yard, then with a scouting troop, then with friends, then alone) but they don't need to be--and can't be--prepared for every danger in the world.
you can't fly without risking a fall to the ground.
It's sad to me how many parents fail to prepare children for the world.
As a non-parent (and do not want kids), I feel I have a jaded view on this. Yet, I was once a child.. so I should have some, I guess. I taught myself to shave, learned about sex myself, taught myself to drive, etcetc. I love my parents, but frankly they didn't teach me anything in life outside of passive observations of their behavior. I learned about bickering from them though, in leagues. heh.
I don't get why more parents don't want to be the kind that are so dependable, the child will call them when they're too drunk to drive home at 16yrs old. Or the kind that explains to their kids that all drugs are not equal, some are far worse, some are not bad. Or hell, not just that some drugs are bad, but why some are bad.
So many parents seem afraid to be the one who teaches their child first about the "tough" things in the world like sex and drugs. Yet, the tough things in the world should come first from them, imo. I just don't get it.
> So many parents seem afraid to be the one who teaches their child first about the "tough" things in the world like sex and drugs. Yet, the tough things in the world should come first from them, imo. I just don't get it.
I am a parent, dad of two girls: 4 and 9. I completely agree with you.
I have a rule that I will never lie to my kids when they ask a question, and that I'll always answer to the best of my abilities. In the rare case where I feel like they're not ready for the answer, I'll tell them that. So far it's worked well.
A couple of months ago we moved ~1k miles. My nine-year-old rode in the moving truck with me for 10 hours, and most of that time was spent discussing sex. Most of her questions were initially about the mechanics of the act, but as I explained things she ended up being just as interested in the emotional and social aspects. That conversation spawned several follow-ups where she had more questions after she thought about things. The only aspect I stopped short of explaining in full was pornography - she's aware of its existence, but not the reasons people participate in it or view it... and that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't yet experienced the impact of hormones during puberty.
The way I see it, my kids are going to learn about the world one way or another. I see only positive consequences of being the trusted source of information and guidance when they first encounter it, regardless of how difficult the conversations may become.
> The way I see it, my kids are going to learn about the world one way or another. I see only positive consequences of being the trusted source of information and guidance when they first encounter it, regardless of how difficult the conversations may become.
Yup, and that's exactly why I struggle to understand why so many parents avoid it.
Some I think mean well, but vastly underestimate when their child will discover the worst of humanity. Especially in the internet age, at school or at home. It's a complicated world.
Looking back on my own childhood, unfiltered internet access really changed my life. Yes, I got into some things that weren't appropriate for my age, but it also turned me on to programming and tech in general. In the end I turned that into a lucrative, successful career. I can honestly say that internet access was more of a factor in my life than school.
In light of that, I give my kids the same thing. Instead of filters, I just keep logs of network traffic and occasionally grep them for keywords that I think might warrant discussion.
Oh yea, I wasn't suggesting filtering the kids - I wasn't saying anything in that context. I meant, the internet is going to get to kids regardless of how much we try to filter them. If a child isn't seeing it at their home computer, it'll be via word of mouth, or with a friends phone. That's all
Very true. I used to volunteer with an advocacy group that helped parents whose kids were wrongly taken by CPS and what I saw of the system scared the crap out of me. It does some good work but the sheer stupidity of some of the employees, the arbitrary powers and lack of due process was the stuff of nightmares.
I read that last one and I'm not sure the "free range parenting" bill would even cover that. That was a case of, baby had a bruise and a doctor arbitrarily decided it was a willful injury by the parents. A process as aribtrary and random as that seems pretty broken and after that the foster process failed catastrophically. But I doubt "free range parenting" shuts down the entire process of removing kids from environments that are detected (rightly or wrongly) as directly physically abusive.
It is frightening. And it varies significantly by state.
For example Utah (where I foster) has 2.8 per 1,000 children in foster care, while neighboring Nevada has 6.7 per 1,000. New York has 5.0. California has 6.2. [1]
The ever-conservative Utah legislature puts a very high priority of children living with their legal parents. As long as there's no imminent health risk (abuse, hard drug use, severe neglect), parents virtually always keep custody.
I really wish it were like that in more places.
Traumatic situations for children should not be taken likely. But being forcibly removed into state custody is also a very traumatic event. You've got to be confident that the latter is the lesser evil.
My friend had a babysitter report her to CPS because there were stuffed animals in her 7-month old's crib, which apparently contradicts some guidance. CPS closed the investigation without doing anything, but not before causing a lot of unnecessary worry.
