Utah governor signs law legalizing 'free-range parenting'
deseretnews.com
deseretnews.com
"Why need a law? Just let your children be free and independent. They need that." "If anyone threatens to call CPS on me I'll tell them to fuck off."
That's why the law is needed! Currently, in a lot of jurisdictions, do either of those two things and your kids can arbitrarily be taken from you, legally, by the government.
This law makes it so that allowing children normal independence is legal. Because slowly administrative agencies started to take a stricter view on what was "safe".
now we just need to make it normal (i.e., socially acceptable). it's hard because no matter where we stand in the sociosphere, we're always on the lookout for danger and enemies. that's the yang to our yin, the opposing force that elucidates our core identity.
while life is full of quite unlikely but life-threatening risks, it's crippling to be constantly finding, worrying about, and trying to mitigate all of those risks for our kids. we can't, and it shouldn't be expected of us.
parents need to provide the broad strokes (don't jump off a cliff, swallow random pills, or run blindly into the street) but kids need the room to test the minutiae of those boundaries (can i jump off the monkey bars? is this rural dirt road ok to run into? is it ok to eat 10 of these flintstones vitamins at once?). that's what growing up is all about.
otherwise our kids won't be able to cope with the inevitable dangers they will face later in life. on some dimensions, they need to be tested in minutely-increasing increments so they develop confidence in emergency situations ("camp" in the living room, then in the yard, then with a scouting troop, then with friends, then alone) but they don't need to be--and can't be--prepared for every danger in the world.
you can't fly without risking a fall to the ground.
As a non-parent (and do not want kids), I feel I have a jaded view on this. Yet, I was once a child.. so I should have some, I guess. I taught myself to shave, learned about sex myself, taught myself to drive, etcetc. I love my parents, but frankly they didn't teach me anything in life outside of passive observations of their behavior. I learned about bickering from them though, in leagues. heh.
I don't get why more parents don't want to be the kind that are so dependable, the child will call them when they're too drunk to drive home at 16yrs old. Or the kind that explains to their kids that all drugs are not equal, some are far worse, some are not bad. Or hell, not just that some drugs are bad, but why some are bad.
So many parents seem afraid to be the one who teaches their child first about the "tough" things in the world like sex and drugs. Yet, the tough things in the world should come first from them, imo. I just don't get it.
I am a parent, dad of two girls: 4 and 9. I completely agree with you.
I have a rule that I will never lie to my kids when they ask a question, and that I'll always answer to the best of my abilities. In the rare case where I feel like they're not ready for the answer, I'll tell them that. So far it's worked well.
A couple of months ago we moved ~1k miles. My nine-year-old rode in the moving truck with me for 10 hours, and most of that time was spent discussing sex. Most of her questions were initially about the mechanics of the act, but as I explained things she ended up being just as interested in the emotional and social aspects. That conversation spawned several follow-ups where she had more questions after she thought about things. The only aspect I stopped short of explaining in full was pornography - she's aware of its existence, but not the reasons people participate in it or view it... and that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't yet experienced the impact of hormones during puberty.
The way I see it, my kids are going to learn about the world one way or another. I see only positive consequences of being the trusted source of information and guidance when they first encounter it, regardless of how difficult the conversations may become.
Yup, and that's exactly why I struggle to understand why so many parents avoid it.
Some I think mean well, but vastly underestimate when their child will discover the worst of humanity. Especially in the internet age, at school or at home. It's a complicated world.
In light of that, I give my kids the same thing. Instead of filters, I just keep logs of network traffic and occasionally grep them for keywords that I think might warrant discussion.
All you need is someone to report you, and for the agency to have an incentive to err on the side of taking kids away.
Removed from parents because the father smoked marijuana at night when the child was asleep, child murdered by foster care parent with a history of violations: http://fox43.com/2014/11/06/2-year-old-taken-away-from-paren...
Removed from parents for "drug use and homelessness", died from neglect in foster care: https://www.abqjournal.com/1113809/caregiver-arrested-in-dea...
Removed from parents because baby had a bruise from when he bumped his head while feeding, died in foster care: http://fox40.com/2017/08/17/after-baby-dies-in-foster-care-b...
For example Utah (where I foster) has 2.8 per 1,000 children in foster care, while neighboring Nevada has 6.7 per 1,000. New York has 5.0. California has 6.2. [1]
The ever-conservative Utah legislature puts a very high priority of children living with their legal parents. As long as there's no imminent health risk (abuse, hard drug use, severe neglect), parents virtually always keep custody.
