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Comment by hardolaf | Hacker News Reader

It's not illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended in Illinois. It is however illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended for an unreasonable amount of time in Illinois.

Here's an actual page from the government explaining the law and even providing the text of the law: https://dcfs.illinois.gov/for-families/safety/preparing-your...

If you follow their advice and your child is ready to reasonably able to be left alone unattended, you can leave even 8-9 year olds unattended for long periods of time. It's not odd for children to be home alone after school for 4-8+ hours.

Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.

Kids go all over the place in Chicago while under 14 without their parents. It's literally not an issue.

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Illinois lawyers [0] and child's rights policy thinkers [1] had evaluated it to mean a child under 14 can not be 'reasonably' left alone, up until 2023. It looks like you are correct and they updated it recently under an amended 705 ILCS 405/2-3 in January 2023.

Unless your child was born in the past couple years or following legislation, I think most people don't realize this, as even most the law firms still have the old '14' as the min age on their neglect pages. So you are correct with the asterisk that it glosses over that it was the case up until the past couple years and you are updating us on a new development.

>Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.

My opinion is based on what legal advice I got when I last researched it a few years ago. A lot of Illinois law is read in the context of common law precedent that makes the actual text less reliable. Mea Culpa.

[0] https://www.mkfmlaw.com/blog/at-what-age-can-a-child-be-left...

[1] https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-has-highest-home-alo...

Your first source is trying to sell a service, namely lawsuits against your ex. The law in 2022 was the same [0] in regards to the text that I mentioned. And as far as I can tell, that's the original text of the law as it was first passed in 1987.

The 2024 update [1] was basically just fixing typos.

The 2023 update [2] was reaffirming the original text and added safeguards to prevent abuse by police and prosecutors misapplying the law. This update did remove the explicit age mentioned, but if you look at the deleted text, you had to leave a minor unattended for a very long period of time not just "a trip to the store" for the law to have been violated before the change despite what the divorce attorneys were trying to tell people on their misleading website.

Also, I'm not going to go into my rant about IPI intentionally misleading people and lying by omissions and funny ways of presenting "data". If you use them as a source for anything and expect that what you read was the truth, then that's on you. They're a propaganda organization that spreads even more disinformation than the Heritage Foundation.

[0] https://codes.findlaw.com/il/chapter-705-courts/il-st-sect-7...

[1] https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/publicacts/view/103-0605

[2] https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/publicacts/view/103-0233

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