Parents Under Investigation After 11-Year-Old Plays Alone in Yard for 90 Minutes

Child Protective Services is in the hot seat again — this time in Florida, where officials placed two brothers into foster care and then in the care of a relative after one, 11, was found playing basketball alone in his own yard.

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The way the latest incident went down, in April, was like this, according to the mom’s story (which has since been verified through court documents by Skenazy): The mom and dad, Cindy and Fred, were on their way home from running errands but were delayed by rain and traffic. Meanwhile, their 11-year-old son had beaten them home and didn’t have a house key, so he amused himself by shooting some hoops while he waited, for about 90 minutes.

That’s when an unknown neighbor, apparently not okay with the situation, called the cops, who in turn looped in CPS. So when Cindy and Fred arrived home they were arrested for child neglect — then fingerprinted, strip searched, and held in jail overnight. Their kids, meanwhile, including their 4-year-old boy, were removed from the home and from their parents’ custody for one month. But Cindy, who had been a school-system employee at the time, reached out to Skenazy just over a month into the ordeal, being sure to note that they do not consider themselves “free-range” parents.

“We still do not have our children, we are fighting for our own freedom and due to the nature of my employment I am no longer employed,” she wrote. “My son was in his own yard playing basketball, not in the street or at the park. The authorities claim he had no access to water or shelter. We have an open shed in the back yard and 2 working sinks and 2 hoses. They said he had no food. He ate his snacks already. He had no bathroom, but the responding officer found our yard good enough to relieve himself in while our son sat in a police car alone. In his own yard, in a state, Florida, that has no minimum age for children to be alone.”

I used to play at parks blocks away from my grandma's house solo. Who knows what would have happened with a modern Social Services if they found out. To be perfectly honest kids are way more likely to suffer abuse at the hands of parents inside the home than accosted by some stranger anyway. What a waste of resources.

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