Danielle and Alexander Meitiv are being investigated by the Police for child neglect. Why? Because they allowed their 10-year-old son, Rafi, and six-year-old daughter, Dvora, to walk home from a local park without parental supervision. The park was only one mile away.
Apparently, someone had reported seeing the children walking alone and called the police.
You can watch the story here:
When the Police showed up at the Meitiv's door with Rafi and Dvora, Alexander Meitiv (who by the way, works as a physicist at the National Institutes of Health), said the conversation was tense and the officers reminded the father of how the world is an unsafe place.
Slate has more on the absurdity of the case:
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv explicitly ally themselves with the “free range” parenting movement, which believes that children have to take calculated risks in order to learn to be self-reliant. Their kids usually even carry a card that says: “I am not lost. I am a free-range kid,” although they didn’t happen to have it that day.
They had carefully prepared their kids for that walk, letting them go first just around the block, then to a library a little farther away, and then the full mile.
When the police came to the door, they did not present as hassled overworked parents who leave their children alone at a playground by necessity, or laissez-faire parents who let their children roam wherever, but as an ideological counterpoint to all that’s wrong with child-rearing in America today.
If we are lucky, the Meitivs will end up on every morning talk show and help convince American parents that it’s perfectly OK to let children walk without an adult to the neighborhood playground.
While it is comforting to know that people passing by are keeping an eye on young, unattended children, the parents should not be investigated for teaching their children how to grow up.
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