> My friend had a babysitter report her to CPS because there were stuffed animals in her 7-month old's crib, which apparently contradicts some guidance.
I can confirm that a wide variety of medical sources strongly recommend that there be nothing but a proper infant mattress and fitted sheet designed specifically for the mattress in an infants crib, to reduce SIDS risk. 7 months is within the age range to which I usually see the recommendation applied, but out of the highest-risk period.
This isn’t just “some guidance”. Its the American Academy of Pediatrics guidance which shows stuffed animals, pillows, and blankets increase the risk factor for SIDS.
This guidance is beyond suspect. It falls into the category of "drink 8 glasses of water a day." Doctors parrot it, but they have no foundation for saying this and no one knows when/why they started saying it. But they all say it.
Any serious medical professional worth a damn will immediately question the SIDS "guidance." If you don't know what causes something, you can't treat it. You don't blindly run around doing things and hope it helps. You have to find out the cause to find the cure.
This is exactly the kind of FUD that people are fighting when dealing with crazy CPS zealots.
Edit: If SIDS is suffocating from an obstruction, then call it suffocation by obstruction. But it's not suffocation by obsstruction. The current theory is that it's suffocation due to brain malfunction. Putting a toy in a crib isn't going to cause a brain malfunction.
> The current theory is that it's suffocation due to brain malfunction.
Law requires hazardous chemicals be sprayed on the bed mat to protect(?) the child from fires. Try stuffing your face in an infant mattress and see if you notice the smell.
A lot of medical guidance comes from busybodies who have no ability to perform cost-benefit analysis (e.g. pregnant women and caffeine). SIDS risk is around 0.5 per 1,000. The major cause of the decrease since the 1980s seems to be the decline of smoking. Everything else is noise for something that's already low probability.
This is something that I have a personal interest in. My nephew died of SIDS months before the recommendation about sleeping positions was reversed back in the early 90s. My sister did not smoke. She did put him to sleep on his stomach.
SIDS has decreased (~70%) since 1980s, but Accidental Suffocation has increased (perhaps due to improved diagnosis of ASSB vs SIDS of the same underlying events) to become about as prevalent as SIDS.
Not to mention that calling CPS would probably be a career-limiting move for a babysitter. What parents would want to risk hiring that babysitter after something like that?
There is a difference between a new born and a 7 month old. The latter is extremly unlikly of suffocating on a blanket or a stuffed animal and calling CPS in this case is abhorrent. There is certinaly a step before you call someone to take there kid away
The context is taking their children away from their parents under the pretext that the parents are unfit to raise them. Can we agree that "a professional association of physicians made a recommendation which the parents violated" does not constitute "unfit parent"? SIDS is also increased in babies who sleep in a separate room; presumably we're not condoning robbing everyone who has a nursery of their children.
> The context is taking their children away from their parents under the pretext that the parents are unfit to raise them. Can we agree that "a professional association of physicians made a recommendation which the parents violated" does not constitute "unfit parent"?
Being aware of a parent disregarding widely disseminated recommendations of the medical community on a death risk is certainly reason for a third party to be concerned about fitness. It may not equate to unfitness, which corresponds well to the lack of any CPS action when the report was investigated.
The threshold for reasonsble reporting to a investigative authority should not be certainty of a violation.
(Now, I would expect a babysitter to attempt to resolve this with the parents first.)
> Being aware of a parent disregarding widely disseminated recommendations of the medical community on a death risk is certainly reason for a third party to be concerned about fitness.
And driving your kids around in a car raises the risk factor of getting killed with a bumper in their face, but that seems fine. We're completely blind to the relative risks we face and focus on the one in a million when one in a hundred risks are everywhere.
I challenge you to find one documented case of the death of a child, of any age, from any number of stuffed animals up to 5 being allowed in the crib during sleep :)
I once spent a bunch of time chasing references from the AAP and others, and could not find anything like that (because I was trying to decide whether to allow a stuffed animal in the crib with my baby). The stuffed animals seem to just be lumped in to the abstract category of "soft things" but all the cases of kids actually suffocating were from other soft things, most notably soft bedding.
I did see one case of a child dying from having a whole crib full of stuffed animals (so the stuffed animals were effectively bedding), hence the limit of 5 for the challenge.
Even so, the extent of the interaction there should be "that is potentially dangerous, you should stop" -- it's not exactly a strong indicator of being unfit parents.
We had a bullshit CPS scare in San Francisco when our first was born that involved 2 CPS inspectors having to come inspect our house and verify that we had "at least a dresser drawer" to put the kid in. It was entirely stupid (we were renting a 3-story townhouse off 8th and Folsom, which was nosebleed expensive even in 1999), but still incredibly stressful for us, because CPS had no compunctions about telling us what the consequences of noncompliance would be.
