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How children lost the right to roam in four generations
By DAVID DERBYSHIRE
Last updated at 01:03 15 June 2007

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.
It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.
Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.
He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.

Even if he wanted to play outdoors, none of his friends strays from their home or garden unsupervised.
The contrast between Edward and George's childhoods is highlighted in a report which warns that the mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations.
The report says the change in attitudes is reflected in four generations of the Thomas family in Sheffield.
The oldest member, George, was allowed to roam for six miles from home unaccompanied when he was eight.
His home was tiny and crowded and he spent most of his time outside, playing games and making dens.
Mr Thomas, who went on to become a carpenter, has never lost some of the habits picked up as a child and, aged 88, is still a keen walker.
His son-in-law, Jack Hattersley, 63, was also given freedom to roam.
He was aged eight in 1950, and was allowed to walk for about one mile on his own to the local woods. Again, he walked to school and never travelled by car.

By 1979, when his daughter Vicky Grant was eight, there were signs that children's independence was being eroded.
"I was able to go out quite freely - I'd ride my bike around the estate, play with friends in the park and walk to the swimming pool and to school," said Mrs Grant, 36.
"There was a lot less traffic then - and families had only one car. People didn't make all these short journeys."
Today, her son Edward spends little time on his own outside his garden in their quiet suburban street. She takes him by car to school to ensure she gets to her part-time job as a medical librarian on time.
While he enjoys piano lessons, cubs, skiing lessons, regular holidays and the trampoline, slide and climbing frame in the garden, his mother is concerned he may be missing out.
She said: "He can go out in the crescent but he doesn't tend to go out because the other children don't. We put a bike in the car and go off to the country where we can all cycle together.
"It's not just about time. Traffic is an important consideration, as is the fear of abduction, but I'm not sure whether that's real or perceived."
She added: "Over four generations our family is poles apart in terms of affluence. But I'm not sure our lives are any richer."
The report's author, Dr William Bird, the health adviser to Natural England and the organiser of a conference on nature and health on Monday, believes children's long-term mental health is at risk.
He has compiled evidence that people are healthier and better adjusted if they get out into the countryside, parks or gardens.
Stress levels fall within minutes of seeing green spaces, he says. Even filling a home with flowers and plants can improve concentration and lower stress.
"If children haven't had contact with nature, they never develop a relationship with natural environment and they are unable to use it to cope with stress," he said.
"Studies have shown that people deprived of contact with nature were at greater risk of depression and anxiety. Children are getting less and less unsupervised time in the natural environment.
"They need time playing in the countryside, in parks and in gardens where they can explore, dig up the ground and build dens."
The report, published by Natural England and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, also found that children's behaviour and school work improve if their playground has grassy areas, ponds and trees.
It also found evidence that hospital patients need fewer painkillers after surgery if they have views of nature from their bed.

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Parents investigated for neglect after letting kids walk home alone
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Md. 'free-range' parents investigated(2:19)
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. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
By Donna St. George January 14  
It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek — in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children.

“We wouldn’t have let them do it if we didn’t think they were ready for it,” Danielle said.




She said her son and daughter have previously paired up for walks around the block, to a nearby 7-Eleven and to a library about three-quarters of a mile away. “They have proven they are responsible,” she said. “They’ve developed these skills.”

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The Meitivs say they believe in “free-range” parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of “helicopter” parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world.

“The world is actually even safer than when I was a child, and I just want to give them the same freedom and independence that I had — basically an old-fashioned childhood,” she said. “I think it’s absolutely critical for their development — to learn responsibility, to experience the world, to gain confidence and competency.”

On Dec. 20, Alexander agreed to let the children, Rafi and Dvora, walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well.

The children made it about halfway.

(Related: Why are we criminalizing childhood independence?)

Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them.


Police on Wednesday did not immediately have information on the case. But a spokeswoman said that when concerns are reported, “we have a responsibility as part of our duty to check on people’s welfare.”


The Meitivs say their son told police that he and his sister were not doing anything illegal and are allowed to walk. Usually, their mother said, the children carry a laminated card with parent contact information that says: “I am not lost. I am a free-range kid.” The kids didn’t have the card that day.

Danielle said she and her husband give parenting a lot of thought.

“Parenthood is an exercise in risk management,” she said. “Every day, we decide: Are we going to let our kids play football? Are we going to let them do a sleep­over? Are we going to let them climb a tree? We’re not saying parents should abandon all caution. We’re saying parents should pay attention to risks that are dangerous and likely to happen.”

She added: “Abductions are extremely rare. Car accidents are not. The number one cause of death for children of their age is a car accident.”

Danielle is a climate-science consultant, and Alexander is a physicist at the National Institutes of Health.

Alexander said he had a tense time with police on Dec. 20 when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world.

The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services, he said, which showed up a couple of hours after the police left.

Mary Anderson, a spokeswoman for CPS, said she could not comment on cases but that neglect investigations typically focus on questions of whether there has been a failure to provide proper care and supervision.

In such investigations, she said, CPS may look for guidance to a state law about leaving children unattended, which says children younger than 8 must be left with a reliable person who is at least 13 years old. The law covers dwellings, enclosures and vehicles.

The Meitivs say that on Dec. 20, a CPS worker required Alexander to sign a safety plan pledging he would not leave his children unsupervised until the following Monday, when CPS would follow up. At first he refused, saying he needed to talk to a lawyer, his wife said, but changed his mind when he was told his children would be removed if he did not comply.


Following the holidays, the family said, CPS called again, saying the agency needed to inquire further and visit the family’s home. Danielle said she resisted.

“It seemed such a huge violation of privacy to examine my house because my kids were walking home,” she said.

