Free-Range Parenting, Neglect Laws, and Government Overreach

Introduction: The Criminalization of Independent Childhood

A Maryland couple was charged with neglect because they allowed their children — aged 10 and 6 — to walk one mile home from a park. The irony of this situation is that those doing the charging likely made similar walks by themselves as children, and did so regularly. It is not strange that some parents prefer to hover over their children obsessively — the lines of cars outside any school at 3 o'clock attest to the commonality of this approach. What is remarkable is that there is an actual charge for letting children do as their parents once did, and as the lawmakers who wrote the law also did. Laws protecting children make sense, but such laws appear to have pushed past the point of reason. The case in Maryland is but one example of administrative overreach into parenting. What needs to happen is that parents must be given back the right to raise their children in the manner they see fit.

There has been considerable discussion regarding this issue, including attempts to identify the pivotal moments when the cultural shift occurred. It seems counterintuitive that parents raised in the 1970s and '80s — walking home from school by themselves — would not only refuse to allow their own children to do the same, but that such views would hold enough sway to become law. The issue has attracted the interest of ethicists, legal scholars, public administrators, and, of course, parents. Free-range parenting — the practice of allowing children age-appropriate independence — sits at the center of this debate. Pimentel (2012) has examined whether overprotective parenting has become the new standard of care. By law, parents are required to provide a baseline standard of care for their children, which typically includes providing food and shelter and a life free from abuse. Beyond that, the law used to extend significant leeway to parents. Today, that leeway has narrowed, so that "de facto legal standards appear to be evolving…with individual parenting choices increasingly second-guessed by a society now willing to pass judgment on them" (Pimentel, 2012).

Pimentel (2012) further notes that grand juries are often involved in the indictment process, but that expert testimony is seldom presented in these cases. Without such testimony, grand juries may overstate certain risks while underestimating others. In terms of actual statistical probability, the risk of a child being kidnapped while walking home from a park is far lower than the risk posed by an unsecured firearm in the home, yet legislation has not reflected this reality. Some states have even written "religious" exemptions for anti-vaccination parents into law, despite overwhelming scientific consensus that such choices endanger children.

Most governments maintain specific agencies to safeguard children in society, and the need for such agencies is not disputed. What is debated is the appropriate scope of government authority in managing how parents raise their children. The concept of risk consciousness has been extrapolated by legislators and administrators to perceive danger at every turn (Lee, Macvarish & Bristow, 2010), producing unreasonable restrictions on individual freedom and imaginary interpretations of danger.

The Legal Erosion of Parental Rights

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. It is well established that in the 1980s and earlier, children were able to walk freely in their own neighborhoods, play in parks unsupervised, and travel to and from school on their own. Today, parents can be charged with neglect and face legal action for allowing their children to be unsupervised in public, even at a playground or on a walk to school. Even riding a bicycle to school might be considered unacceptable in some jurisdictions. The very parents who insist that their children must be supervised at all times were, ironically, raised in an era when unsupervised movement was ordinary — and they survived the experience without harm.

The erosion of parental rights is a relatively recent phenomenon. Pimentel (2012) examines the issue from a legal perspective and notes that laws regarding child neglect have increasingly been interpreted — especially since the turn of the millennium — to include strict provisions requiring constant supervision. These interpretations have occurred across many states and thus represent an identifiable national trend in law. Yet, as Pimentel (2012) notes, there is no legal justification for this strict interpretation. At the venues where the issue enters public law — hearings before child services agencies or grand jury proceedings — expert evidence is seldom introduced. Those making the case that parents are neglecting their children by allowing them to walk home from school or a playground unsupervised are typically doing so without any expert basis for their claims. The claims are therefore grounded more in rhetorical argument and conjecture than in expert opinion or fact-based risk assessment.

What Child Neglect Actually Means

Traditional understanding of child neglect does not encompass children moving independently in their community. The clinical conception of neglect is typically characterized by conditions of socioeconomic disadvantage and is usually accompanied by other forms of abuse (Knutson, DeGarmo, Koeppl & Reid, 2005). The interpretation applied by government agencies and, occasionally, by law enforcement is not supported by those who have devoted their careers to understanding and defining childhood neglect. Professionals who work with abused and neglected children operate with a definition of neglect far more severe than mere lack of constant supervision. They encounter children left alone for hours or days, children denied adequate food, and parents whose addiction — to alcohol, gambling, or drugs — renders them incapable of providing adequate care. It is therefore unsurprising that academic experts and professional care workers hold a substantially different standard of neglect than the one recently applied in cases like the Maryland incident.

Conclusion: Restoring Parental Rights

Parents need to be given back the right to raise their children as they see fit, particularly with respect to allowing age-appropriate unsupervised activities such as walking to school or playing at a playground. The current state of affairs in the United States reflects administrative and legal overreach. In recent years, child neglect laws have been misinterpreted, and the standards applied no longer reflect the clinical definition of neglect. Instead, those standards reflect perceptions unsupported by statistical evidence. The fact that expert testimony is almost never utilized in the prosecution of neglect cases involving free-range parenting has allowed unfounded myths to become embedded in law.

The reality is that the threats children face today are no greater than they have ever been. There has also been a systematic conflation of the benefits of supervision with the assumed negative outcomes of a lack of total supervision, but these are two distinct warrants — one cannot simply be substituted for the other. On top of this, research shows that even the worst forms of neglect do not significantly correlate with negative childhood outcomes unless accompanied by other serious factors such as extreme poverty or abuse. The prosecution of parents on the basis of perceptions that have no statistical grounding, and that rest on a misinterpretation of the clinical definition of neglect, must stop. Expert analysis should drive prosecutions of child neglect going forward.

Works Cited

Kehily, M. (2010). Childhood in crisis? Tracing the contours of crisis and its impact upon contemporary parenting practices. Media, Culture and Society, 32(2), 171–185.

Knutson, J., DeGarmo, D., Koeppl, G., & Reid, J. (2005). Care neglect, supervisory neglect, and harsh parenting in the development of children's aggression: A replication and extension. Child Maltreatment, 10(2005), 92–107.

Lee, E., Macvarish, J., & Bristow, J. (2010). Risk, health and parenting culture. Health, Risk & Society, 12(4), 293–300.

Nye, J. (2015). Free range parents hit out at wrong and painful decision by CPS finding them guilty of neglect for letting their children walk home. Daily Mail. Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2977623/Free-range-parents-let-children-walk-home-park-furious-responsible-child-neglect-CPS.html

Pimentel, D. (2012). Criminal child neglect and the free range kid: Is overprotective parenting the new standard of care? Utah Law Review, (2), 947–999.