Free Range Parenting Neglect

¶ … free range parenting." Child Protective Services in Maryland, acting on a report from law enforcement, investigated a couple for neglect, based on the fact that they allowed their children to walk home from a park without parental supervision. For the Maryland couple, the charge was "unsubstantiated child neglect." This is not a criminal charge, but it is typically a precursor to a criminal charge (Nye, 2015). The couple was charged by Maryland Child Protective Services, rather than the police.

The charge means that, operating within the confines of their mandate, Maryland CPS has the right to monitor the parents for the next five years. The CPS may, if it chooses, recommend criminal neglect charges that would go through the standard criminal justice processes. The CPS responded to an alert that the children were walking alone, and brought about their own investigation of the parents in this case.

Thus, the effort against the parents in this case was a combination of the police and CPS, with the latter agency taking the lead in the investigation. While the parents have maintained their parental rights, and the children, for now, the fear for the parents is that this current investigation is a precursor to future investigations that will result in criminal charges for something that, as they rightly point out, "was normal just one generation ago" (Nye, 2015).

Analysis Parents need to be given back the right to raise their children as they see fit. There are two main premises in this argument. The first is that parents have in recent years seen such rights eroded, replaced by increasing government involvement in what used to be parental decisions. It is known and agreed that in the 1980s and earlier, children were able to walk freely in their own neighborhoods, play in parks unsupervised, and to walk to and from school.

Today, parents can be charged with neglect and face other legal actions if they allow their children unsupervised in public, even at a playground or walking to/from school. As Pimentel (2012) notes, there has been a shift in the way that both government agencies and courts have interpreted the standard of care that parents need to provide their children.

External intervention in parenting is typically only exercised when neglect is suspected; it is the interpretation of the concept of neglect that has shifted over time that results in cases like that in Maryland. There have been considerable study of this issue, by ethicists, legal scholars, sociologists, public administrators and, of course, by parents. The first support to the thesis is that the erosion of parental rights is a recent phenomenon. Pimentel (2012) examines the issue from a legal perspective, and notes that laws regarding child neglect have increasing been.