That all sounds marvelous. It's the best-case scenario. And all of those excellent secular brainy home-educators would, I imagine, have no problem with complying with a state- or federally-mandated core curriculum or testing for basic proficiency. Those aren't the ones that we have to "worry" about, and they aren't…

Two or three years ago my friend ran to the local CVS at 7 pm. Her 12 year old stayed in the car. Friend is waiting to pick up her prescription and a woman comes into the waiting area and asks waiting patrons if any of them owns (friend's car), in the parking lot with a child inside. Friend speaks up thinking maybe…

Home school students whose parents subscribe to fee-based testing score higher than public school students. That's a very small subset of homeschooled students, and really doesn't mean much. I learned to verify data and testing methods as a public school student.

There's less crime now and kids are much more sophisticated. We think there's something off about seeing kids riding the bus because it's so rare and out of place, but it's not more dangerous.

If most six year olds can't make good decisions in very simple circumstances, it's because they haven't been properly taught. In some parts of the worlds, six year olds literally build fires and cook dinners on them, take care of infants, and do housework, go swimming by themselves.

The biggest reason I'm sick of this shit, is that my parenting generation is constantly being told that we are coddling a bunch of dependent future idiots. But here is fucking society forcing us to coddle or risk having our kids removed from the home.

Kids the world over somehow manage to survive without their parents atop them from dawn to dusk. Presumably these parents know their kids better than you do, and know how much responsibility they can handle. Maybe you couldn't handle a walk with an older sibling at that age, but I could (and very, very regularly…

They can't read and are in their early teens. That kind of ignorance is bad for society as a whole.

I was babysitting for a friend's 6 year old once and she went next door for a play date. I called the mom about 90 minutes later and said she could send the little girl home for dinner. Fifteen minutes later, still no Katie. So I called back and the mom said, "Oh. I thought you were kidding about me sending her…

This comment assumes that the children in question hadn't demonstrated their level of maturity to the parents previously, at which point they were given the freedom to walk home alone. By the evidence provided in this article, the parents knew what they were doing: they'd evaluated the potential risks the children…

You bring up an interesting point. I have been wanting to call CPS on my husband's sister for years, because she is homeschooling her six kids and doing the bare minimum required, because "They are going to grow up to be carpenters, like Jesus." Every time I have tried, I am told I can't do it anonymously. But I guess…

the one time we have called CPS because of suspected abuse, they needed more details than anyone outside the home would have. The refused to investigate because we could not tell them the exact dates of suspicious injuries (the kid had stitches, we knew what week she showed up with the stitches but couldn't tell them…

Just like in the 50s, children now are at much greater risk from adults they know than from strangers. There has been no point in recent history in which children have been significantly victimized by street crime.

I was 10 and my brother was 5. We took public transit by ourselves to get to and from school each day through a very iffy neighbourhood and nothing ever happened. And not just by luck. Most people don't want to hurt anyone. We hung out at parks after school, went to the beach by streetcar by ourselves, a walk to the…

I'm a teacher in Philly. The level of abuse that occurs to some children and they are left in those homes is just astounding!!!!! Maybe when we report the neglect, physical and sexual abuse we should mention that they also walk home alone. Maybe that'll get some fucking results.

This is bullshit. Call it whatever new-age hipster shit you want, these parents have the right idea. There is ZERO wrong with letting your kids walk home together, especially if the distance is short. That's how they learn independence. It's how they become more aware of their surroundings, and it's how they learn to…

What baffles me is how difficult it is to get kids out of abusive homes, and they go around threatening for this? They have WAAAAY better things to be doing.

These stories always confuse me, because in my decade of teaching I have found CPS to be so overburdened that we have to seriously harass them to intervene. I had a 9 year old student whose mother would make her sleep in the garage (in Canada, in winter) and it took NUMEROUS calls to get them to investigate. It…

this is happening where I live, so two interesting notes on the law:

Are parents with full-time job really not allowed to let their children go to the park alone? Or walk to the store? or go to the library? I am deeply uncomfortable with this. As an ex-latch-key this is offensive. Jesus let kids eat some dirt.