The Meitiv family of Silver Spring, Maryland is now under Child Protective Services scrutiny for permitting their children to walk the neighborhood alone a little too freely. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids has been on the story for a while, and now the Washington Post and columnist Petula Dvorak are covering it too (related). More: Beth Greenfield, Yahoo Parenting (cross-posted from Free State Notes).
P.S. Google Street View will let you simulate the experience of walking south a mile down Georgia Avenue from Woodside Park through and past downtown Silver Spring. And welcome listeners from “Frederick’s Forum” on WFMD with host Dave Schmidt, where I’ll be calling in to discuss the case this morning.
9 Comments
[…] The Meitiv family of Silver Spring is now under Child Protective Services scrutiny for permitting their children to walk the neighborhood alone a little too freely. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids has been on the story for a while, and now the Washington Post and columnist Petula Dvorak are covering it too (related). More: Beth Greenfield, Yahoo Parenting (cross-posted at Overlawyered). […]
Sounds like a mass demonstration of civil disobedience is needed here. I can see it now, thousands of kids walking to and fro with no supervision.
An Indian man I know here in northern British Columbia was sent out to spend the entire winter alone trapping at the age of 12. His father would leave a little package of sugar, tea, and flour for once a month, but otherwise he was on his own.
Yeah, but the backcountry of BC, even at minus 70, is safer than the streets of America.
How do I know? I asked a liberal.
Hmmm…..I just checked the distance using Google Maps. My brother, friends and I would walk or ride our Huffy bikes ~0.8 miles, each way, to the gas station that also sold candy bars (it seemed a lot further than that back in the day). This was in the 70’s. We were about 7 to 11 years old. I’d occasionally go solo. This was in suburban Seattle. There is nothing wrong with kids traveling this far on foot or bike alone.
Oh…..and we also walked to school about the same distance (but the other direction) and that was as a first and 2nd grader – what’s that, 7 or 8 years old?
Growing up in a different era, I was sent by myself each day to walk about a half mile to school in the city of Detroit along a known route by the time I was about 6, and by age 9 or 10 I was walking independently around downtown Detroit at will. Almost as shocking, from a 2014 point of view, my mother freely left me in the back seat of the car when she went in to shop.
“Almost as shocking, from a 2014 point of view, my mother freely left me in the back seat of the car when she went in to shop.”
And you survived? You must be the luckiest person alive.
My respect for the Obama administration would go up immensely if Michelle Obama, as part of her campaign against childhood obesity, would take up the cudgel on behalf of free-range parenting.
(In addition, helicopter parenting may well be behind recent survey results showing an unprecedented drop in interest in entrepreneurship among our newest generation of adults.)
As an alternative, could lawyers for free-range parents persuade the US Supreme Court to issue another parental-rights ruling like Wisconsin v. Yoder? (In Yoder, the USSC exempted Amish parents from high-school truancy laws partly on the grounds that they had proven they could raise their children to be productive and happy adults.)