When playing is a crime:
Children’s book author Kari Anne Roy was recently visited by the Austin police and Child Protective Services for allowing her son Isaac, age 6, to do the unthinkable: Play outside, up her street, unsupervised.
He’d been out there for about 10 minutes when Roy’s doorbell rang. She opened it to find her son —and a woman she didn’t know. As Roy wrote on her blog HaikuMama last week, the mystery woman asked: “Is this your son?”….
About a week later, an investigator from Child Protective Services came to the house and interrogated each of Roy’s three children separately, without their parents, about their upbringing.
“She asked my 12 year old if he had ever done drugs or alcohol. She asked my 8-year-old daughter if she had ever seen movies with people’s private parts, so my daughter, who didn’t know that things like that exist, does now,” says Roy. “Thank you, CPS.”
It was only last week, about a month after it all began, that the case was officially closed. That’s when Roy felt safe enough to write about it. But safe is a relative term. In her last conversation with the CPS investigator, who actually seemed to be on her side, Roy asked, “What do I do now?”
Replied the investigator, “You just don’t let them play outside.”
There you have it. You are free to raise your children as you like, except if you want to actually give them a childhood. Fail to incarcerate your child and you could face incarceration yourself.
Via Child Services to Mom Who Did Nothing Wrong: ‘Just Don’t Let Your Kids Play Outside’ @ Reason.com.