I really wish it were like that in more places.
Traumatic situations for children should not be taken likely. But being forcibly removed into state custody is also a very traumatic event. You've got to be confident that the latter is the lesser evil.
[1] http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/6243-children-in...
I can confirm that a wide variety of medical sources strongly recommend that there be nothing but a proper infant mattress and fitted sheet designed specifically for the mattress in an infants crib, to reduce SIDS risk. 7 months is within the age range to which I usually see the recommendation applied, but out of the highest-risk period.
This isn’t just “some guidance”. Its the American Academy of Pediatrics guidance which shows stuffed animals, pillows, and blankets increase the risk factor for SIDS.
Any serious medical professional worth a damn will immediately question the SIDS "guidance." If you don't know what causes something, you can't treat it. You don't blindly run around doing things and hope it helps. You have to find out the cause to find the cure.
This is exactly the kind of FUD that people are fighting when dealing with crazy CPS zealots.
Edit: If SIDS is suffocating from an obstruction, then call it suffocation by obstruction. But it's not suffocation by obsstruction. The current theory is that it's suffocation due to brain malfunction. Putting a toy in a crib isn't going to cause a brain malfunction.
Law requires hazardous chemicals be sprayed on the bed mat to protect(?) the child from fires. Try stuffing your face in an infant mattress and see if you notice the smell.
References like https://www1.nichd.nih.gov/sts/campaign/science/Pages/backsl... and articles like https://www.npr.org/2011/07/15/137859024/rethinking-sids-man... make it likely that the increase in sleeping children on their back is the bulk of the reduction. And that the fact that blacks are less likely to take that recommendation is the reason why the black community has twice the death rate of whites.
This is something that I have a personal interest in. My nephew died of SIDS months before the recommendation about sleeping positions was reversed back in the early 90s. My sister did not smoke. She did put him to sleep on his stomach.
>busybodies who have no ability to perform cost-benefit analysis
Not just medical guidance. All sorts of rules, laws, regulation and other BS is the result of these people.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/128/5/e1341.fu...
Being aware of a parent disregarding widely disseminated recommendations of the medical community on a death risk is certainly reason for a third party to be concerned about fitness. It may not equate to unfitness, which corresponds well to the lack of any CPS action when the report was investigated.
The threshold for reasonsble reporting to a investigative authority should not be certainty of a violation.
(Now, I would expect a babysitter to attempt to resolve this with the parents first.)
Absolutely not. Way over the line.
I once spent a bunch of time chasing references from the AAP and others, and could not find anything like that (because I was trying to decide whether to allow a stuffed animal in the crib with my baby). The stuffed animals seem to just be lumped in to the abstract category of "soft things" but all the cases of kids actually suffocating were from other soft things, most notably soft bedding.
I did see one case of a child dying from having a whole crib full of stuffed animals (so the stuffed animals were effectively bedding), hence the limit of 5 for the challenge.
You have kids and you realize how traumatic even a single night of custody interruption would be, and then you think about what the reality of due process in these situations is.
(Personally I think most people should do a few things that scare the crap out of them while growing up--it's the only way to learn your limits.)
I've met people who don't take public transportation and think city buses are basically the Mos Eisley cantina on wheels.
The problem is they are (somewhat necessarily) vague. They didn't think the laws would be used for trivial things but words like "endangerment" can easily be applied to letting your kid walk home alone.
This is the first real attempt that I know of to scale back some of it and I suspect we'll see more of this in other states as society realizes some of this has gone to far.
It should also be said that this is just codifying what was basically already the case. Utah's Child Protective Services supported this law and already considered the behaviors the law protects to be perfectly fine but they were obligated to open investigations anyway. Now they don't have to. It also prevents Utah's CPS in the future from doing some of the ridiculous actions that have occurred in other states if the attitude of the workers/leadership at Utah's CPS shifted.
As a parent, the shuffle to drive or walk my bike-capable kids 0.5 miles to their school costs us time or money (to have someone shepherd them).
These days we have ways to track kids or kids have their own phone, tools like Nextdoor and crime levels are low. Why shouldn't we trust kids to be able to navigate (perhaps in a group) themselves to a local school?
I am thankful for this law, and for the bill of rights, but it is sad that we require either. We were not supposed to.
Where does the ninth amendment fit into that?
My point is if they start a list of not-neglectful things, then it becomes the list of authorized-only things. What about letting my kids chop wood, light a barbecue, carve a chicken, swim in a lake without supervision?
