A New Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Protect Free-Range Parenting and Redefine Neglect
· Reason
A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress yesterday pushes states to "promote childhood independence" rather than investigate or punish the parents who permit it.
The bill lists seven examples of decent parents investigated for letting their kids play outside, bike, walk to the store, etc. Five of these stories were first reported in Reason.
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Reps. Blake Moore (R–Utah), Janet McClellan (D–Va.), and Virginia Foxx (R–N.C.) are cosponsoring the "Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act."
"I want my kids to go exploring without it being just every minute planned for them," says Moore, a father of four. No parent, he adds, should be investigated for letting their kids do that.
Rep. McClellan agreed: "Our parents would have been in jail," she says, recalling her Gen X childhood.
In 2023 McClellan was instrumental in getting Virginia to pass its own Reasonable Childhood Independence bill. As lawmakers there noted: Some parents choose to let their kids roam free, but others, especially those financially strapped, have no choice. Letting your kid come home with a latchkey while you're working your second shift isn't neglect, but it can certainly be a result of poverty.
Virginia is one of 13 states to date where Let Grow, the nonprofit I helm, has helped to pass such a law, usually with bipartisan sponsors and often, as in Virginia, unanimously.
The new national legislation provides a straightforward framework for states to distinguish ordinary childhood activities from actual neglect or abuse: Neglect is when you put your child in obvious and serious danger—not just anytime you take your eyes off them.
Unfortunately, says Diane Redleaf, Let Grow's legal consultant, "Many states still operate under laws and policies that give governmental authorities the discretion to tell parents they cannot allow their kids to be unattended, on pain of being investigated for neglect, or threatened with family separation."
Rafi Meitiv knows that threat all too well. In 2015 when he was 10, Meitiv and his sister walked home from the park in Silver Spring, Maryland. Someone saw them unsupervised and called the authorities.
That night, child protective services came to the Meitiv home. "They threatened multiple times to take us away," Meitiv, now 21 and a college senior, recalls. "They forced my dad to sign something. They said, 'If you don't sign this thing that says you will comply with all our demands, at least temporarily, we're going to take away your kids.' And that's what it felt like was the end goal—at least from a child's eyes. They thought that my parents were dangerous and we'd be better off someplace else."
His mom, Danielle Meitiv, had read my book, Free-Range Kids, and we'd been in touch even before this happened. She called me when it did. The incident became known as the Free-Range Parenting case and ricocheted around the world—especially when the kids were picked up for being unsupervised a second time, the little recidivists, just two blocks from their home.
Eventually, the Meitivs were cleared. But their story made parents realize their rational decisions could be second-guessed by authorities who saw childhood only through the lens of risk. Over the years, many investigated parents have told me that their caseworkers said their kids could have been kidnapped.
How common is kidnapping, really? Warwick Cairns, author of How to Live Dangerously, crunched the numbers and found that for a child to be statistically likely to be kidnapped by a stranger, you'd have to leave them outside, unattended, for 750,000 years.
I suppose that is a risk. The problem is that any "risk" presented by letting kids do things on their own is at least offset by the risk of not letting them.
For the last 50 or 60 years, kids' independence and free play have been declining. Today, 1 in 5 American kids age 3-17 has a diagnosable mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder in any given year.
Meanwhile, the number of children being investigated by Child Protective Services keeps growing. Today, it is estimated that more than one-third of all children—and more than half of all African-American children—will be the subject of a child abuse investigation before age 18.
The goal of all this intervention was laudatory: preventing child abuse. But child abuse deaths are, thank God, extraordinarily rare—according to data from 2024, about 0.002 percent of children died of abuse or neglect. The authorities are looking for a needle in a haystack.
Yet the social norm has become no child left outside. I often hear parents say, "I'm not worried about my child being kidnapped. I'm worried about someone seeing them outside and calling 911."
Shortly after Indiana State Rep. Victoria Garcia-Wilburn (D–Fishers) moved into her suburban home, she says, "My children hopped on their bikes, and one of the neighbors comes out and starts yelling, 'Get your kids under control! You better watch it, or else I'll call [the Department of Child Services] on you.'"
Recalls Garcia-Wilburn, "It stopped me in my tracks. I couldn't believe that was where her mind went. I said, 'I'm their parent and what they're doing is totally fine. Have a great day.'"
She also told that story at a hearing in Indiana where she and Rep. Jake Teshka (R–North Liberty) worked with Let Grow to pass a Reasonable Childhood Independence law this spring—unanimously. She added that a few months after her neighbor yelled at her, the woman apologized.
If the federal Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act passes, parents across the U.S. will be able to do more than smile and hope their outraged neighbors calm down. State child protective welfare agencies will be tasked with training their employees to encourage, rather than investigate, childhood independence.
This about-face—from safetyism to trust—has been a long time coming. At long last it looks like America may be on its way to once again becoming the land of the Free-Range Childhood.
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