Asshat City

The article begins:

Recently, in Silver Spring, Maryland, drivers at a busy intersection witnessed a spectacle you don’t see much these days, outside of the “Hunger Games” franchise: two children, aged ten and six, walking alone. An onlooker alerted the police. The cops scooped up the kids, drove them home in a patrol car, and reprimanded their father, Alexander Meitiv, a physicist at the National Institutes of Health. Within an hour, five squad cars had arrived.

Meitiv insisted that he was not guilty of negligence. He’d dropped off the children at a nearby park, with the idea that they would walk home. He and his wife are devotees of Free-Range Kids, a movement committed to rolling back the excesses of the helicopter-parent era.

The Meitiv family is guilty as charged. They are guilty of raising their children the old-fashioned way, without bureaucratic meddling and asking permission from the collective community gossipmongers. Montgomery County Child Protective Services (CPS) made the “decision” to find the parents “responsible for UNSUBSTANTIATED child neglect.” “Unsubstantiated,” meaning no definitive conclusion. These parents have adopted the “free-range parenting” philosophy, or what most folks my age – and I’m not exactly a dinosaur – would deem to be a normal child not bound by the modern boundaries of helicopter/it-takes-a-village parenting. Seriously, there is such a thing as a “Maryland Unattended Children Law” that sets arbitrary “guidance” for parental care and supervision. This is a cancer upon all of our houses when traditional parenting has come to be defined as “free-range” because of the wretched, bored, bastard busybodies among us who bully their way into our private existence.