You have kids and you realize how traumatic even a single night of custody interruption would be, and then you think about what the reality of due process in these situations is.
I think what baffles the mind is, that a state law is required to ensure this in the land of the free. How did things evolve to a state where this is necessary?
Both frustrating and terrifying as a parent of young kids. I'm fortunate enough to live far enough off the beaten path that nosy neighbors aren't my top concern, but it still just seems asinine for cases like the ones mentioned in the article to even result in investigation, much less losing my kids (even temporarily).
The law seems like a common sense balancing of issues--protect children from obvious abuse but ensure there's plenty of room for them to grow up into robust adults. Kudos to Utah for trying to be reasonable about it.
(Personally I think most people should do a few things that scare the crap out of them while growing up--it's the only way to learn your limits.)
It’s sad to me that the 24h news cycle that depends on selling fear causes people to misestimate the dangers in the world. My sister doesn’t allow her teenage children to take the bus in a wealthy suburb for fear of something happening to them, yet both she and I took buses around SF and the bay starting at age 10 without cellphones. Statistics show that things are _less_ dangerous now than when we were kids — but she’s been made paranoid via attention grabbing media.
Child abuse and neglect laws started in the 1940s after a series of articles were published by a doctor with accounts of children with injuries clearly caused by adults and by the 1970s most states had passed them. They were well meaning and only intended to protect children from real harm.
The problem is they are (somewhat necessarily) vague. They didn't think the laws would be used for trivial things but words like "endangerment" can easily be applied to letting your kid walk home alone.
This is the first real attempt that I know of to scale back some of it and I suspect we'll see more of this in other states as society realizes some of this has gone to far.
It should also be said that this is just codifying what was basically already the case. Utah's Child Protective Services supported this law and already considered the behaviors the law protects to be perfectly fine but they were obligated to open investigations anyway. Now they don't have to. It also prevents Utah's CPS in the future from doing some of the ridiculous actions that have occurred in other states if the attitude of the workers/leadership at Utah's CPS shifted.
I seriously hope other states take the opportunity to review this legislation for similar adoption.
As a parent, the shuffle to drive or walk my bike-capable kids 0.5 miles to their school costs us time or money (to have someone shepherd them).
These days we have ways to track kids or kids have their own phone, tools like Nextdoor and crime levels are low. Why shouldn't we trust kids to be able to navigate (perhaps in a group) themselves to a local school?
That's the wrong way to look at it, this is a law limiting what the government can do. For really broad, difficult to define crimes like "neglect" or "child abuse", it makes sense to pass additional legislation limiting how those laws can be applied.
The parent is correct. It is sad that this is necessary. Similarly, the bill of rights was almost not included at all, because the original premise was that you had ALL rights that were not specifically prohibited in the constitution. That the bill of rights has turned out to be necessary at all, is also sad.
I am thankful for this law, and for the bill of rights, but it is sad that we require either. We were not supposed to.
I don't understand the issue. Do you agree that child abuse should be a crime? If so, do you think you could correctly define it in legally precise language on the first try, with no unintended consequences? Legislators are human and make mistakes. It's good that they're proactively considering potential unintended effects of a law, and it's not that sad that they didn't get it exactly right the first time.
You'd have the same issue even if there weren't a specific child abuse law. Does letting your 8-year-old walk to school alone count as "general harm"? What about leaving them home alone for a day? A week? A month? Who gets to decide? If the law doesn't specify, the police and the courts decide. And if the police start making decisions that the public disagrees with, then we pass new legislation to clarify what exactly counts as general harm.
It's not different. If police started arresting people for letting their adult mentally handicapped dependents do reasonably independent things, then it might be a good idea to pass some legislation to modify the relevant law.
It has to be separate because your responsibilities towards your kids are different than your responsibilities towards other people. There are things you can do to your kids you can't do to other people (e.g. grounding). There are things you can't do to your kids that you can do to other people (e.g. refuse to provide shelter).
That's not limited to children, your parents with dementia may have diminished capacity. Age is a trap as not all 16 year old children are capable of taking care of themselves for a weekend alone, but many are.
You're missing it. If the original law is overbroad, it makes sense to modify the original law, not pass a second law adding exemptions where it doesn't apply. If something as innocuos as letting your kids walk home was "endangerment", there are still other, equally innocuous things that qualify as endangerment but aren't covered by this exception. In other words, if the standard is wrong, change the standard (but keep it uniform), don't add (non-uniform) exceptions for the examples that showed the standard was wrong
I think it's very hard, if not impossible, to write the kind of uniform standard you're talking about. I feel pretty confident that if you came up with an example standard, we could both easily come up with unintended effects and unclear gray areas.