The only way to write this law would be to provide basically no guidance and give police and judges and enormous amount of discretion, or to provide a lot of detail that includes concrete examples of things that are allowed and things that aren't. The world is too complex to write this in purely general terms and expect it to work without issue.
Security always involves trade-offs. Unthinkingly choosing the most restrictive policy every time is not a good security practice.
There are absolutely times where security has to be compromised, even abandoned, in the name of usability, and times where security must be ironclad, even user-hostile. Civil rights law is definitely the former.
Why do they now need to be codified when they've worked (more or less) as implicit rules for so long? Seems like different reasons for everything. In this case, the protective tendencies and govt agencies started to over-run the 'free-range' tendencies, and this just pushes it back a bit.
This is not the same as "Anything not enshrined in law is unauthorized."
I agree that it can be cast in an awkward light but it's not uncommon.
You cannot and should not prevent every possible bad thing from happening to your child. It doesn't produce the best outcome.
Disclaimer: I'm from Europe.
In the case of Utah, things like letting your children walk home alone or go to the park by themselves was already considered perfectly fine by Utah's Child Protective Services (who supported the passage of this law) but they were still obligated to open investigations when someone reported these innocuous events. Now they don't need to.
There was a notable story of a parent in Vancouver who had to stop letting his kids take the city bus to school because a neighbour complained.
It is also very hard to get the bureaucracy to drop a case once it has been brought to their attention.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/nyregion/toddler-left-outs...
She was Danish and left her child in the stroller outside while dining inside.
Doesn't seem like a big issue to me, but I can see why Americans might see it as an issue.
No specific age limits.
My parents took me and my siblings to Mexico when I was a kid, I was the oldest at 7 years old. My brother and sister were 6 and 4. We'd go walking for miles on our own. In retrospect it seems amazing that nothing serious happened to us, though once my brother decided to pet a horse from behind and got kicked.
This article also reminds me of a story comedian Molly Shannon tells about sneaking onto an airplane with her friend when they were 13 and flying to New York City to spend the day.
It seems like nobody does this kind of stuff anymore, parents are much more on top of it than 30 years ago.
People then have a sense of walking as weird and potentially dangerous. If they see a kid walking, they think the kid must be neglected, or else why wouldn't they have gotten a ride from a parent? If they see a grown woman walking, they think she's taking an unnecessary risk. If they see a grown man walking, they worry he's up to no good, and might even post on NextDoor or call the police to report "suspicious activity."
Also, I think as small towns and suburbs have moved more commerce and also some housing to the outskirts of town, more streets have become arterial roads, which means faster cars and more danger to pedestrians.
I'd bet that the enforcement of existing laws has changed with society's consent, as is usually the case. Like it or not, parents are more likely to see new threats that didn't exist a few decades ago, and this manifests itself in what law enforcement officers see as threats.
The irony is not lost: "Free-range" advocates say that society vastly overestimates the risk of harms, so they campaign against child-protection laws that they vastly overestimate the harm of.
The typical harassment starts with a kid who gets a normal childhood injury or is found unattended at a library or church, or sometimes an anonymous tip by somebody who wants to cause trouble. This is enough to start an investigation. The agency's workers then feel entitled to interview and examine the kids alone, invade the home, and even inspect the content of a refrigerator. Depending on your location, a warrant may be automatically approved by a judge.
The thing with the refrigerator is particularly absurd. It's not as if you can't feed children without one. You could even eat out every day! If the agency's workers find moldy food you forgot in the back of your refrigerator, they will presume that the children are being fed moldy food. If you haven't been shopping recently and the refrigerator is mostly empty, they will assume the kids aren't being fed.
The agency benefits greatly from people's reluctance to talk with friends, news media, and so on. So much of the malicious activity occurs in private.
These investigations have lasting effects. Years later, one can snap awake in a panic due to a nightmare about kids being grabbed out of the home. You can forever lose your feeling of safety and security in your own home. When the report is anonymous, you can no longer trust anybody you know.
(Intentionally vague) laws intended to protect kids from serious harm end up being applied to situations where kids are perfectly safe, but some busybody heard a late night news report one time about a kid that got abducted, or fell out of a tree and broke his neck, or got hit by a bus and felt the need to impose their worry on others. So they call CPS, and now the parent is under investigation for doing something completely normal, because CPS has too much power and not enough oversight/due process.
The idea of this law is to send a clear message that parents are NOT to be harassed/threatened by government agencies over these harmless situations. Sometimes the state has to be told where their power ends explicitly.
