Bill easing rules on unsupervised play ready for House floor

It's Kiwanis Club's Children’s Week at the Florida Capitol!

The House Health and Human Services Committee unanimously passed a measure Tuesday that seeks to decrease a parent or caregiver’s exposure to child welfare oversight and criminal prosecution.

Palm Bay Republican Rep. Monique Miller presented the bill (HB 1191) and explained that the measure would decriminalize parents or guardians who allow a child to engage in certain independent, unsupervised activities, and further codifies current Department of Children and Families (DCF) policy into law.

“This bill decriminalizes parents allowing their children to travel to and from school, play outdoors, and remain at home for reasonable amounts of time,” Miller said. “It simply codifies current DCF policy into law. Child and teen suicide rates have been dramatically increasing in recent years, and research shows this is partially due to the fact that outdoor play is discouraged both in culture and in law.”

Miller said similar legislation has already been passed in Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Montana, and Virginia, and is supported by research conducted by Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”

Kristin Nelson, a Florida mother in support of the bill, spoke before the committee and said she had lost custody of her child after allowing her 12-year-old son with low-functioning autism, to continue swimming at a public pool while she ran an errand.

“The pool incident has been used against me over and over in family court,” Nelson said. “It has caused unnecessary emotional distress. I have had to endure supervised visits with my son all these years, causing extreme hardships.”

In the bill’s analysis, it states that under current child welfare law, child neglect is when a parent or caregiver fails to provide a child in their care adequate food, clothing, shelter, or health care if they have the resources to do so. Child neglect also includes any harm that befalls a child left without supervision appropriate for the child’s age, mental, or physical condition.

While the measure would offer protection for parents and caregivers allowing their child to engage in independent, unsupervised activities without child welfare oversight, it expressly excludes a parent or guardian’s failure to provide adequate supervision if the failure is considered “reckless.”