Yes, otherwise this new law would be unnecessary. Utah has a child abuse law, and saw that other states were overreaching with similar laws. So they're passing new legislation to amend and limit their own existing child abuse law.
I don't know the history of Constitutional philosophy among the unwashed masses, but my anecdata suggests that the backwards understanding of the Constitution exists at least in part because of the Bill of Rights.
"... all rights *that are not outlawed". Many institutions have the capacity to regulate law. So if a lower ranking level would out-law, the top level might need to correct.
> The bill specifies that it isn't neglectful to let kids do things alone like travel to school, explore a playground or stay in the car.
My point is if they start a list of not-neglectful things, then it becomes the list of authorized-only things. What about letting my kids chop wood, light a barbecue, carve a chicken, swim in a lake without supervision?
Ok, can you write a law that allows those things while disallowing "leave my 8 year old at home for a month while I go on vacation"? Where are you going to draw the line, and how? Do you think you can get a whole state to agree with you on where the line should be? Does age matter? If so, what ages matter, and how? Do you think public attitudes might change in the future, and require the line to move?
The only way to write this law would be to provide basically no guidance and give police and judges and enormous amount of discretion, or to provide a lot of detail that includes concrete examples of things that are allowed and things that aren't. The world is too complex to write this in purely general terms and expect it to work without issue.
Of course you can't write such a law. My point is that because such a law is impossible to write, I think it is better to defer to common sense, and to attack CPS when they're overreaching.
Laws do describe what is forbidden. Utah legislators noticed that in some states with language similar to Utah's laws on what is prohibited, the laws were applied or interpreted in ways that don't match what they wanted for Utah, and passed a law correcting Utah's existing prohibitions to clearly and explicitly prevent similar application in Utah.
The original constitution carefully outlined people's rights so as to limit the power of government. Law's affirming people's rights can be very powerful
If you're talking about the bill of rights, the fact that they're all "amendments" should be a hint that they're not part of the "original constitution".
I'm speaking more from the database/XSS side of things, where a blacklist is about as useful as no list at all.
There are absolutely times where security has to be compromised, even abandoned, in the name of usability, and times where security must be ironclad, even user-hostile. Civil rights law is definitely the former.
Perhaps. But, but it could be arising more from a need to codify the unwritten rules of society.
Why do they now need to be codified when they've worked (more or less) as implicit rules for so long? Seems like different reasons for everything. In this case, the protective tendencies and govt agencies started to over-run the 'free-range' tendencies, and this just pushes it back a bit.
I don't really see it that way. From a legal perspective, it's just preventing legitimate parenting techniques from being dragged into an over-broad definition of neglect.
I understand the intent. And this makes sense. I'm just saying that we're seeing a case of "negligence is everything except what is specifically mentioned as being authorized".
Well, we're seeing a case where a type of parenting is viewed as neglectful, so we're adding a law to enshrine it's legality in the face of changing cultural norms among certain sets of the population.
This is not the same as "Anything not enshrined in law is unauthorized."
This seems like a matter of the legislature reining in law-enforcement whose interpretations have become overly broad, something legislatures (and Congress) also sometimes does to the judicial system.
I agree that it can be cast in an awkward light but it's not uncommon.
The US has a slow decline where the acceptable level of risk to expose your children to is nil. This is not good parenting; good parenting involves teaching your children to navigate the world with increasing independence and ability to judge and handle risk. It is, however, what people will pressure each other into doing when something bad happens (or looks like it might).
You cannot and should not prevent every possible bad thing from happening to your child. It doesn't produce the best outcome.
That a law like this is even necessary seems absurd to me. A child learns by doing, by making mistakes by itself. By being curious about the world. By feeling the consequences of ones actions. Of course parenting is needed, but much less restrictive as it apparently is. My parents sent me to the UK when I was 12. i knew no-one. Yes, there was a school and a host family that fulfilled my basic needs, but I had to become selfconscious and responsible. I would never want to miss that. Your parents won't always be here and the earlier you learn to get on by yourself, the better. A child must develop a sense of self dependency IMO.
After some high profile incidents states started passing laws to protect the children of reckless parents but in their panic they didn't spend enough time defining what endangering a child really means. Child protective laws are difficult because you can't just enumerate the list of things that could harm a child so they need to be somewhat vague but the way words like "endanger" are interpreted by people turns out to vary widely (shocker!).
