A new Utah law protects parents who allow their children to play outside unsupervised, sparking similar efforts from lawmakers in New York and Arkansas.
The Utah “free-range parenting” law, which went into effect this month, states that it doesn’t constitute neglect if a parent allows their children to do activities such as walking to school, riding their bikes or playing on a playground without adult supervision, provided that the children are “of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm.” It also says leaving a child 6 years old or older alone in a car temporarily does not constitute neglect.
Arkansas State Sen. Alan Clark, R-Hot Springs, who authored an unsuccessful free-range parenting bill last year, said he “hated it” that Utah became the first state to adopt such a law and vowed to push legislation again when the state legislature reconvenes next year.
“We would have loved to be the first, but honestly it doesn’t matter who does it first so long as it gets done,” Clark told the Washington Examiner. “It just defies comprehension that parents could be prosecuted for something like letting their child ride a bus on their own.”
Clark’s legislation passed through the state senate last year but hit a wall in the lower house because of concerns it could endanger children. He is optimistic that Utah’s law will show that that isn’t the case. “It’s always the fear factor … but people are beginning to see we have too much fear,” he said.
Support cuts across party lines. New York Assemblyman Phil Steck, D-Schenectady, is pushing similar legislation. “When I was a child, you let your dogs and your children out after breakfast and … they had to be home for dinner. I felt I gained a lot more from just playing on the street than my children did from being in organized sports activities,” he told the Associated Press last month.
Such practices had been the norm for decades, but parental neglect laws were strengthened starting the 1980s amid growing concerns of child abduction and abuse, symbolized by the use of milk cartons to profile missing children.
The issue recently has led to episodes of parents being charged with criminal neglect for allowing their children to play outdoors on their own. In one highly publicized case, a Maryland couple, Danielle and Leonard Meitiv, were investigated by state child protective services in 2014 and again the following year for letting their children, ages 10 and 6, walk home from their local park. Advocates of the free-range laws argue such cases are not uncommon but usually escape public notice because of privacy protections in cases involving child protective services.
Utah Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, author of his state’s free-range parenting law, said such overzealousness does not benefit anyone.
“As a society, we’ve kind of erred as our pendulum has swung for children’s safety a little bit too much to the side of helicopter parenting, right? We want kids to be able to learn how to navigate the world so when they’re adults they’re fully prepared to handle things on their own,” he told a Fox affiliate after the law was passed.
The Utah legislation was broadly bipartisan, having passed unanimously through both houses of the state legislature, but some critics remain. Salt Lake County District Attorney Simarjit Gill warned that the law could complicate efforts to prosecute cases of genuine neglect. “We want to be careful this … doesn’t comprise our ability as prosecutors to hold abusive parents accountable.”
Supporters of the law point to the growth of cell phone technology as evidence that parents can now easily communicate with their kids without being in the immediate vicinity and that record low national crime rates indicate that dangers of kidnappings and abductions are overstated.
The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found in a 2017 report that just 105 cases of “stereotypical kidnappings” occurred in 2011, the most recent year for which it had data. It defined “stereotypical” as cases where a stranger or a “slight acquaintance” took the child. Just 65 cases involved kidnappings by strangers. In the vast majority of cases of child abduction, the perpetrator is another family member, the case usually related to a divorce or child custody dispute.
“You have this presumption that it happens all of the time because the media focuses on those cases. … You just have to educate people,” Clark said.
