The search system is borked, so I can't determine if this has already been diaried.
To read about an incredible controversy that has just gone white-hot, Google "free-range children."
Here's a link to a Washington Post article about the key incident:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Here is the lede:
A familiar debate over how much freedom parents should give their children ignited Monday with the news that a Montgomery County couple had, once again, tangled with Child Protective Services for allowing their youngsters to take a walk on their own.
A couple of months after Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were found responsible for “unsubstantiated neglect” for letting Rafi, 10, and Dvora, 6, walk home from a park close to where they live in downtown Silver Spring, they gave the children permission to do it again.
Responding to a call from a citizen, police collected the children and took them to CPS in Montgomery where, 5 1/2 anxious hours later, they were reunited with their parents.
The Meitivs have said they are going to sue the police and CPS. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Megan McCardle of Bloomberg News has a wonderful op-ed about the issue:
http://www.bloombergview.com/...
The Meitivs are professionals who live in Silver Spring, Maryland. The husband is a scientist at NIH. Silver Spring is in wealthy Montgomery County, adjacent to Washington, D.C. My parents were living in Silver Spring when I was born, and I've lived there several times, so I know the area well.
The downtown Silver Spring area where the Meitiv children were walking is a mix of fancy new office buildings and seedy, run-down blocks with a significant amount of crime. I used to have my law office just two blocks from where the children were picked up, and there were several fatal stabbings, armed robberies, etc. within a few blocks.
So I have mixed feelings about this issue.
When I was a kid, growing up just a few blocks from where this happened, my brothers and I used to freely roam all around the neighborhood without supervision. The only rule was we had to be close enough so we could hear the dinner bell. How times have changed.
McCardle's piece makes the good point that stranger abductions are rarer now then they used to be, and they're rarer than getting struck by lightning; but such crimes are endlessly hyped up by cable news and the Internet, and for other reasons parents in the United States are much more paranoid than they used to be.
UPDATE: After thinking about this some more and discussing it with my wife, I think it was outrageous that the police and the CPS waited for hours to notify the terrified parents. But I also think it was wrong and incredibly reckless for the parents to let children so young walk so far through dangerous neighborhoods.
According to the WaPo article in the first link, the police found the children in a parking garage on Fenton Street, reportedly being eyed by a "homeless suspect." The article later says the older child had to go to the bathroom but had to hold it for 20 minutes while in custody. Maybe they stopped at the public parking garage to find a bathroom. I know that particular parking garage very well. For more than a year I used to park there to get to my nearby office. In those days I often worked past midnight, and I used to be terrified going up the enclosed stairways. I guarantee, that garage, and that street, is no place for a 6-year-old child.