"Unless it's a difference in degree"

Let your kids play outside by themselves or walk to school, and get reported to Child Protective Services. It is very much a different world these days.

Utah actually passed something to mitigate against that kind of response last year. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/01/24/utah-lawmakers-pass-b...

Look - I'm sure you can find some outlier news article about this happening, but as someone who actually has professional contact with CPS once in a while, this is - in my opinion - wildly hyperbolic. The social workers I know who work for CPS have excessive work loads of really intense circumstances (like, children being preyed upon, beaten, chained to radiators...). They're not doing parent interviews because someone let their 10-year-old walk to the park.

It’s not hyperbole. It’s happened twice recently in Montgomery County, a DC suburb near me: https://patch.com/maryland/silverspring/mother-free-range-ki.... (It’s one reason we moves two counties over.)

You moved because something happened twice in a county with a population over 1 million?

I'm just trying to process the irony of this entire discussion. American kids are over-protected because the media has created a culture of fear that terrible things are constantly happening to kids. Now you're going to flip that hysteria around and apply it to the parents.

While there are a million people in the county, there is just one CPS who brought those charges, run by one set of leadership. And the fact they felt that was an appropriate thing to do is emblematic of how skewed perceptions are in the county about what is normal and abnormal. CPS doesn’t bring charges for conduct that’s completely normal in a community. They did it because it was so unusual it seemed quite reasonable to decision makers that it should be illegal. It wasn’t the risk of being prosecuted by CPS that made us move away, it was the prospect of being surrounded by parents like that.

We have friends who get calls from "concerned neighbors" because their child is a block away playing at a park with no adult supervision. Any wanker can call cps and make your life miserable, and the wealthier the area, the more cps tends to meddle. Montgomery county mentioned in the sibling comment is one of the most well-to-do counties in the country and also a place I would not ever consider raising a child in due to cps actions there.

Child Protective Services is the thing I've most feared as a parent. Getting caught up in that system is about the worst thing that can happen to a child.

One of the things I liked best about the town we moved to is that when we were looking for houses I happened to go check out a listing around the time school got out and saw probably 15 different elementary aged kids walking home from school.

I don't think childhood in the US is quite as bleak as these articles make it out to be. Probably has something to do with where your area is on the income scale. Upper-middle class kids are coddled and probably always have been. Working class kids can't be coddled because their parents are busy putting food on the table.

It's just that the media focuses pretty exclusively on the well-off, because that is the world journalists live in.

Right! It's the combination of new laws/regulations and the higher likelihood of litigation when kids get hurt.

On the other hand, there are plenty of parents who completely neglect their kids. We don't want that either.