Bill would change child neglect law
Two state legislators make case for childhood independence, saying current rules go too far
Decades ago, in a simpler era, kindergarteners would walk to their local school without any parental supervision.
They would often play outside for hours without ever seeing their parents.
Those days are over, but two Fairfield County legislators say the state’s “neglect” law for children has swung way too far and needs to be changed.
Rep. Thomas O’Dea, a conservative Republican from New Canaan, and Rep. Travis Simms, a liberal Democrat from Norwalk, have joined together on a bipartisan bill to loosen the restrictions of the current law. It’s time, they say, to allow kids to be kids.
“The concern is there’s a presumption of liability for parents for leaving kids under 12 alone,” O’Dea said in an interview. “We’ve seen instances where parents are getting in trouble with police or in leaving kids under 12 alone. We need to allow parents the freedom to let their kids be a little more independent. … We should be letting kids be kids.”
But the state Department of Children and Families, which investigates cases of abuse and neglect, is not ready to embrace the bill. The department is open to negotiating with O’Dea and Simms for a compromise, but the department also favors a similar bill that is being offered in the legislature’s children’s committee.
The children’s commissioner, Vanessa Dorantes, testified recently that O’Dea’s bill weakens the definition of “neglect,” gives more discretion to parents, and provides much more leeway for parents to avoid criminal charges for risk of injury to a minor.
“As written, it appears that a parent could, for example, leave a child of any age at home unattended for any length of time and not face risk of injury charges,” Dorantes said.
The bill also states that the parents should not be deemed to be
neglectful unless they “willfully or recklessly disregard … an obvious danger.”
The department has written guidelines on the issue, but says there is no precise age, under the law, on when a child can stay home alone.
One of the multiple guidelines states: “Experts believe a child should be at least 12 before he is left alone, and at least 15 before he can care for a younger brother or sister. These are the minimum ages. Not every child is ready then.”
A similar bill failed once before in 2019, but O’Dea is hoping to have the measure passed by the judiciary committee’s deadline of March 31 before continuing to work on a final version before the legislative session ends in early June.
O’Dea’s bill generated supportive testimony from a Quinnipiac University medical school pediatrics professor, a Boston College psychology professor and an Idaho law school professor, among others.
Experts on the issue have differing views, citing the difficulty in striking the delicate balance between judgement calls by parents and the safety of children.
“Fraught encounters between DCF investigators and anxious and frightened parents can trigger escalating DCF concern and intervention, even where no actual neglect is present,” said longtime UConn law school professor Paul Chill, who has written about child abuse. “I’ve represented parents whose children were removed essentially because they gave a DCF investigator too much lip. A substantiation of neglect against a parent, and the parent’s permanent placement on the state child abuse and neglect registry, can cost them their job and even career, putting greater stress on a perhaps already struggling family. An arrest can obviously lead to an even greater deleterious impact.”
Carla M. Horwitz, who has taught child development at Yale for 45 years, said some children have become so boxed in by adult-planned activities and screen time that they have lost their spirit of independence and have often become bored.
“Some of the children I have worked with in the last 10 years have demonstrated a lack of ability to even generate ideas for their own play,” she said in written testimony to the judiciary committee. “Without the organized activity that fills their out-of-school time, they have lost the ability to imagine, or even to dream.”
Many families, she said, have been pulled into the child-protection agency after reports about them.
“Parents in Connecticut have been harassed and even charged with neglect or child abuse for allowing their child to walk two blocks home alone from school, stay home for a brief time while the parent runs a short errand, or gather on a playground with peers in their neighborhood with no grown-ups in attendance,” Horwitz said in written testimony to the judiciary committee.
The current situation, she concludes, “inhibits the process of separation and individuation, so crucial to the development of capable young people who will have the confidence and experience to become the next generation of competent adults.”
At the same time, Horwitz readily concedes that the safety of the child is paramount.
“Sadly, there are situations that are truly unsafe for children — neighborhoods in which gunfire is a daily occurrence, where there is little adult supervision, and where poverty and racism fuel violence and community dissolution,” she said. “These are real fears and call for many actions on the part of our society to address them.”
A different time decades ago
O’Dea, who will soon turn 56, recalls that things were different back in his early days in the Philadelphia suburbs.
“Growing up, we were alone, playing in the neighborhood at much younger than 12,” O’Dea said.
His bill has the long title of “an act limiting a finding of neglect or risk of injury to a child in certain circumstances.”
The bill is designed to curb the findings “if the allegation of neglect is based on a child’s participation in certain independent activities and the child is considered by the parent, guardian or caregiver of the child to be of sufficient maturity, physical condition and mental ability to avoid engaging in conduct that carries a substantial risk of physical harm.”
At DCF, Dorrantes favors a separate bill regarding a defense in court for parents, caregivers or others charged criminally with a misdemeanor for children under 12, saying that the bill “strikes a more appropriate balance between parental judgment and child safety.”
The office of the chief public defender, represented by counsel Deborah Del Prete Sullivan, agrees with Dorrantes that age alone should not be the biggest factor in this instance. The defense would be that the parent or other “exercised reasonable judgment in determining that the child was of sufficient age, maturity, physical ability and mental ability to be left unsupervised,” according to the bill.
“Under current law, these factors are not considered,” Sullivan said. “Only the age of the child is relevant. As a result, under current law, a person could be so charged even if a child is within days of their 12th birthday. Being able to raise an affirmative defense at trial presents evidence for the court or jury to consider that explains the defendant’s reasoning based upon other factors beyond the child’s age.”
David Pimentel, an Idaho law school professor, said many cultural factors are evident when police and investigators are making judgments in child neglect cases.
“No doubt,” he said, “these laws have been applied disproportionately against single moms and poor families, who already have fewer resources to devote to helicopter parenting their kids, against ethnic and cultural minorities, including immigrants who may bring different cultural traditions and values to their parenting, and against anyone whose parenting style might be characterized as unconventional, including those who believe in long-leash or ‘Free Range’ parenting to, among other things, teach their kids responsibility.”