In the case of Utah, things like letting your children walk home alone or go to the park by themselves was already considered perfectly fine by Utah's Child Protective Services (who supported the passage of this law) but they were still obligated to open investigations when someone reported these innocuous events. Now they don't need to.
Wow, so hard for me to grasp. I didn't know. When I was young I used to climb on trees all the time. I remember one incident where a neighbour called my mother and told her that I was doing that and that she should tell me to stop this as it was dangerous. My mother told her that this was none of her business. For such a drastic measure (taking ones child away) much more severe neglect is needed here in Austria (e.g. drug abuse, violence,...)
That's the way it should be. Unsure why it's different in North America. I think it's because the agency faces severe consequences from a false negative, so they err on the side of false positives.
It is also very hard to get the bureaucracy to drop a case once it has been brought to their attention.
If you are from Europe then you don't get it. This is mostly an American thing and it has been going on for years. I recall a story from about 10-15 years ago where a couple from Europe (I think they were Dutch but I'm not 100% sure) was arrested in New York City for leaving their child outside on the sidewalk while they entered a cafe for a few minutes and ordered coffee. They could see their child through the cafe windows the entire time. They expressed shock upon being arrested because such behavior was normal and commonplace in their country.
I'm glad to see some sense coming back, after having seen things get to the point where most of what's happening in the Charlie Brown Chrismas special would be unthinkable. ("He bought a Chrismas tree? Without adult supervision!?!?")
Right. To clarify what that page is showing, the bill is a proposed change of the Utah code and it's presented almost like a "diff" file. Underlined portions are additions, strikeouts are removals. Lines 309 through 325 contain the important parts.
I feel like we don't have enough free-range parenting, even if silly new laws seem to support it. Not nearly enough parents let their kids walk to school where I live. (But I'll be careful to admit this view may be much more upper-middle class centric than for poorer families.)
My parents took me and my siblings to Mexico when I was a kid, I was the oldest at 7 years old. My brother and sister were 6 and 4. We'd go walking for miles on our own. In retrospect it seems amazing that nothing serious happened to us, though once my brother decided to pet a horse from behind and got kicked.
This article also reminds me of a story comedian Molly Shannon tells about sneaking onto an airplane with her friend when they were 13 and flying to New York City to spend the day.
It seems like nobody does this kind of stuff anymore, parents are much more on top of it than 30 years ago.
The fact that our society needs such a law is beyond insane. When did the law change? I walked to school in the 90's by myself at 9 years. Or has the law changed? Or has the enforcement just changed without anyone's consent? I can't imagine raising kids in America today. I'd never subject another human being to this kind of life. Children are human too but Americans seem to have forgotten that lately.
I've gotten the impression it's really an issue in areas where nobody walks anywhere. There seem to be more of those than there were even a generation ago, probably as small town and suburban "main streets" have declined, people have longer commutes so less time to spend walking around town, etc.
People then have a sense of walking as weird and potentially dangerous. If they see a kid walking, they think the kid must be neglected, or else why wouldn't they have gotten a ride from a parent? If they see a grown woman walking, they think she's taking an unnecessary risk. If they see a grown man walking, they worry he's up to no good, and might even post on NextDoor or call the police to report "suspicious activity."
Also, I think as small towns and suburbs have moved more commerce and also some housing to the outskirts of town, more streets have become arterial roads, which means faster cars and more danger to pedestrians.
> Or has the enforcement just changed without anyone's consent?
I'd bet that the enforcement of existing laws has changed with society's consent, as is usually the case. Like it or not, parents are more likely to see new threats that didn't exist a few decades ago, and this manifests itself in what law enforcement officers see as threats.
Thanks to Internet and mass media, the occasional extreme case gets misreported and widely publicized as "the new normal"
The irony is not lost: "Free-range" advocates say that society vastly overestimates the risk of harms, so they campaign against child-protection laws that they vastly overestimate the harm of.
I've dealt with those agencies enough to know that they are horrible. I've even caught them in criminal acts, which of course won't be prosecuted.
The typical harassment starts with a kid who gets a normal childhood injury or is found unattended at a library or church, or sometimes an anonymous tip by somebody who wants to cause trouble. This is enough to start an investigation. The agency's workers then feel entitled to interview and examine the kids alone, invade the home, and even inspect the content of a refrigerator. Depending on your location, a warrant may be automatically approved by a judge.
The thing with the refrigerator is particularly absurd. It's not as if you can't feed children without one. You could even eat out every day! If the agency's workers find moldy food you forgot in the back of your refrigerator, they will presume that the children are being fed moldy food. If you haven't been shopping recently and the refrigerator is mostly empty, they will assume the kids aren't being fed.
