As others have said this is very very strange. If the parents actually said this word-for-word that is shilling to me. If they also as others have said left young children alone at home while they went out that is also a very telling bit of information.
I’m not one to defend them, but our newspapers have a very bad habit of really twisting what people say, even in direct quotation marks.
I don’t believe they have said this, they are being advised by a media team who would certainly not be sending out those sort of messages, so I’d probably assume they didn’t say anything like this.