Posted on 09/22/2014 10:58:18 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
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?"
I nodded, still trying to figure out what was happening.
"He said this was his house. I brought him home." She was wearing dark glasses. I couldn't see her eyes, couldn't gauge her expression.
"You brought..."
"Yes. He was all the way down there, with no adult." She motioned to a park bench about 150 yards from my house. A bench that is visible from my front porch. A bench where he had been playing with my 8-year-old daughter, and where he decided to stay and play when she brought our dog home from the walk they'd gone on.
"You brought him home... from playing outside?" I continued to be baffled.
And then the woman smiled condescendingly, explained that he was OUTSIDE. And he was ALONE. And she was RETURNING HIM SAFELY. To stay INSIDE. With an ADULT. I thanked her for her concern, quickly shut the door and tried to figure out what just happened.
What happened? The usual. A busybody saw that rarest of sights—a child playing outside without a security detail—and wanted to teach his parents a lesson. Roy might not have given the incident a whole lot more thought except that shortly afterward, her doorbell rang again.
This time it was a policewoman. "She wanted to know if my son had been lost and how long he'd been gone," Roy told me by phone. She also took Roy's I.D. and the names of her kids.
That night Isaac cried when he went to bed and couldn't immediately fall asleep. "He thought someone was going to call the police because it was past bedtime and he was still awake."
As it turns out, he was almost right. 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.
Oh the stories I could tell and have told my kids and grand-kids... These CPS people would have a stroke and fall over dead if they only knew.
Kid should have started screaming about being kidnapped. Teach the busybody a lesson.
I know this is the Peoples’ Republic of Austin we’re talking about, but this *is* still TX, right?
There are more than a few psychologists who are publicly decrying the shift towards total cocooning of children. Can’t happen soon enough.
And people like the “agents” in this story really need some wall-to-wall counseling.
This is why ‘shunning’ used to be employed to drive such people from the company of normal humans.
It’s time has come again. Because if it doesn’t, this problem will multiply by the day. In short, make life hell for people who pull this crap.
Investigator found the kids home alone unsupervised?
Its been quite a few years ago now...
I made a comment to a south american friend about “how does it feel to live in a free country”...
He laughed and almost spat. “You have no idea what a free country is”.
I've never quite grasped how Tejas is sposed to be some amazing bastion of freedom and such. I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Sheila Jackson Lee
If she can get elected in Texas, the Republic is doomed. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the morons.
This kind of stuff is happening across most of the state for the most part.
As an attorney I’ve represented parents who were charged with Felony Child Endangerment for letting their kids walk from home to the corner store two blocks away.
When I was a kid this would have been unthinkable. My brothers and I would bicycle all over the neighborhood and play unsupervised for hours at a time.
The only way to stop this crap is to yank the funding from CPS and law enforcement. If they have to make due with the bare minimum then they won’t have the resources to go around trying to nanny the entire populace.
From 6 on, I played further and further away from home. I lived in Los Angeles, not in the country either. By the time I was 10, I would take myself to the beach 15 miles away using the san gabriel river channel. But in the late 70’s, early 80’s they didn’t have predators or anything.
I guess she’d have a heart attack if she knew how far from home I used to travel. No cell phones back then.<<<
Me, too. When I was 10, we ranged far and wide in the area, riding our bikes and playing wherever we found something interesting. I realize times were different then, but all the kids in our group survived, somehow.
Most of the Moms were stay at home, and they all glanced out to see where we were headed. But when we went AWOL from the block, nobody sent out a posse or called the cops. We were usually down in the ditch looking for tadpoles or over at the last vestige of earlier times, a cornfield, where we could reenact endless scenarios.
My youngest grandsons don’t have anywhere near the freedom I had as a kid. It’s sad, and the government needs to butt out unless there is true neglect or abuse. Good Grief!
My children would not be allowed to be questioned by CPS busybodies.
...
I continued to be baffled.
...
I thanked her for her concern, quickly shut the door and tried to figure out what just happened.
______________________________________________________
Bull Cheese. While I want to sympthize with the mother, she KNEW exactly what was going on. No one could be that stupid.
While she felt she had the right to be left alone and leave her child unsupervised, she also knew that our 21st century culture does not allow that.
Ok, so the busybody:
Brought the kid home.
Called the police.
Possibly called CPS (it could have been the cops who called them)
There should be a public record of who it was. Police report or somesuch. It might have their name. Which should be published.
However, the kid did willingly go with a stranger. If the kid had been taught properly he would have run home as soon as the stranger approached him, hopefully screaming “Stranger Danger!”
Yet the same media who sees illegal alien children crossing the border alone calls their parents “brave” gotta love hypocrisy
1) Most of these CPS workers don’t have kids, and are 26 yr old females who think they know better than actual parents.
2) JOIN HERITAGE DEFENSE TODAY.
As far as acting in a childs best interest and welfare? Nope it doesn't happen. NUMBERS and Percentages rule the agency. A kid can be taken away for violating village rules and kept indefinitely unless parents buy into their propaganda. On the other end of the spectrum abused kids can be taken away and caseworkers will bend over backwards to get the abused kids back home so the reunification percentages are high thus in their eyes a success. If the kid is abused the next week it doesn't matter. The agenda starts all over again.
I'm a former kinship foster parent who was found in contempt of court for trying under oath to tell The Whole Truth. DCS knew the truth and still sided with the parents because DCS Failed to investigate properly and gather needed evidence needed for court. DCS should be allowed to run an animal shelter.
we moved to Hawaii in 1984.
While I was un packing all the boxes, my girls were skating in the driveway.
My neighbor came over immediately to tell me that the kids could not be left to play on the driveway, they had to skate in the garage, because they were girls, and bad things could happen.
I just said, “ they’re fine, it’s the driveway” and shut the door.
Chino State Prison for Men (Go fighting felons!) was on the outskirts of town, yet we had little to worry about back then. The police were mostly ex-military and drove my dad batty trying to get him to work for them.
“shunning”
Where’s that quote from Solzenychen (sp)?
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