The agency benefits greatly from people's reluctance to talk with friends, news media, and so on. So much of the malicious activity occurs in private.
These investigations have lasting effects. Years later, one can snap awake in a panic due to a nightmare about kids being grabbed out of the home. You can forever lose your feeling of safety and security in your own home. When the report is anonymous, you can no longer trust anybody you know.
I"m shocked that this is even forbidden in the "land of the free".
I was walking home alone from school. In fact, my father once said to me that I basically raised myself on my own.
It isn't forbidden, but its very poorly protected.
(Intentionally vague) laws intended to protect kids from serious harm end up being applied to situations where kids are perfectly safe, but some busybody heard a late night news report one time about a kid that got abducted, or fell out of a tree and broke his neck, or got hit by a bus and felt the need to impose their worry on others. So they call CPS, and now the parent is under investigation for doing something completely normal, because CPS has too much power and not enough oversight/due process.
The idea of this law is to send a clear message that parents are NOT to be harassed/threatened by government agencies over these harmless situations. Sometimes the state has to be told where their power ends explicitly.
You can't be brave unless you perceive a threat. Being oblivious to a threat, or being in denial of a threat, is not bravery. Bravery requires well-considered acceptance of a recognized threat. It's a matter of being able to justify taking a risk.
Should call this the "let city kids have the same rights as rural kids" law. All the kids on farms are just looking at this like "what the...?" (yes, kids still live and work on farms)
This is the part where I make some reply that subtly suggests that everyone BFE is a backwards hick, that there's no economic opportunity there and that kids who don't get out will all turn to drugs.
If I really wanna show how out of touch I am I should take pity on anyone who lives somewhere without over 9000 ethic restaurants and bars that serve hipster micro-brews within walking distance and mention startups somehow.
> On the federal level, another Utah politician, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, added an amendment to a 2015 federal education bill supporting the concept. It said kids shouldn't be stopped from biking or walking to school alone with a parent's permission, and parents shouldn't face charges for letting them.
Ah, what?
In Florida in the late 90s, my my 2nd grade self and my 1st grade sister walked a mile to school every day.
The thought that someone would find that objectionable...genuinely bizarre.
When I was a kid, they just called that "parenting". The generation that has been growing up locked away from the world under constant adult supervision is going to have a hell of a time leaving the crib when the time comes. 30 will be the new 18.
Maybe this will help Facebook and Google's surveillance towns take off, since these adult children would be able to move somewhere else where they'd be under constant supervision.
It's an ironic joke. By saying that you raise "free-range kids" you are accusing (correctly these days for the U.S.!) that other parents are raising caged, confined kids.
This law is coming from a good place, but I'm not sure how much it can accomplish. The pressure against "free-range parenting" is much more social than legal, and it doesn't seem like the government can do a lot about that. Although maybe it will be enough knowing that if someone threatens to call CPS on you for letting your kid walk to school, you can tell them to fuck off.
Social pressure is fine, the problem is that right now people leverage the law to force their culture of helicopter parenting on people not complying.
Frankly, I think it should go even further, it should be a civil offense to frivolously report child endangerment based only on the fact that children are unsupervised. Even with a protection bill, people will still report parents if there are no consequences, and not everyone on the enforcement side will get the message. Best to level the playing field so helicopter reporters will have some skin in the game.
> it should be a civil offense to frivolously report child endangerment based only on the fact that children are unsupervised.
So when I see children alone and think they might be lost, what do I do? Trust the runaways who tell me that all is good? Creepily follow them until they reach their destination? What you call "frivolous reporting" in one area would be "criminal neglect" in another.
That's the whole idea of child protection services: Give them slightly more power to investigate than an ordinary citizen, so they can make an informed decision according to the law. After all, the reporting is not the problem, lack of standards/consensus what good parenting means en detail is.
> not everyone on the enforcement side will get the message
Lack of ongoing training in law enforcement should, IMHO, never be a reason not to change things for the better.
> So when I see children alone and think they might be lost, what do I do?
do they appear to be in distress? are they in some strange location away from civilization? quite possibly "nothing" is the correct answer, because "alone" doesn't mean much.
if you really have reason to think they're "lost", you could ask whether they are and if they need an assist in finding their way.
What one parent considers reasonable is not necessarily so. For example a neighbor in our town house community considers it reasonable to allow his 5-year old and 3-year old to play outside unsupervised, including "free-ranging" across busy streets and such.
