> child play outside by themselves is essentially illegal.
No it's not.
No it's not.
Second one, leaving your 9 year old at a park all day while you are not there. I can see why that is a problem.
The third one is maybe where the is controversy. It would be nice if a 6 year old could play on the street by themselves. I think there is some discretion here and it depends what your street and suburb is like to some extent.
The last one is tragic and totally unfair to the family. Looks like another nail in the coffin for people without a lot of money in the US (who can't call a babysitter on short notice) and who use common sense. Then they get a criminal record, lose their jobs etc, can't get a new one etc. F'd.
I know, anecdata and all that, but it's really crazy out there.
That and the fact that "oh and then the charges were dropped and in some cases local laws changed" is inevitably (I think purposefully) left out.
Reason.com went on a year-long bender of self-promotion and half-truthing about 3 years ago when three women were arrested in three states, claiming that "jack-booted big gubmint was comin to take yer kerdz" and plastered people's pictures and stories on fundraising materials and tried to get people to buy their "free range kids" books, as though three incidents in a country of 300 million was an epidemic.
Of course, the most confusing thing about all of this is that a Venn diagram of "people who think that the government is rounding up mothers all over the country" and "people who immediately, vocally, and vociferously criticize the government for NOT protecting the welfare of children" is a perfect circle.
My personal experience as a parent is that my kids don't get nearly the amount of independence that I did at their age. A reasonable part of this is that I am afraid that my kids will get taken away. My preference is towards the free(r)-range style of parenting, so the ex-post stats don't convey the full effect that the small sample size of reported "big gubmint takeaways" has.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/05/26/free-range-kids-the-u...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...
> In December, the couple was accused of neglect for allowing the children to walk around their suburban Washington neighborhood together unaccompanied by an adult. In one instance, Rafi and Dvora were walking from a playground two blocks from home; in another, the park was about a mile away.