Florida parents were arrested in April for negligence because they allowed their 11-year-old son to go unsupervised for 90 minutes.
The boy did not have a key to the house, so he began playing basketball in his yard, where a neighbor saw him and called the police.
As a result of their parents’ arrest, their 11-year-old and four-year-old sons were supposed to be taken away for a month, spending a few days in foster care and with an unreliable relative. The parents were not alerted that the relative began returning the boys to state authorities, Reason.com reported.
In civil court the judge dropped the charges after the older son spoke to the judge in private. The family now must go to criminal court in hopes of combating the negligence charge. Until then, Child Protective Services requires the parents to take parenting classes, all four family members go to therapy and both sons to have to spend their summer at camp or in daycare during the day, Reason.com reported.
According to local law, negligence is defined as “a person who willfully or by culpable negligence neglects a child without causing great bodily harm, permanent disability, or permanent disfigurement to the child commits a felony of the third degree.”
The debate over what is an acceptable amount of parental supervision has become a nationwide issue.
Another Florida mother was charged with neglect for letting her seven-year-old son walk alone to a park half a mile away, CNN reported.
A South Carolina mother was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct for swearing angrily in front of her children at a Kroger grocery store. The law in North Augusta defines disorderly conduct as when people “utter, while in a state of anger, in the presence of another, any bawdy, lewd or obscene words or epithets,” WJBF reported, according to the Huffington Post.
Two Silver Spring, Md., parents who believe in “free-range” parenting were also investigated twice after allowing their six-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son to walk home unattended from a park a mile away.
Since the police picked up their children on the walk home in the first incident, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv have been contacted by Child Protective Services and only cooperated with authorities after they threatened to take the Meitivs’ children away.
“I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing,” Alexander Meitiv told the Washington Post. “We feel we’re being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with.”
Areas across the nation are even going as far as to ban sledding for fear of liability suits, the Economist reported.
“This crackdown on unregulated sledding seems of a piece with the recent American tendency to curb marginally perilous childhood pleasures, such as tricycling without body armor or venturing alone into the back garden without a Mossad-trained security detail,” according to The Economist.
Television shows such as “World’s Worst Mom” showcase overbearing “helicopter” parents who suffocate their children’s independence for a sense of security.
“If Americans need something to fear, it should be that by continuing to inspire this surfeit of heedfulness in generation after generation, America risks heading downhill, and not in the fun way,” The Economist wrote.
