Free-range kids picked up AGAIN by police

[Anonymous]

You just don't get it. And yes, we do need some regulations as to what can and cannot with their kids -- we do. People do not mind that their are car seat laws or leaving kids alone in a car, etc. . I let my kids do stuff that technically may be against the regs and if I got called out on it -- I'd get over it and comply. Why? Because I know that I am responsible, but their are a lot of other people that are not and it is not going to kill me or my kids to not walk to Starbucks by themselves. Folks get pissed because things are no longer old-school and neighbors are not friendly and looking out, but as soon as someone does -- there is hell to pay. These parents are loud mouth grand standers who are more interested in a cause then the possibility of losing their kids. Horrible execution on their part, so much else they could have done to change the regs if they disagree. Just another example of the privileged, all about me, entitlement epidemic in this area.

Bravo, very well stated!!! I totally agree that these parents have a huge sense of entitlement because they feel they are above the law. Sorry folks, no one is above the law. As others have said, work to change laws you don't agree with. These parents just continue to flaunt their disagreement with the law, thereby putting their own kids at risk in the meantime.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Legal definitions often differ from dictionary definitions, you're clearly not a lawyer. And no one said that being a mile away from home constituted neglect. They said it constituted evidence of neglect. I think you don't understand what evidence means.

Correct, I am not a lawyer.

So is the lawyerly argument is that being a mile away from home isn't neglect but is evidence of neglect? In my limited experience of lawyers, when lawyers say that [word] might seem to mean [definition], but actually means [something completely different that nobody who was not a lawyer would ever think it means], that's a sign that the lawyers are on shaky ground.

Well in this case, it means that the definition is laid out in the regulations. That's how that works usually. You should probably stop opining on stuff you don't understand.

Yes, the definition of neglect is in the regulations.

But you haven't explained how something that is not neglect can nonetheless be evidence of neglect.

Oh! You actually don't understand what evidences. Okay, here's an example: say someone saw someone running out of a convenience store two minutes after the store was robbed. That does not prove that the guy running out was the robber in and of itself. However, it is evidence that he's the robber. Make sense? You need evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict. Not just "some evidence".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Are yes, the old truism that if you don't let your kid walk a mile from home alone until they are eight you are a helicopter parent. Makes perfect sense.

That is not an old truism. For one thing, it's not a truism. More importantly, it's not old. Before 40 years ago, if you had said that children under 8 should not be allowed to walk a mile home by themselves, most people would have thought you were nuts.

"Free-range parenting", the name, is new-fangled. But doing what free-range parents do is not new-fangled. It's what parents have been doing for hundreds and thousands of years. Even Tony Kornheiser recognizes this, and he's an idiot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am sad to live in a county that does not allow kids to walk to and from a park without getting paranoid people calling 911 and getting pulled over by police. My siblings and I definitely were this age on our own playing outside daily. And not right in our front yard. As soon as the training wheels were off, we were free to ride to friends homes, the park, the baseball field, and the convenience store. The last 3 were at least a half mile away and the store was crossing a busy 2 lane road. We didn't have cell phones, we had watches and were told what time to be home. Made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun. Great childhood. Kids these days are so coddled and structured it is scary. And the fact that so many of you think that walking a mile back home from a park is abuse is even scarier.

Maybe that should be written into the law. As soon as a child can ride a bike without training wheels.

Your sadness is lost on elitist children, you should be sad for children who go days without food not hours.

Why can't we be sad for both children? Why can't we work to improve the lives of both children?

Because 1 set of children lives far exceed the measurement for excellent.

Not necessarily. Children who grow up with too much supervision have problems, as well:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2014/09/02/how-helicopter-parents-are-ruining-college-students/?tid=sm_fb

Bradley-Geist and Olson-Buchanan, both management professors, surveyed more than 450 undergraduate students who were asked to “rate their level of self-efficacy, the frequency of parental involvement, how involved parents were in their daily lives and their response to certain workplace scenarios.”

The study showed that those college students with “helicopter parents” had a hard time believing in their own ability to accomplish goals. They were more dependent on others, had poor coping strategies and didn’t have soft skills, like responsibility and conscientiousness throughout college, the authors found.

“I had a mom ask to sit in on a disciplinary meeting” when a student was failing, said Marla Vannucci, an associate professor at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, who was that students’ academic adviser. Her team let the mom sit in, but in the end it doesn’t help. “It really breeds helplessness.”

Vannucci also had a college-aged client whose parents did her homework for her. The client’s mother explained that she didn’t want her daughter to struggle the same way she had. The daughter, however, “has grown up to be an adult who has anxiety attacks anytime someone asks her to do something challenging” because she never learned how to handle anything on her own.