On the parenting quality scale, there ought to be a huge gap between "good parenting" and "illegal parenting". Lots of crummy stuff should be in that gap.
So was I, but the streets weren't busy and there was plenty of grass and other open areas to play in. Hell, I used to bike and walk to school a couple miles away by myself starting in first grade.
This is a community that is basically all pavement next to the only major road into or out of the town that is always busy.
There are gradients in circumstances and what is reasonable, is my point. We ought not be too rigid nor naively permissive.
I agree with the concept of free-range parenting, and I see where you're coming from re. civil offenses for frivolous reports, but that carries the burden with it that perhaps some things that should be reported will go unreported. Isn't the reverse better?
No. Being a kid is comically safe these days, there is room to move in the other direction. It's also a matter of setting cultural norms. When CPS issues a civil citation for reporting someone for having stuffed animals in the crib, that tells people that worrying about such frivolities is not okay.
It's not the reporting that's the problem, it's the overzealous prosecution of families that end up in government's crosshairs. I expect the rate of reporting won't change, but the abuses by local agencies will be abated somewhat.
> Although maybe it will be enough knowing that if someone threatens to call CPS on you for letting your kid walk to school, you can tell them to fuck off.
I don't live in Utah, where this law was just enacted, but I will happily tell folks to fuck off if they threaten me with a CPS call for letting my child walk to school. This culture of fear is unnecessary and harmful.
You can tell the person to fuck off, but if they call CPS then CPS still has to come talk to your kids. This happened to me as a child (not for being allowed to walk to school, but for something similarly dumb).
If you tell the wrong person to fuck off, they can escalate these situations to class A felonies. Doctors and lawyers are a few examples of people with this kind of influence, I'm sure there are other examples.
Kids can't even take the bus to school together. And that's on government, not social pressure. (For Americans) In Vancouver transit is both clean and effective.
Wow - when I was 10, growing up in Burnaby (suburb of Vancouver, and uses the same transit system), we learned to use transit in school on a special field trip designed to teach us to take the bus and Skytrain.
After that I took it to Metrotown to do my Christmas shopping - felt very responsible and grown up. It was definitely a good thing, and not at all unsafe.
Heck, today it'd be even safer since most parents give kids cell phones!
- edited to clarify Burnaby's context to Vancouver
That is indeed extreme. The main point of having 4 kids is that it the redundancy makes it OK to risk losing one of them due to unfortunate circumstances that might occur as when riding a bus.
As a parent of three it seems ridiculous that we need these laws, but sadly we do to reverse the years of overly anxious people creating a world hostile to kids exploring it without hovering caretakers.
I won't move to Utah because of this, but hopefully other states take notice and I'll be lobbying my state to use this as precedent.
What is wrong with people if they need to make a law for this? Seriously, just because a kid is playing outside instead of being confined indoors playing video games is no reason to call the cops.
Coming from UT, I remember a lot of teens in high school that had over reaching parents and as a result they didn't get the full experience of being a junior or senior in HS.
Luckily for me, my parents had trust in me so in high school I could hang out with my friends without my parents questioning my every move. They just wanted me home before 10.
Social trust is falling in the west. I appreciate Utah making an effort here, but the problem is systemic.
There are specific reasons that this is the case, but most people will not discuss it openly. Putnam sat on his results for years because it is simply not acceptable to discuss in polite society.
Seems logical but social isolation is also increasing in Japan with their ethnic homogeneity. I think its all related to the collapse of large families. People have few children and when the kids grow up they're likely to move away.
When was the last time you were there? I spent most of the past month in metro Osaka, as a parent of young children, and I noted:
* Young children freely coming to city parks, fraternizing, and leaving, in absence of any adult supervision, indeed, without any adults other than myself even present
* Groups of young schoolchildren traveling mostly autonomously to and from school among busy urban streets (though sometimes under the watchful eye of many volunteer shepherds along the route)
* Children as young as 8 approaching me to be generally curious, maturely and completely without fear
* Proprietor of a local bar I visited knew everyone around, including my in-laws' family, this in the busy inner-city
* Ample resources and facilities provided by the prefectural and local governments, including staffed play areas and civic center events. My older daughter was broadcast on-air TV with other children attending a Girls' Day event.
* health care including vision/dental costs hard capped to 500 yen/treatment day (~$5) for children under 6
So yeah. I don't think the situation in Japan is comparable at all in any way to what's happened here in the USA. I would not allow even the appearance of my daughter playing alone in my own front yard, for fear of what well-intentioned neighbors might say or do, let alone the boogie-man.
