Free-Range Parents And The Law

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2015-04-27 02:33

Article here. Excerpt:

'There’s a good chance you’ve heard about the Meitiv kids (especially if you have children of your own or friends with children). The kids, ages 10 and 6, were walking home from a park a mile from their house in Maryland when they were spotted by a zealous citizen-protector, reported to the police, picked up 3 blocks from home, and detained for over five hours. In the end, they were handed over to their parents, but only after plenty of panic on both the kids’ and parents’ parts. And, as it turns out, that wasn’t really the end. The parents found themselves under investigation for neglect.
...
But the reality facing most parents in court is that that “presumption” isn’t actually a thing. Take the experience documented in a well-publicized essay on Salon last year: the author left her four-year-old unattended in a car for a few minutes on a mild day, the police were called, she found herself charged with a crime along the lines of the ones excerpted from the Iowa criminal code above. She told her lawyer: “It doesn’t sound to me like I committed the crime I’m being charged with. I didn’t render him in need of services. He was fine. Maybe I should plead ‘not guilty,’ go to trial.” He warned her that “juvenile courts are notorious for erring on the side of protecting the child” and suggested that fighting the case might lead her to lose her child. Faced with that possibility she, of course, folded. Anyone would.

And that’s been my experience as an advocate too. When I worked for a legal aid organization, one of my tasks was to represent parents in child welfare proceedings. No one in those sad, sequestered courtrooms cited Supreme Court cases; everyone just argued over what was in the best interest of the child. That was how to get results. Indeed, the very notion that parental choice is “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” (Justice O’Connor in Troxel, again) would have rung hollow in a courtroom that regularly held proceedings to terminate people’s parental rights.

So parents, be cautious: yes, there’s Supreme Court precedent on your side, but if you find yourself in court then the system’s conception of the “best interests of the child” will likely overrule yours.'

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Comments

I never expected a article about free range kids to posted at an MRA site, but I am quite familiar with the concept as many 'non-conventional' parents such as homeschoolers are in to stuff like this to a certain degree (the free range parenting featured in the media are the extreme end of the spectrum, right up there with "unschooling" parents).

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Submitted by Kris on Mon, 2015-04-27 03:37

... the issue of the right of parents to raise their kids without gov't interference most esp. in mundane matters (e.g., leaving kids locked in a car for a few mins. while going into a store, something moms and dads both did in years past to keep their kid from h@ving the 10th tantrum of the day because he or she was not getting that candy bar they wanted, etc.) The "best interests" standard is used all the time to vacate the parental rights of fathers, and that is where the relevance of this article comes in. The overarching reality (unfortunately) is that your kids are not really your kids; they are the government's. If anyone needed an argument to deter them from reproducing, the "best interests" standard ought to do it. Inevitably in practice it translates to "whatever a judge and/or social worker says", regardless of what is in fact in the best interests of a child.

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Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2015-04-27 05:17