These may be extreme cases, but parental over-involvement has been bleeding into college culture for some time now. “I think they need to know that they are actually diminishing their child’s ability to understand how to navigate the world by trying to do it for them,” Gibralter said.

Are yes, the old truism that if you don't let your kid walk a mile from home alone until they are eight you are a helicopter parent. Makes perfect sense.

Not the PP but yes I think if you don't let kids go off on their own with friends and siblings, you are indeed a helicopter parent. There are just so many of you out there these days that you don't even see it. As a matter of fact, a few decades ago, if you left your kid inside all day or followed them around everywhere they went, the other kids would have been so freaked out, another mom would have called CPS on your for being a nut job. Could you imagine if all our moms followed us around on foot, bike, etc... Wow!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

What are you doing to help those kids?

What are you doing? Besides posting on DCUM.

A lot actually.

Good for you. Keep doing that, and don't waste your time worrying about what everybody else is doing.

I don't worry about what everyone else is doing. I also don't get all up in arms about the application of perfectly reasonable regulations to a situation that I don't know all the facts about. Maybe you should stop doing that and actually try helping someone for a change.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am sad to live in a county that does not allow kids to walk to and from a park without getting paranoid people calling 911 and getting pulled over by police. My siblings and I definitely were this age on our own playing outside daily. And not right in our front yard. As soon as the training wheels were off, we were free to ride to friends homes, the park, the baseball field, and the convenience store. The last 3 were at least a half mile away and the store was crossing a busy 2 lane road. We didn't have cell phones, we had watches and were told what time to be home. Made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun. Great childhood. Kids these days are so coddled and structured it is scary. And the fact that so many of you think that walking a mile back home from a park is abuse is even scarier.

Maybe that should be written into the law. As soon as a child can ride a bike without training wheels.

Your sadness is lost on elitist children, you should be sad for children who go days without food not hours.

Why can't we be sad for both children? Why can't we work to improve the lives of both children?

Because 1 set of children lives far exceed the measurement for excellent.

Not necessarily. Children who grow up with too much supervision have problems, as well:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2014/09/02/how-helicopter-parents-are-ruining-college-students/?tid=sm_fb

Bradley-Geist and Olson-Buchanan, both management professors, surveyed more than 450 undergraduate students who were asked to “rate their level of self-efficacy, the frequency of parental involvement, how involved parents were in their daily lives and their response to certain workplace scenarios.”

The study showed that those college students with “helicopter parents” had a hard time believing in their own ability to accomplish goals. They were more dependent on others, had poor coping strategies and didn’t have soft skills, like responsibility and conscientiousness throughout college, the authors found.

“I had a mom ask to sit in on a disciplinary meeting” when a student was failing, said Marla Vannucci, an associate professor at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, who was that students’ academic adviser. Her team let the mom sit in, but in the end it doesn’t help. “It really breeds helplessness.”

Vannucci also had a college-aged client whose parents did her homework for her. The client’s mother explained that she didn’t want her daughter to struggle the same way she had. The daughter, however, “has grown up to be an adult who has anxiety attacks anytime someone asks her to do something challenging” because she never learned how to handle anything on her own.

These may be extreme cases, but parental over-involvement has been bleeding into college culture for some time now. “I think they need to know that they are actually diminishing their child’s ability to understand how to navigate the world by trying to do it for them,” Gibralter said.

Are yes, the old truism that if you don't let your kid walk a mile from home alone until they are eight you are a helicopter parent. Makes perfect sense.

Not the PP but yes I think if you don't let kids go off on their own with friends and siblings, you are indeed a helicopter parent. There are just so many of you out there these days that you don't even see it. As a matter of fact, a few decades ago, if you left your kid inside all day or followed them around everywhere they went, the other kids would have been so freaked out, another mom would have called CPS on your for being a nut job. Could you imagine if all our moms followed us around on foot, bike, etc... Wow!

Oh well, because I didn't let my kid do that stuff until she was eight alone, I guess she's damaged for life. Strangely she seems to be super independent but who knows?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Legal definitions often differ from dictionary definitions, you're clearly not a lawyer. And no one said that being a mile away from home constituted neglect. They said it constituted evidence of neglect. I think you don't understand what evidence means.

Correct, I am not a lawyer.

So is the lawyerly argument is that being a mile away from home isn't neglect but is evidence of neglect? In my limited experience of lawyers, when lawyers say that [word] might seem to mean [definition], but actually means [something completely different that nobody who was not a lawyer would ever think it means], that's a sign that the lawyers are on shaky ground.

