Child Services to Mom Who Did Nothing Wrong: ‘Just Don’t Let Your Kids Play Outside’

Children’s book author Kari Anne Roy was recently
visited by the Austin police and Child Protective Services for
allowing her son Isaac, age 6, to do the unthinkable: Play outside,
up her street, unsupervised.

He’d been out there for about 10 minutes when Roy’s doorbell
rang. She opened it to find her son —and a woman she didn’t
know. As
Roy wrote on her blog HaikuMama last week, the mystery woman
asked: “Is this your son?”

I nodded, still trying to figure out what was happening.

“He said this was his house. I brought him home.” She was
wearing dark glasses. I couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t gauge her
expression.

“You brought…”

“Yes. He was all the way down there, with no adult.” She
motioned to a park bench about 150 yards from my house. A bench
that is visible from my front porch. A bench where he had been
playing with my 8-year-old daughter, and where he decided to stay
and play when she brought our dog home from the walk they’d gone
on.

“You brought him home… from playing outside?” I continued to
be baffled.

And then the woman smiled condescendingly, explained that he was
OUTSIDE. And he was ALONE. And she was RETURNING HIM SAFELY. To
stay INSIDE. With an ADULT. I thanked her for her concern, quickly
shut the door and tried to figure out what just happened.

What happened? The usual. A busybody saw that rarest of sights—a
child playing outside without a security detail—and wanted to teach
his parents a lesson. Roy might not have given the incident a whole
lot more thought except that shortly afterward, her doorbell rang
again.

This time it was a policewoman. “She wanted to know if my son
had been lost and how long he’d been gone,” Roy told me by phone.
She also took Roy’s I.D. and the names of her kids.

That night Isaac cried when he went to bed and couldn’t
immediately fall asleep. “He thought someone was going to call the
police because it was past bedtime and he was still awake.”

As it turns out, he
was almost right. About a week later, an investigator from Child
Protective Services came to the house and interrogated each of
Roy’s three children separately, without their parents, about their
upbringing.

“She asked my 12 year old if he had ever done drugs or alcohol.
She asked my 8-year-old daughter if she had ever seen movies with
people’s private parts, so my daughter, who didn’t know that things
like that exist, does now,” says Roy. “Thank you, CPS.”

It was only last week, about a month after it all began, that
the case was officially closed. That’s when Roy felt safe enough to
write about it. But safe is a relative term. In her last
conversation with the CPS investigator, who actually seemed to be
on her side, Roy asked, “What do I do now?”

Replied the investigator, “You just don’t let them play
outside.”

There you have it. You are free to raise your children as you
like, except if you want to actually give them a childhood. Fail to
incarcerate your child and you could face incarceration
yourself.