Jokes aside, I'm often surprised by how frequently people in US describe places, people and ideas as "threats".
If I really wanna show how out of touch I am I should take pity on anyone who lives somewhere without over 9000 ethic restaurants and bars that serve hipster micro-brews within walking distance and mention startups somehow.
(yes, this is sarcasm)
Ah, what?
In Florida in the late 90s, my my 2nd grade self and my 1st grade sister walked a mile to school every day.
The thought that someone would find that objectionable...genuinely bizarre.
Maybe this will help Facebook and Google's surveillance towns take off, since these adult children would be able to move somewhere else where they'd be under constant supervision.
(I hope not, that would sound quite patronizing)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What a disgrace.
I won't move to Utah because of this, but hopefully other states take notice and I'll be lobbying my state to use this as precedent.
Luckily for me, my parents had trust in me so in high school I could hang out with my friends without my parents questioning my every move. They just wanted me home before 10.
https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html
Look specifically at the underlined additions on lines 309-325.
This is simply a refinement of the definition of "neglect".
There are specific reasons that this is the case, but most people will not discuss it openly. Putnam sat on his results for years because it is simply not acceptable to discuss in polite society.
Seems logical but social isolation is also increasing in Japan with their ethnic homogeneity. I think its all related to the collapse of large families. People have few children and when the kids grow up they're likely to move away.
When was the last time you were there? I spent most of the past month in metro Osaka, as a parent of young children, and I noted:
* Young children freely coming to city parks, fraternizing, and leaving, in absence of any adult supervision, indeed, without any adults other than myself even present
* Groups of young schoolchildren traveling mostly autonomously to and from school among busy urban streets (though sometimes under the watchful eye of many volunteer shepherds along the route)
* Children as young as 8 approaching me to be generally curious, maturely and completely without fear
* Proprietor of a local bar I visited knew everyone around, including my in-laws' family, this in the busy inner-city
* Ample resources and facilities provided by the prefectural and local governments, including staffed play areas and civic center events. My older daughter was broadcast on-air TV with other children attending a Girls' Day event.
* health care including vision/dental costs hard capped to 500 yen/treatment day (~$5) for children under 6
So yeah. I don't think the situation in Japan is comparable at all in any way to what's happened here in the USA. I would not allow even the appearance of my daughter playing alone in my own front yard, for fear of what well-intentioned neighbors might say or do, let alone the boogie-man.
In this case, it was gradual shift in the perception of 'neglect' by CPS, helicopter parents, or overly concerned citizens who think every child is in mortal danger if they're not within 10 feet of a responsible adult.
Smells like political posturing.
If a kid was caught doing that today, it would legally be taken away form his/her family by Children Protective Services, the parents charged, tried, and probably convicted of child neglect and endangerment.
Some of the best memories from childhood for me are those trips. How sad that kids have to be home playing with their iPads today.
citation needed.
> Once, we had to cross a freeway and a truck hit our dog, who died.
Your parents negligently put you in charge of a dog that you negligently killed. That should be legal?
"Your parents negligently put you in charge of a dog that you negligently killed. That should be legal?"
Shit happens. The truck killed the dog, not me. Maybe you come from another continent or country, but America is a free country, so we don't care about what is legal, because the law establishes what is illegal, and everything else is legal. It is not illegal to run with your dog.
This just reads of something done purely for face-saving reasons rather than solving the greater issue of safety in America. Never mind that the concept of free range parenting in America is something mostly for the white and wealthy.
To be clear, this isn't about solving some greater issue of safety. There's no big safety crisis. This is about parents letting their kids have some independence because even in poorer areas, the world is not that unsafe.
In fact, the safety of the one kid who plays alone in the park is much more of an issue than a group of kids. We need basic independence to be the norm because it doesn't work as well if it's rare.
>Never mind that the concept of free range parenting in America is something mostly for the white and wealthy.
How is that? The US isn't Norway, but it is still very safe. I don't see why helicopter parenting should be required?
As for your second point, it's because for a lot of the poorer parents they don't really have the ability to let their kids roam freely. Either due to proximity, lack of funds and so forth. Not to mention the institutional problems minority kids face on a daily basis (see: black children being shot by police).
It's not about requiring helicopter parenting but rather that laws like this don't really solve the actual problem for the majority of parents in the US. It's effectively lip service and I guarantee the wriggle-room left in the law will be used to harm minorities more than anyone else.