Sometimes, Doing It The Scary, Imperiling Way Is The Way You Change Things Back To Sane
KJ Dell'Antonia at The New York Times' MotherLode thinks the Meitivs should have just sucked it up and gone along with repressive government demands that they parent the way the government says they should.

These are the Maryland parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, whose children were once again in the custody of Montgomery County Child Protective Services. But first, the backstory:

The Meitivs are the family whose 10- and 6-year-old children were stopped by the police while walking home from the park on a (busy, urban) Maryland street and driven home (over the older child's protests). The family was investigated by the local Child Protective Services and were found responsible for "unsubstantiated child neglect."

A neighbor apparently saw the children walking alone yesterday evening and called 911. A local television station reported the children were walking about a third of a mile from home at the time. Danielle Meitiv said they were supposed to be home by 6; when the children didn't arrive, she and her husband began searching for them. They were not, she said, notified that the children were in custody until 8 p.m., and weren't allowed to see them until 10:30, when the parents were asked to sign an agreement promising not to leave the children unattended before taking them home. They did.

The initial stopping of the children on their way home from the park resparked the continuing conversation about whether children are more hemmed in than they were in the past. As a broader matter, that's a good thing; it encourages parents to think about whether we're letting our children have the kinds of age-appropriate experiences that teach the lessons of independence we need as adults.

The specifics, though, worried local parents, who knew intimately the walk that the Meitiv children were taking, which crosses busy intersections with three to four lanes in either direction.

I crossed busy streets with four lanes at age 8. I also went to the park and rode miles and miles to the cider mill on my bike all by myself not long afterward.

Here's the "give into the state" gutless model -- rather than questioning the imposition of state power -- that is so pervasive in our society, and why we still have a pointless groping of diapered, 79-year-old blind grandmothers' genitalia at the airport. Dell'Antonia writes:

It's a fundamental principle of my parenting that I don't sit down with my children to help them with their homework every night. I don't believe in doing that, and I don't think it's helpful for them.

That said, if our local version of Child Protective Services took my children into custody for that choice, and told me that if we didn't change, they might do it again -- I would sit down with my children every night and help them with their homework, and find other ways to promote their independence.

Question nothing. Stand up for nothing. Great that this is what you will teach your children.

Thanks, but I'd rather live in a world populating by people like the Meitivs, who stand up for their principles.

Interestingly, I find that it is often immigrants to this country who value our freedoms the most -- in the way our founding fathers did. That is, to the point where they are or were willing to risk what is most precious to them -- their right to raise their children or even their lives -- in order to preserve what is most precious to all of us (or should be): Our civil liberties.