Interesting counterpoint. So I guess the social isolation in America is one part poor urbanism (cities designed for cars, isolating suburbs) and one part decreasing social trust, one part due to small families and children moving away.
In Utah? Perfectly sane. The law just codifies Utah CPS practices. Other states with similar laws? You could have your children confiscated if they weren't in visual range.
It's not the original laws as written - they were fine for many generations. It's the modern interpretation of those same laws that often gets out of hand. Often it's changes in regulations, or court rulings related to those laws.
In this case, it was gradual shift in the perception of 'neglect' by CPS, helicopter parents, or overly concerned citizens who think every child is in mortal danger if they're not within 10 feet of a responsible adult.
This is Utah, where the Mormon church has a de facto near-monopoly on large segments of society. The church (and parents) impose far more oppressiev restrictions of children's freedom than any CPS does.
When I was 12 years old, my friends and I used to bike about 8 miles to the airport to see airplanes take off from a nearby hill. The hill was federal land, delimited by simple wire fencing, so we would climb it to get to the hill. The path was clearly there, so we must not have been the only ones there. As long as we came back before the light came on, we would be fine with my parents. Once, we had to cross a freeway and a truck hit our dog, who died. There was nothing we could do for it, so we left it there. We never went back after that.
If a kid was caught doing that today, it would legally be taken away form his/her family by Children Protective Services, the parents charged, tried, and probably convicted of child neglect and endangerment.
Some of the best memories from childhood for me are those trips. How sad that kids have to be home playing with their iPads today.
> it would legally be taken away form his/her family by Children Protective Services, the parents charged, tried, and probably convicted of child neglect and endangerment.
citation needed.
> Once, we had to cross a freeway and a truck hit our dog, who died.
Your parents negligently put you in charge of a dog that you negligently killed. That should be legal?
"Your parents negligently put you in charge of a dog that you negligently killed. That should be legal?"
Shit happens. The truck killed the dog, not me. Maybe you come from another continent or country, but America is a free country, so we don't care about what is legal, because the law establishes what is illegal, and everything else is legal. It is not illegal to run with your dog.
This is genuinely a fantastic comment. You dealt with a cold, rude comment with grace and calm, then provided an easily understood statement of what defines a country with both freedom and rule of law.
Last I checked, it's generally a bad idea to leave pets alone in a car so I'm not sure what the political or parental benefits are of leaving children alone in a car.
This just reads of something done purely for face-saving reasons rather than solving the greater issue of safety in America. Never mind that the concept of free range parenting in America is something mostly for the white and wealthy.
Free-range parenting for the white and wealthy‽ Nonsense. Some of the high-profile cases of wrongfully taking kids away from parents have been specifically non-white, non-wealthy families. What happens, of course, is that when the underprivileged parents are accused of neglect, they're more likely to be judged harshly. Protecting and respecting the rights of poorer parents to let their kids go play in the neighborhood park and such is as or more important as for privileged families.
To be clear, this isn't about solving some greater issue of safety. There's no big safety crisis. This is about parents letting their kids have some independence because even in poorer areas, the world is not that unsafe.
In fact, the safety of the one kid who plays alone in the park is much more of an issue than a group of kids. We need basic independence to be the norm because it doesn't work as well if it's rare.
Leaving children in the car for short periods has occasionally practical benefits, just as with pets. And both humans and animals do just fine in cars as long as you make sure that the interior doesn't get too hot. In this instance it's more about making sure harmless behavior isn't accidentally outlawed.
>Never mind that the concept of free range parenting in America is something mostly for the white and wealthy.
How is that? The US isn't Norway, but it is still very safe. I don't see why helicopter parenting should be required?
Because the occasional practical benefits do not outweigh some of the more irresponsible parents leaving children or pets in cars on hot/cold days. I view that as being more of a public safety issue much like seat belts.
As for your second point, it's because for a lot of the poorer parents they don't really have the ability to let their kids roam freely. Either due to proximity, lack of funds and so forth. Not to mention the institutional problems minority kids face on a daily basis (see: black children being shot by police).
It's not about requiring helicopter parenting but rather that laws like this don't really solve the actual problem for the majority of parents in the US. It's effectively lip service and I guarantee the wriggle-room left in the law will be used to harm minorities more than anyone else.
"Why need a law? Just let your children be free and independent. They need that." "If anyone threatens to call CPS on me I'll tell them to fuck off."
That's why the law is needed! Currently, in a lot of jurisdictions, do either of those two things and your kids can arbitrarily be taken from you, legally, by the government.
This law makes it so that allowing children normal independence is legal. Because slowly administrative agencies started to take a stricter view on what was "safe".