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.
