Last month, 10-year-old Ravi and 6-year-old Dvora were walking home from a park when they were stopped by police and driven to their residence about a mile away. Now their parents are facing an investigation from Child Protective Services, which is threatening to remove the children from their care.
Their mother, Danielle Meitiv, joined HuffPost Live on Thursday to discuss the pending neglect investigation. Meitiv, who calls herself a “free-range parent,” said her kids had trouble coping with the investigation at first.
“The scary part was actually when the CPS officers came,” she told host Nancy Redd. “My daughter had nightmares about the police taking her daddy away.”
Meitiv received her first visit from CPS in October after a neighbor reported her for allowing her kids to walk home unsupervised. The mother of two said she appreciates the concern for her children, but she feels the calls are misguided.
“I’d like to think that they actually care about the kids. I don’t mind that somebody would walk up to the kids and say, ‘Are you OK? Are you lost?’ Or even if a police officer did that, that's fine with me,” she said. "We want people to look out for each other's kids. It’s the idea that it then becomes a crime [that is what bothers me].”
While Meitiv and her husband have already sought legal counsel, the most difficult aspect of the investigation is knowing that she could lose her kids, she said.
"The thing that’s so frightening is that the people at CPS have the power to do exactly what they are threatening to do,” Meitiv said. “They do have the power to take children away with actually very little evidence.”
Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation about “free-range” parenting here.
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