This week, a CPS social worker showed up at her door, she said. She did not let him in. She said she was stunned to later learn from the principal that her children were interviewed at school.

The family has a meeting set for next week at CPS offices in Rockville.

“I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing,” Alexander said. “We feel we’re being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with.”

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

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Why are we criminalizing childhood independence?
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By Petula Dvorak Columnist January 15

Good thing I don’t live in Montgomery County. Because the cops, apparently, would be at my door.

They showed up at the Silver Spring home of Danielle and Alexander Meitiv last month, followed by Child Protective Services workers. And CPS was back again this week. And at their kids’ school, too.

Petula is a columnist for The Washington Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. View Archive
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Their crime?

The Meitivs let their kids, 10 and 6, walk home alone from a park in downtown Silver Spring. Now the parents are being investigated for child neglect.

The case represents one of those huge culture clashes in parenting today. On one side, the free-range parents who roamed their neighborhoods with front-door keys around their necks when they were growing up and who want the same kind of childhood for their kids. On the other side, the hypervigilant parents who can’t imagine letting their kids walk to school or do much of anything else without full parental supervision.

Md. 'free-range' parents investigated(2:19)
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. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
The criminalization of childhood independence is a cultural shift as significant as cellphones. And it’s insanity.

“Don’t you realize how dangerous the world is?” asked one of the four police officers who showed up at the Meitivs’ home on Dec. 20, after police received a call that two children were walking alone in downtown Silver Spring.

The police swooped in and picked the kids off Georgia Avenue, where they were in the middle of their one-mile walk home from the park. One mile? Yes, it made me pause, too.

My big letting-go moment, which I wrote about in August, was allowing my two boys, 10 and 7, to walk about 500 feet to the corner store on Capitol Hill. They had the dog and my cellphone. And I’ll admit I was a wreck the whole time.

So the idea of the two of them walking a mile down Georgia Avenue, through downtown Silver Spring, seems as brave and improbable as those guys who soar through mountains in flying-squirrel suits.

I couldn’t do it. But the Meitivs have been working on this independence thing a lot longer than I have. They are science-minded people. He is a physicist at the National Institutes of Health; she is a climate science consultant for the World Bank. They look at parenting decisions based on science.


“Every parenting decision is about risk management,” Danielle told me as Rafi, the 10-year-old, practiced his cornet in the background. “The truth is, child abductions by strangers are as rare as alien abductions. Maybe not that. But they are much rarer than car accidents. Putting your child in a car is the most dangerous thing you do every day.”

That’s true. About 300 children a day are injured in car accidents. An average of three kids a day are killed while riding in a car. Would we argue that’s child neglect, because parents should know the risks of the road?

Probably not. And given that statistic, Danielle didn’t think it was a horrible risk to let the kids play outside by themselves. “We’re willing to take the risk because we understand the odds,” she said.

Then, their kids started walking around the block in their quiet neighborhood near Montgomery College’s Silver Spring campus.

“Oh, I can’t even remember the first time. It just wasn’t that big a deal,” Danielle told me when I tried to swap nervous-parent stories.

Her children have played alone at the playground across the street and in their own front yard for a couple of years now. So, to them, the mile-long walk wasn’t that much of a stretch.

When you take each piece of the story — a concerned citizen seeing two little kids alone in the hustle and bustle of Silver Spring and calling the cops; police receiving the report and taking it seriously (imagine the stories we’d be writing right now if the kids were in distress and the cops just dismissed it); and laws that demand a Child Protective Services investigation whenever there’s a report of neglect — each action makes some sense.

Montgomery officials said they couldn’t comment on this case in particular, but they did say there is a law against leaving children younger than 8 inside without the supervision of someone who is at least 13. The law, the Meitivs argue, doesn’t say anything about being alone outdoors.

It’s also curious that the county schools will provide transportation, according to their Web site, to elementary school kids who live “beyond a mile” from school or have some extraordinary circumstance. So, does that mean the schools are cool with kindergartners walking a mile to class?

Since the incident, Child Protective Services has returned to make the parents sign a “safety plan,” in which they promised to not leave their children unsupervised. CPS interviewed the kids at their school and asked to inspect the family’s home for other signs of neglect.


Whoa. This has been a nationwide pattern, thumping parents who are caught not hovering.

Over the summer, we heard about a Florida mom arrested for letting her 7-year-old walk to the local park and about a mother locked up because her 9-year-old was playing at the neighborhood park in South Carolina.

Not only are we placing unreasonable demands on parents to be with their children 24/7, but we are stunting the natural development of independent humans.

It’s a different world today, you say? Why, yes, it is. Since 1993, the number of children younger than 14 who are murdered is down by 36 percent. Among children ages 14 to 17, murders are down 60 percent. Fewer than 1 percent of missing children are abducted by strangers or even slight acquaintances, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

It only seems scarier because we know so much more. From across the nation, stories of missing children are delivered to the palms of our hands every day. In the old days, it seemed so much safer because the tragic stories were largely restricted to hometown papers and local newscasts.

Are the statistics dropping because we’re so much more careful? Maybe. But probably not, given the huge number of child assaults that weren’t reported in the past because of the social stigma they carried.

The Meitivs are scheduled to meet again next week with CPS workers, who they hope will understand their decisions were a matter of parenting philosophy, not neglect.

“All of this fear is misplaced. The biggest fear our society should have is that we’re raising kids who don’t know how to be independent,” Danielle said. “When do you think this independent child will emerge like a genie from a bottle? It takes time.”

She’s right. No, most parents aren’t going to let their kids walk a mile alone on a heavily traveled road. That’s a little extreme.

But letting go in little steps is a human experience that has to accompany our return to sanity.