Well in this case, it means that the definition is laid out in the regulations. That's how that works usually. You should probably stop opining on stuff you don't understand.

Yes, the definition of neglect is in the regulations.

But you haven't explained how something that is not neglect can nonetheless be evidence of neglect.

Oh! You actually don't understand what evidences. Okay, here's an example: say someone saw someone running out of a convenience store two minutes after the store was robbed. That does not prove that the guy running out was the robber in and of itself. However, it is evidence that he's the robber. Make sense? You need evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict. Not just "some evidence".

It doesn't make sense in this case. What neglect would being a mile away from home without a parent be evidence of, in this case?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Are yes, the old truism that if you don't let your kid walk a mile from home alone until they are eight you are a helicopter parent. Makes perfect sense.

That is not an old truism. For one thing, it's not a truism. More importantly, it's not old. Before 40 years ago, if you had said that children under 8 should not be allowed to walk a mile home by themselves, most people would have thought you were nuts.

"Free-range parenting", the name, is new-fangled. But doing what free-range parents do is not new-fangled. It's what parents have been doing for hundreds and thousands of years. Even Tony Kornheiser recognizes this, and he's an idiot.

+1 and you forgot to add what most countries still do to this day.

[Anonymous]

^^^not to mention that a CPS finding is not a court case, and I doubt (but don't know for sure) that CPS uses '"beyond a reasonable doubt" as the standard of proof.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Legal definitions often differ from dictionary definitions, you're clearly not a lawyer. And no one said that being a mile away from home constituted neglect. They said it constituted evidence of neglect. I think you don't understand what evidence means.

Correct, I am not a lawyer.

So is the lawyerly argument is that being a mile away from home isn't neglect but is evidence of neglect? In my limited experience of lawyers, when lawyers say that [word] might seem to mean [definition], but actually means [something completely different that nobody who was not a lawyer would ever think it means], that's a sign that the lawyers are on shaky ground.

Well in this case, it means that the definition is laid out in the regulations. That's how that works usually. You should probably stop opining on stuff you don't understand.

Yes, the definition of neglect is in the regulations.

But you haven't explained how something that is not neglect can nonetheless be evidence of neglect.

Oh! You actually don't understand what evidences. Okay, here's an example: say someone saw someone running out of a convenience store two minutes after the store was robbed. That does not prove that the guy running out was the robber in and of itself. However, it is evidence that he's the robber. Make sense? You need evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict. Not just "some evidence".

It doesn't make sense in this case. What neglect would being a mile away from home without a parent be evidence of, in this case?

Well for one thing it's evidence that a kid wasn't being supervised by someone old enough to supervise her. That, if coupled with other evidence, might constitute neglect. That's why they investigate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

What are you doing to help those kids?

What are you doing? Besides posting on DCUM.

A lot actually.

Good for you. Keep doing that, and don't waste your time worrying about what everybody else is doing.

I don't worry about what everyone else is doing. I also don't get all up in arms about the application of perfectly reasonable regulations to a situation that I don't know all the facts about. Maybe you should stop doing that and actually try helping someone for a change.

No, but you do get all up in arms about other people getting up in arms. Please focus on the issues you want to focus on and let me do the same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am sad to live in a county that does not allow kids to walk to and from a park without getting paranoid people calling 911 and getting pulled over by police. My siblings and I definitely were this age on our own playing outside daily. And not right in our front yard. As soon as the training wheels were off, we were free to ride to friends homes, the park, the baseball field, and the convenience store. The last 3 were at least a half mile away and the store was crossing a busy 2 lane road. We didn't have cell phones, we had watches and were told what time to be home. Made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun. Great childhood. Kids these days are so coddled and structured it is scary. And the fact that so many of you think that walking a mile back home from a park is abuse is even scarier.

Maybe that should be written into the law. As soon as a child can ride a bike without training wheels.

Your sadness is lost on elitist children, you should be sad for children who go days without food not hours.

Yes because I am sad about a rigid overprotective government telling me how to raise my kids, means I am not sad at all for the children who go days without food. Nice well thought out retort!!

I am not sad that my kids may have to follow some rules that I don't agree with like waiting until 8 to walk to a park alone or adhering to curfews even though our neighborhood does not have hoards of kids stealing from 7-11 and threaten police officer's lives. I realize I live in a society that needs rules to protect kids and society and when these rules/guidelines/laws are looked at individually, may not make sense to me but when applied to a society is in the best interest of all kids not just my very privileged kids.

AMEN
PREACH
YES!
THIS!
EXACTLY +1000000000000000000000000000000000

I totally agree!!!

