By Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
A family has been harassed by social services and police for the egregious crime of allowing their children to play outside in another example of how the nanny state is running wild in America.
Lenore Skenazy, editor of the Free Range Kids website, was contacted by a mother in Virginia who related her story of how she was interrogated by police four times and visited by social services twice after her children were spotted playing outside unsupervised.
The mother said that despite the fact she is careful about allowing her kids to stay over at other people’s houses because of a related childhood trauma of her own, she is being harassed by authorities because she is “one of only two families that allows my children to play outside at all in our neighborhood (which is very safe).”
“Just today, I allowed all four of my children (they were all together) to go play in the field adjacent to my house. I could literally see them outside my kitchen window.
My 10 year old ran home to tell my husband and I that a cop had stopped and was interrogating my oldest daughter,” the mother writes.
“No, this was not after dark, it was at 4pm on a Saturday. So my husband walked out to see what was going on, and the police officer even wrote up a report, stating that the children were left outside unsupervised.”
Although she makes her children carry cellphones and check in every 30 minutes, the mother was told by her neighbors that “it just isn’t safe anymore to allow your kids to play outside.”
When the mother asked the police officer if the children, two teens, a pre-teen and a 5-year-old, were causing trouble, the officer responded, “No they were very respectful kids, I just wanted to make sure they were okay because it was odd seeing them outside unsupervised.”
How fundamentally warped has society become when children are not allowed to play outside in a field right next to their own house without suspicion being cast on their parents by authorities and neighbors?
Paranoia about child abductions has been hyped by both the media and the state as a means of eviscerating parental rights and transferring such power over to the government.
In reality, America has never been safer for kids in decades.
As AOL News’ David Knowles documents, “According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 980,712 people under the age of 18 were reported missing in 1997, compared to 643,744 in 2008.”
Child abductions are declining rapidly year upon year, so why on earth are Americans increasingly terrified of allowing their kids to enjoy the freedom of the great outdoors?
This is another example of the nanny state gone wild.
Manufactured paranoia that has no basis in reality is being hyped to turn all parents into potential child abusers and in the process castrate the happy, normal, and adventurous upbringing that all children should enjoy.
Is it any wonder that so many children end up being put on Ritalin or other psychotropic drugs given that the happiest days of their lives and the key formative stage of their development is being strangled by such overbearing nonsense?
Parents are being harassed by police and social services for caring for their children in ways which a sane society would consider normal and healthy.
Back in 2010, we reported on the case of a father of two who was harassed and investigated by Child Protective Services and police for feeding his daughters organic food, refusing to make them drink fluoride-poisoned tap water and not having them injected with mercury-laden vaccines.