Parents Charged with 'Neglect' After 11-Year-Old Plays in Yard for 90 Minutes

Can they press charges on the officer that relieved himself in their yard?

 

I bet that Douchebag from florida approves Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings this just shows what state is really crazy.

 

Then they need a more reasonable and brief CYA checklist. If there are not more serious charges coming they had absolutely no business keeping the kid overnight. They kept the kid, and his brother who wasn't even there for a month.

To me....it's 100% on CPS and the Police. They need to differentiate between a nuisance call (or false alarm) or adverse circumstances and a real situation. Police met the parents at the house -- why arrest them? If there was no evidence of harm or impending harm, why not a stern warning and document the call?

My neighbor's toddler wandered from his home a couple of summers ago. The dad thought he was with the mom, so he was very surprised when the cops showed up with kid, having found him wandering several blocks away. A neighbor may have called the police. Didn't help that he was in his Sunday dregs, watching football, with a beer in hand when he opened the door. The police absolutely grilled him. Made him feel awful. And advised him they were noting the incident. But they returned the kid. And that was it. No charges. No CPS. That's how it should be.

 

No - they didn't have to do it. They chose to do that. When an organization who's whole existence is to protect kids picks protecting themselves from lawsuits over the best interests of the kids, then something is very wrong with the structure of the organization. It's a complicated problem, but one that needs to be solved.

 

I used to stay alone by myself when I was 6, 7 years old.

 

Lawyer up, sue the hell out of everyone involved, drag the idiots though the mud in the media.

 

PREACH ON BROTHER MAN !

DD

 

If the neighbor knew the kids, why didn't he go outside and check on them first? If he didn't know the kids then how would he know they were in supposed danger. Why not keep an eye on them for a little bit and let the situation play out, especially if the kids were in no immediate danger like it seems. Just beyond ridiculous that the police were called, and that the system let it escalate further.

I also hate the term "free range" parents. Giving your kids a little independence, like mine used to give to me. That's called normal parenting.

 

Delete wrong thread

 

Hell . . i walked over 2 miles to school . . . . My mom would be inprisoned now I guess

Rocket River

 

Pretty ridiculous. Few stories from my childhood that make my parents look like bandits, but make me thankful for the way they raised me.

When I was 11 and 12, I used to walk 2 or 3 miles home. My instructions were to take the same path everyday and eventually my mom would pick me up somewhere along the path. There were times when I would literally be across the street from home when my mom would find me. At that point, I was like, "nah mom, I got it." It wasn't the best neighborhoods either, but oh well. Didn't die.

My parents (especially my mom) routinely locked us outside, on purpose, and told us to go play while they cleaned the house (didn't want us ruining the freshly mopped floors). We drank from the hose or asked for water at the door. No big deal.

Once, my sister did something stupid (can't remember, talked back or something). She got a whipping for it. Mom used the belt. Sis thought she was a bad A and tried to grab the belt, instead of just taking the belt on her rear end. Anyway, she had a bruise on her arm. Went to school the next day and one of her friends asked her about the bruise, and my sister said something like "ran into a door". Her friend went and told the school counselor. My sister, brother, and me all got pulled from school and brought home. While there, my parents and CPS were talking about "the incident". I don't remember the exact quote my mom said, but it went something like this, "If you're not going to allow me to spank my children when they do something bad, then you can go ahead and take them right now, because I will continue to spank them." CPS ended up putting them on some sort of probation or something for a year (we still got spankings and never once tried the "if you do that I'll call the cops" line, because we knew they wouldn't care).

Point of this is that, I'm doing fine second person in my family with a college degree, first with an MBA, and a CPA and I'm married with a 10 month old of my own. And really, I owe it all to my parents.

 

As is usually the case, I think there's more to this story than we're being told. We're mainly getting the details from the parents, probably because (as was previously mentioned) the city officials can't discuss details due to privacy laws. Of course the parents will paint themselves as victims...why would they point out their faults in public? But there are a some unanswered questions here:

- Why didn't the kid have a key?
- Why not provide a hide-a-key?
- What was their contingency plan for the kid being left outside too long? (Sounds like they didn't have one)
- Why not communicate with the neighbors and let them know the kid comes home by himself BEFORE this happens?
- A little delay is understandable...but an hour and a half?!? And due to inclement weather? Why aren't the parents calling neighbors at that point? Or a friend to check on the kid?
- Was the kid left outside in the rain? If so, not cool at all.
- Has this happened before? Or any other instances of CPS being called?

I guarantee, if the kid was kidnapped and raped/tortured/murdered during the 1.5 hour time period, the first thing people would be asking is, "Where were the parents?!?". And if folks weren't so ready to litigate whenever anything goes wrong, govt agencies wouldn't overreact so much. Like it or not, the days of leaving your kids unsupervised are over. We have no one to blame but ourselves for this situation.

 

This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Anyone arguing for neglect is just as dumb.

I guess the kid's lucky that George Zimmerman didn't shoot him, though.

 

I'm pretty sure just raising your kid in Florida is considered neglect.

 

I hate to do this to you bro but are you sure they were just "cleaning"?
Sorry gross I know.

Anyway great story and good to see you survived what most would consider normal parenting but society today would have you believe it's horrible.

 

It's possible, but not necessarily the case. CPS has a long history of overreach. Here are a few similar articles:

http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/15/child-services-to-mom-who-did-nothing-wr#.ikrmcc:LPwf

http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2015/...y-cps-for-letting-their-kids-walk-home-alone/

It's not intentional on their part, but CPS people often operate out of fear of messing up, so they do stupid things on the other side. Nothing in this story is particularly unrealistic.

There are some fairly simple solutions that could remove the low-hanging fruit of mistakes. For example, to keep a child overnight, a case has to be referred to 2 other random agents and all 3 have to agree. That would eliminate one person making bad decisions. There are lots of things like this, but there needs to be a comprehensive effort to repair the system.

 

We agree on the bottom line completely.

Given what information we have on hand (which might not be everything the organization had about this family), they completely overreached. The end results appear ludicrous and cruel (again, given what information we have available).

If what they did was following a check-list, they need to come up with a new checklist.

(Separately, however, I'm definitely a neighbor who has my neighbors' cell #s and would call them before ever calling social services or the police on them... unless there had been a disturbing pattern.)

 

Agreed - there seems to have been plenty of people involved in this lacking some common sense. Assuming they know who made the call, it seems like it would be very uncomfortable for these two families now.

 

I think a lot of people in this thread feel the neighbor is to blame... but if you saw a kid drenched in water, moping around outside the house for more than an hour.. you would be concerned, no?

 

Instead of inviting him inside, you call the police?