A New Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Protect Free-Range Parenting and Redefine Neglect

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.

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.

My first thought on reading this was it was oriented at hippy-dippy parents who wanted to let their hippy-dippy kids run all over the place. After all, it seems like Leftist legislation is the only thing we seem to hear about.

But in reading it, I am all for it.

One of the things I hear myself saying often is, I am glad I grew up when I did, back in the 50's-70's. I came from a large family, and we had free reign during the day and some of the evening as long as we were home for supper.

I remember being seven, and walking several miles with a friend to go to a candy store in some other part of the town, picking up soda bottle on the way to pay for it.

I understand things are different today, and more dangerous, but kids of today seem to have everything planned out and structured, and I think that lack of independence to explore and learn is a liability.

Heck. When my oldest brother was 11 or 12, my parents would no longer hire a babysitter, and he was responsible for all of us.

Reading the stories recounted in this article, I supported the aims of the sponsors.

In my opinion, calling the cops on a ten year old kid walking around alone is completely absurd and nanny-statist. I wrote this below about 10-15 years ago, and it is likely only worse since then.

I think one of the most damaging things has been the propensity to take away the natural inclination of kids to explore their environment...for their own "safety".

Kids learn and grow from exploring their environment. I think we have lost something as a culture when we restrict them too narrowly, and those kids have less ability to reach the potential to be more "successfully" independent. (The accounts below are simply reminisces on my part to further make my point, but...my point is made above enough for the article posted)

When I was a kid, I had a lot of freedom to go and do things that were...unstructured. Sure, I played Little League and was a Boy Scout, but when I got out of school, or on a weekend, once my chores were done, I was free to do what I wished. When I was six or seven, I was already wandering miles from my house...as long as I was back for dinner (I was tied to be back for lunch, because if I wasn't, there wouldn't be any, and...ya gotta eat when you are growing!) or in time to hear the triangle or bell we had outside our house that my mom would use to call us home.

But we were in the woods...in the fields...with other kids in the neighborhood, often groups of neighborhood kids playing games without any adult supervision. Sometimes as many as 10-15 kids. Red Rover, dodge ball, Four Square, Tether ball, baseball, football, "Smear the Queer With The Ball", Hide and Seek...playing Army (God help a kid playing Army today, they would probably have a SWAT team called in by a hysterical parent).

We didn't have video games, iPods, or iPhones, and I am grateful for it. If they had video games and those other things when I was 10, I have no doubt I would be just as addicted as some kids seem to be today.

As for clothes...the thing I wanted for years more than anything else was high top Keds..."Chucks". But my mother would never buy them. We got low-top generic Keds knock-offs. I wanted more than anything wire-rimmed glasses, rather than the black plastic "BCD" (Birth Control Device) glasses, but...that was a no go until I was sixteen.

Sometimes we would build things. Go Carts. Tree forts. Models. Rockets. Explosives. Fires. Sometimes with legitimate materials...and sometimes not.

And sometimes we would do things we shouldn't...break things, blow things up, set them on fire, be places we shouldn't. We didn't have drugs or even alcohol (though we would occasionally try for alcohol, but that was risky too...but never succeeded, which was a good thing)

We had to fight sometimes, and we had to learn to stick up for ourselves, because if we told our parents, we were told to do just that. But we weren't worried about getting knifed, shot, or worse. (Note: I readily admit that this particular situation is worse today, or at least I perceive it to be such. A kid does, I believe, have a higher possibility of having those things happen to them in today's world)

But all that stuff, we learned from. We learned boundaries that our parents couldn't teach us, we had to learn to "learn", if that makes sense. We learned to be independent.

Now, it seems like kids aren't allowed that. Everything has to be structured and organized. And doing things spontaneously with large groups of other kids is not simply discouraged, it doesn’t even seem to be possible.

Your parents taking you from point "A" to point "B". You have a cell phone all the time. They might even track your movements.

And God forbid you tell a parent their kid should have their cell phone disabled or taken from them for any reason at any time.

Sigh. I feel bad for kids, I feel like their existence is far more sterile these days. And I think the lack of having the option to explore their own boundaries has sadly taken its toll.

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