Silver Spring family faces off against CPS — over letting kids walk outside

The Meitiv family of Silver Spring is now under Child Protective Services scrutiny for permitting their children to walk the neighborhood alone a little too freely. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids has been on the story for a while, and now the Washington Post and columnist Petula Dvorak are covering it too (related). More: Beth Greenfield, Yahoo Parenting (cross-posted at Overlawyered).

More: Welcome listeners from “Frederick’s Forum” on WFMD with Dave Schmidt, Pattee Brown, Darren Wigfield, and Eric Beasley. I’ve amplified the cross-link at Overlawyered with a Google Street View map link for those who want to check out what Georgia Avenue in that section of Silver Spring looks like, and there’s a reader discussion under way. After our Saturday morning talk I saw this new post from Lenore Skenazy about a Maryland mother who now has a misdemeanor conviction for letting her 10-year-old look after her baby sister for ten minutes in the back of the car while she shopped. A lot of these aggressive-CPS cases seem to come from the state of Maryland.