I would have already packed in a moving van if it were me.
Free Range Kids grow up to be intelligent adults. Bureaucrats hate that.
Well ... I sure wouldn’t let the kids play in the park or walk home like that without some adult in charge watching them every single second!
Signing was a HUGE mistake.
We went 6 blocks away to a park and stayed all day. There were always at least two of us and often 6 or more kids. But how sad. Glad I was a kid in the 70’s.
In the rural Indiana village I grew up in in the 1950s, there were nothing but ‘free range children’. We roamed around the houses, out into the fields and nearby woods all day long, only coming in for lunch.
“...and looking for someone who can give us legal advice on these issues in Maryland.”
Move.
Time to move...
” Since when are children not supposed to play outside on their own? ...”
Since the moment that the Collective HiveMind seized control of your children even though they have allowed them to continue to live with you while they are not at the indoctrination center.
Yet I’ve known of instances where CPS recommended the “family is better off together” when the father was molesting the children.
Most of these CPS “agents” have liberal arts degrees and couldn’t work the third shift at a convenience store.
Free range kid — never heard that term before, but it sure applied to me. If my mom knew half the places I went on my bike during the day (summer vacation), she would have had six kinds of hissy fits. :-)
“They got 1/2 way when someone called the police.”
Here’s the problem; Some busybody called the police! If everyone who called the police had to be identified and if any charges were brought the busybody would have to bring the charges. That would stop all the nonsense and only serious stuff would be reported. Every story I read starts with somebody called the police.....
The answer in Maryland is:
1. Get a lawyer if you are going to stay in the area. CPS is shockingly terrible at their job - they do not have the resources to follow transient parents who abuse their children, but they are like bulldogs going after stable parents who make different parenting choices from the Nanny State advocates.
2. Once CPS is on your case, you have to do what they say until a lawyer gets a court order permitting you to parent your own children, or your kids will be in immediate danger from CPS “solutions” to the problems they imagine exist. Some foster families are good, but the demand exceeds the supply of good foster homes, and the children they take from good parents are uncomfortably likely to end up in a terrible place.
Pure tyranny
Because parents today don't take personal responsibility for their children. If something happened, the parents would probably sue the park district, the police, CPS and the city for not protecting their children.
The MSM would jump on the story, the Internet would be a-Twitter, and civil-suit lawyers would arrive in buses. The parents would be the heroes -- so brave and so strong in the face of an incompetent and inept bureaucracy that would allow such things to happen to children. Our future!
They'd probably clear a cool $10 million in an out-of-court settlement.
That's why.
I grew up being terrorized by CPS and would never, ever allow them on our property. Never.
Inmates may not walk around without guard supervision.
The great majority of the time this kind of absurd nanny stat-ism occurs in the northeast (of which I am including non-merry-land).
It actually is a different world tho it probably wasn’t as safe as we assumed it was way back then.
I was a free range kid from about the age of 4 but probably only because I had two older brothers who I was always with.
I actually fell in the spring when I was four but my oldest brother jumped in and pulled me out. I was trying to reach a drinking glass which we left on a cut off branch.
I would not even think of allowing my Grandkids to roam around like that.
“The higher ups at child services agreed that this was insane, and the case was closed—until this week.”
Bingo. A CPS worker pi$$ed off is a creation that could only by suffered by Satan himself. You might as well sell the house and move because it will be like fighting the walking dead!!!!!!