Should a parent face arrest, or Child Protective Services investigation, for leaving a well-behaved nine-year-old at home for an afternoon? Or letting her walk home alone eight blocks from school, or play unattended in a public park? What about leaving him in the back seat of the car for 20 minutes while mom shops? A new survey finds criminal and civil standards vary widely across the fifty states, with parental practices that are explicitly legal (and common) in one state subject to stringent penalties in the next.
The survey is from the organization Let Grow, founded by author Lenore Skenazy. (If you haven’t watched Skenazy’s 2014 Cato event “Stop Shrink-Wrapping Our Kids!” you can do so here.—it’s one of my all-time favorites. Or listen to her related Cato Daily Podcast appearance or its 2018 sequel.)
In separate maps, the survey tracks criminal-law and CPS/juvenile law exposure for neglect, which as Let Grow says needs to mean something more substantive than “I wouldn’t let my kids do that.”
The states with the most punitive standards are Connecticut and Montana. Connecticut law provides that children under 12 must not be left alone, while its civil neglect standards are hazy and subjective in the extreme. Montana criminalizes the knowing violation of a duty of care, protection, or support toward a child, a vast range that could take in behavior from heinous to humdrum.
This sort of vagueness and open-endedness constitutes much of the problem; laws simply don’t define what is meant by key terms. Writes Skenazy: “Alabama, Alaska, South Dakota, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., all define a lack of supervision as “neglect,” leaving parents to divine what qualifies as a lack of supervision. Some states throw proper or adequate in front of supervision, but that does not make things any clearer.” Authorities are left with arbitrary discretion, while parents and other caretakers get no notice of what the law requires of them, even though reasonable opinion can vary widely from one person to the next. Fear of jeopardy can then chill family behavior that is innocuous or even potentially helpful to the cause of raising independent, curious, and venturesome kids.
On May 15 Texas, joining Utah and Oklahoma, became the third state to pass “Free-Range Kids” laws, which aim to enshrine reasonable childhood independence into law. The Texas bill enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the lower house in Austin by a vote of 143 to 5. Utah’s pioneering law “states that it is not neglect to let kids walk or play outside, stay home alone, or wait briefly in the car in some circumstances.” Let Grow offers a legislative toolkit to bring the principle to the other 47. It, and the 50-state survey, are worth checking out.
