>Sounds like an administration completely out of control. This isn't an administration completely out of control. This is a society completely out of control.

>Sounds like an administration completely out of control. This isn't an administration completely out of control. This is a society completely out of control. The administration simply reflects the prevailing social attitude, and that attitude is that we want to take away the rights of children to properly develop (and more to the point, limit the rights of parents to allow their children to develop) and hand it over to concern trolls and/or the paranoid so that they may exercise power over their neighbors under the guise of looking out for them- remember, abuse from CPS is always initiated by a "concerned citizen". Oppression, after all, is always at its worst when the oppressors act with the approval of their own conscience. Societies typically fail to deal with this kind of person appropriately, because when risk is exposed it both presses emotional buttons and provides an easy way out (by banning the risk). The way it's correctly dealt with is to write laws that ban society from paying that kind of Dane-geld. These laws codify things called "rights"; and their primary function is to prevent unwarranted risk aversity (be it genuine, or fake to score political points) by setting down a baseline beyond which those that spread terror are not negotiated with (that your children will be abducted unless you pay the ransom of never letting them outside, or that they'll grow up to be mass killers unless you pay the ransom of banning rock music, D&D, and video games), even if the allegations are correct (a child raised in a locked cage will by definition never be abducted). Utah has passed such a law (I'm not sure about other places, though Red states are by current definition more likely than Blue ones to do this) explicitly codifying the right of way of minors of "sufficient age and maturity" in its state definition of "neglect" so that State power can't be abused to harass them. While it's not a permanent solution explicitly recognizing the rights of persons of sufficient age and maturity (as it could easily be changed later, and even if minors had the explicit right of way they would be unlikely to realize if it was being infringed), it's a good first step.