{"id":183250,"date":"2015-01-15T23:18:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T04:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/01\/15\/what-the-fing-f-3\/"},"modified":"2015-01-15T23:18:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-16T04:18:00","slug":"what-the-fing-f-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/01\/15\/what-the-fing-f-3\/","title":{"rendered":"What the F%$#ing F%$#?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Police Detained, and Child Protective Services opened an investigation on the family, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/local\/education\/maryland-couple-want-free-range-kids-but-not-all-do\/2015\/01\/14\/d406c0be-9c0f-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html\">because the parents allowed their children to walk home from the park<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek \u2014 in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have let them do it if we didn\u2019t think they were ready for it,\u201d Danielle said. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">On Dec.\u200920, Alexander agreed to let the children, Rafi and Dvora, walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The children made it about halfway.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services, he said, which showed up a couple of hours after the police left.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Mary Anderson, a spokeswoman for CPS, said she could not comment on cases but that neglect investigations typically focus on questions of whether there has been a failure to provide proper care and supervision.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In such investigations, she said, CPS may look for guidance to a state law about leaving children unattended, which says children younger than 8 must be left with a reliable person who is at least 13\u2009years old. The law covers dwellings, enclosures and vehicles.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is nuts.<\/p>\n<p>Notwithstanding the , &#8220;It bleeds, it leads,&#8221; standards of local news coverage, children have literally never been safer from stranger abduction, and crime rates are at a decades long low, but the ginned up child abduction mythology of the early 1980s keeps the general public, as well as law enforcement and the social services bureaucracy, in a state of acute paranoia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Police Detained, and Child Protective Services opened an investigation on the family, because the parents allowed their children to walk home from the park: It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1010,976,972,985,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-family","category-justice","category-regulation","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183250"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}