Danielle and Alexander Meitiv let their children, 10 and six, walk home alone from a park a mile away from their house. Now, Montgomery County is investigating the couple for child neglect.
The Meitiv family of Silver Springs, Maryland, is back in the news again, just months after their first run-in with police for the “crime” of letting their children play on their own.
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv’s parenting style was first called into question by authorities late last year. Their two children, Rafi, age 10, and Dvora, age 6, had been given permission to walk home alone from a park about a mile from their home. The police picked up the pair when they were roughly halfway home. Child Protective Services soon got involved, insisting on a full investigation into the children’s lives.
“They have proven they are responsible,” Danielle Meitiv told the Washington Post at the time, citing similar trips to a nearby library and convenience store.
CPS determined it had found what it called an “unsubstantiated” case of neglect, meaning it would keep a file open on the family for the next five years. The Meitiv’s said they would continue to allow their children to play alone.
The Post is now reporting that Rafi and Dvora were detained by police on Sunday after playing alone in a park.
On Monday, Danielle Meitiv reported via Facebook that, “The police coerced our children into the back of a patrol car and kept them trapped there for three hours, without notifying us, before bringing them to the Crisis Center, and holding them there without dinner for another two and a half hours. We finally got home at 11 pm and the kids slept in our room because we were all exhausted and terrified.”
Meitiv told the Post’s Petula Dvorak, “The cops said they would drive them home, then kept the kids in the patrol car for three hours. Wouldn’t even let them out to use the bathroom.”
According to the county police spokesman, the matter remains under investigation.
The case of the Meitiv family highlights the broader national debate on the changing role of parental authority. While so-called “helicopter parents” exert ever-increasing control over their children’s lives, others recall childhoods spent wandering freely through urban and suburban neighborhoods and argue that kids who grow up this way are more independent and better adjusted to adult life.
In a Post editorial following the first incident with police, Meitiv wrote:
“When did Americans decide that allowing our kids to be out of sight was a crime? … Crime rates across the United States are as low as they’ve been in my lifetime. Stranger abduction, the bogeyman of most parental fears, has always been exceedingly rare. Far more hazardous are the obesity risks and idleness we subject children to if we do not allow them to run outside and play.”
Kim Kinzie, writing on the popular website Free-Range Kids, argues that over-protective parents create more problems than they solve: “It becomes a vicious circle — we can’t leave them alone because when we’re with them we think, ‘Boy, if we weren’t here, they could never handle this stuff by themselves!’ We forget that when we were young, we too made plenty of dumb decisions and wasted a lot of time (that wasn’t really wasted) and muddled through to the point where we are competent folks today.”
Yet authorities seem to be increasingly siding with the helicopter parents. Kari Anne Roy, a children’s book author from Austin, Texas, found her parenting under repeated investigation because she let her six year old play alone in her yard, as reported by The Free Thought Project in September 2014.
In the end, she was told by a CPS investigator: “Just don’t let them play outside.”