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Comment by beaglesss | Hacker News Reader

When my parents wanted to go out they did, and if I didn't want to I went down the creek, biked to the store, ran around the neighborhood with friends or whatever.

Now that earns a call from CPS and the parents are arrested and the kid may end up in a foster home which are common sources of abuse. So the family just stays home if the kids won't/can't be taken.

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Anyone can call CPS as many times as they want and they will investigate, but no one is putting kids in foster care for biking to the store unless there are other things going on.

The annoyance of being investigated is enough to make parents so no to biking.

Are you saying this from personal experience? Because it sounds like you’re spreading an urban legend. Parents aren’t being investigated for kids biking around. CPS is way too busy for that.

I have relatives who work for CPS and if anything they are extremely lenient. And even if they take kids (when both parents can’t take care of the kid for example if they’re both heroin addicts) CPS will try to place with a relative, even out of state.

I've been investigated. They did the mandatory interview and closed it, but still annoying.

What you are describing is essentially an urban legend. Parents are not being investigated for letting kids bike around.

Also, the most common source of child abuse is a family member, which unfortunately is a common reason for CPS to get involved.

Sure if you ignore all the examples of it happening, after you so rudely lied about in your other reply where you claimed I cited no evidence despite citing sister comment that included articles such as children being taken into cps custody for walking home alone from the park.

Of course the genius is the kidnappers seal most these cases so their relatives can gaslight you about what happened, which is the icing on the cake.

Did you click through them? Only 1 sounds like a simple case of a parent letting kids out to play and CPS taking any action, and cites several people in that community claiming the CPS response as irresponsible. A few of those links are about a law specifically protecting parents rights to allow children to go play at a park unsupervised.

I've seen the narrative before and I agree that parenting attitudes have changed, but are there any stats/studies to show that kind of severe outcome has really become more common over the decades? (As opposed to simply more-feared.)

Most of the stats come from media outlets reporting on singular cases, and most of the articles on the subject are op-eds rather than scientific studies. It does seem to be more common, but overall data is unfortunately very hard to come by.

The plural of op-ed anecdotes is not objective data, but I can give you some jumping-off points:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/09/05/mom...

https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/living/feat-maryland-free-ran...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-mom-accused-of-leaving-ki...

https://www.businessinsider.com/teen-bans-curfews-malls-them...

https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/sb0065.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/well/family/utah-passes-f...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...

Most the cases are sealed and depend on self reporting to the media by parents who do so at great threat of it impacting their secret proceedings, where you cannot even face the accuser.

By design they've made such studies effectively impossible from the outside. You don't even get a jury. So we're left with the odd anecdotes (as exemplified below in sister comment)from those who weren't successfully intimidated.

And that's the beauty. They can knowingly and willingly intimidate parents while screeching "but muh data, you can't prove it" laughing all along by design they've hidden the data in the shadows from inspection.

Yet surely the number of cases and broad outcomes are at least countable, even if identities and specifics are not available, right? For example, like in this piece [0]:

> That study was based on an analysis of [...] the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, which provides information on removals of children from home, terminations of parental rights and adoptions.

From there with a little searching I find this graph [1] showing various metrics from 2013-2022, which don't appear to show any freakish growth over that decade.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-child-wel...

[1] https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/report/trends-foster-care-adoptio...

The flip side is you are claiming CPS is over-reaching but conveniently can’t provide any evidence of it.

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