[Anonymous]

I wonder if the parents who are hell bent on sending their kids to the park alone before they are old enough are the same parents who drank wine throughout their pregnancies, dragged their babies to bars, and shun after school activities (which involve giving up your me time to schlep kids to/from practice and games)?

And I wonder why these kids aren't playing with kids in their neighborhood? And if there aren't any kids on their street, then why not pick up the phone and invite a kid over to play?

As the mother of four, I find it supremely odd that a ten year old boy would have any interest in playing with his six year old sister...most ten year olds have zero interest in playing with much younger kids. My guess is that the parents use him as a babysitter, and that's a crummy thing to do IMHO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am sad to live in a county that does not allow kids to walk to and from a park without getting paranoid people calling 911 and getting pulled over by police. My siblings and I definitely were this age on our own playing outside daily. And not right in our front yard. As soon as the training wheels were off, we were free to ride to friends homes, the park, the baseball field, and the convenience store. The last 3 were at least a half mile away and the store was crossing a busy 2 lane road. We didn't have cell phones, we had watches and were told what time to be home. Made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun. Great childhood. Kids these days are so coddled and structured it is scary. And the fact that so many of you think that walking a mile back home from a park is abuse is even scarier.

Maybe that should be written into the law. As soon as a child can ride a bike without training wheels.

Your sadness is lost on elitist children, you should be sad for children who go days without food not hours.

Why can't we be sad for both children? Why can't we work to improve the lives of both children?

Because 1 set of children lives far exceed the measurement for excellent.

Not necessarily. Children who grow up with too much supervision have problems, as well:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2014/09/02/how-helicopter-parents-are-ruining-college-students/?tid=sm_fb

Bradley-Geist and Olson-Buchanan, both management professors, surveyed more than 450 undergraduate students who were asked to “rate their level of self-efficacy, the frequency of parental involvement, how involved parents were in their daily lives and their response to certain workplace scenarios.”

The study showed that those college students with “helicopter parents” had a hard time believing in their own ability to accomplish goals. They were more dependent on others, had poor coping strategies and didn’t have soft skills, like responsibility and conscientiousness throughout college, the authors found.

“I had a mom ask to sit in on a disciplinary meeting” when a student was failing, said Marla Vannucci, an associate professor at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, who was that students’ academic adviser. Her team let the mom sit in, but in the end it doesn’t help. “It really breeds helplessness.”

Vannucci also had a college-aged client whose parents did her homework for her. The client’s mother explained that she didn’t want her daughter to struggle the same way she had. The daughter, however, “has grown up to be an adult who has anxiety attacks anytime someone asks her to do something challenging” because she never learned how to handle anything on her own.

These may be extreme cases, but parental over-involvement has been bleeding into college culture for some time now. “I think they need to know that they are actually diminishing their child’s ability to understand how to navigate the world by trying to do it for them,” Gibralter said.

Are yes, the old truism that if you don't let your kid walk a mile from home alone until they are eight you are a helicopter parent. Makes perfect sense.

Not the PP but yes I think if you don't let kids go off on their own with friends and siblings, you are indeed a helicopter parent. There are just so many of you out there these days that you don't even see it. As a matter of fact, a few decades ago, if you left your kid inside all day or followed them around everywhere they went, the other kids would have been so freaked out, another mom would have called CPS on your for being a nut job. Could you imagine if all our moms followed us around on foot, bike, etc... Wow!

Oh well, because I didn't let my kid do that stuff until she was eight alone, I guess she's damaged for life. Strangely she seems to be super independent but who knows?

Do you let your 8yr old go to the park alone, ride her bike all around the neighborhood, stay out until dinner time and you aren't 100% sure the location in the neighborhood she may be in? Or is she only allowed a few houses away, must make contact with you every 30min, carry a cell-phone, etc... There is a difference in what helicopters say is freedom and what truly is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^^^not to mention that a CPS finding is not a court case, and I doubt (but don't know for sure) that CPS uses '"beyond a reasonable doubt" as the standard of proof.

No they do not. That was just a simple example since you seem to be having trouble with this. Different kinds of violations have to be proven to different standards. So in a civil case it's usually a preponderance of the evidence. In a criminal case it's beyond a reasonable doubt. The child protection scenario is sort of quasicriminal. So it's kind of in between. On the one hand we don't want to take custody of children away without really solid proof. On the other hand if you had to prove an actual criminal violation before you remove the child from custody, you would end up leaving a lot of kids in abusive situations. It's very hard. And very complicated. Which is why I would never prejudge the facts before they all came out.