There’s a good chance you’ve heard about the Meitiv kids (especially if you have children of your own or friends with children). The kids, ages 10 and 6, were walking home from a park a mile from their house in Maryland when they were spotted by a zealous citizen-protector, reported to the police, picked up 3 blocks from home, and detained for over five hours. In the end, they were handed over to their parents, but only after plenty of panic on both the kids’ and parents’ parts. And, as it turns out, that wasn’t really the end. The parents found themselves under investigation for neglect.

Insane? I think so. Unusual? Nope.

In an article run this weekend by the Washington Post, there are more examples of clashes between parents who believe their kids deserve some autonomy and child protective services workers who are charged with taking every potential threat to a child’s safety seriously:

In Austin, Kari Anne Roy, 38, a children’s author, was investigated for neglect after her children walked the dog one day in August and her 6-year-old lagged behind, playing on an outdoor bench a few houses down the street.

In Port St. Lucie, Fla., Nicole Gainey, 35, a mother of two, was arrested for letting her 7-year-old son walk alone to a park and play there, about half a mile away from their home in the town where she grew up.

One of most the most publicized recent cases involved Debra Harrell in North Augusta, S.C., who allegedly allowed her 9-year-old daughter to play at a park while she worked at a McDonald’s as a shift manager.

The “Free-Range Kids” website has still more examples — and statistics to suggest that allowing a child to walk to and from a playground may actually be less of a threat to that child’s safety than the everyday act of buckling her into a car.

But even though hundreds of thousands of parents find themselves embroiled in the child welfare courts each year (many deservedly so, some not), child welfare law itself is not all that well developed. It can be very difficult to know what’s legal and what’s not.

For the sake of randomness, let’s use Iowa to focus a bit. Iowa criminalizes both neglect and child endangerment. Neglect is a felony that’s committed when a parent “knowingly or recklessly exposes” a child “to a hazard or danger against which such person cannot reasonably be expected to protect such person’s self.” Child endangerment is committed when a parent “knowingly acts in a manner that creates a substantial risk to a child or minor’s physical, mental or emotional health or safety”; if the child is not harmed by the offending conduct, the crime is only a misdemeanor. That language is broad enough to apply to practically anything: teach your ten-year-old to cook and he might start a grease fire that he doesn’t know how to put out.

Anyway, that’s Iowa’s criminal code. Even more conduct is included in the broad definition of “child abuse” in the context of Iowa’s civil child welfare system. Abuse includes “the failure on the part of a person responsible for the care of a child to provide for the adequate food, shelter, clothing, medical or mental health treatment, supervision, or other care necessary for the child’s health and welfare when financially able to do so or when offered financial or other reasonable means to do so.” The statute goes on to explain that “failure to provide for the adequate supervision of a child means the person failed to provide proper supervision of a child that a reasonable and prudent person would exercise under similar facts and circumstances and the failure resulted in direct harm or created a risk of harm to the child.”

Would a reasonably prudent person allow a child to walk a mile to a park? Does such a walk create a risk of harm to the child? These are fuzzy questions that give the state leeway to act as the state (for “the state” here, read “a social worker”) sees fit.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Ilya Somin notes that the application of child welfare laws is subject to some (seemingly) robust constitutional constraints: there’s case law providing that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit and that it also, in the words of Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion in Troxel v. Granville, creates a “presumption that fit parents act in the best interests of their children.”

But the reality facing most parents in court is that that “presumption” isn’t actually a thing. Take the experience documented in a well-publicized essay on Salon last year: the author left her four-year-old unattended in a car for a few minutes on a mild day, the police were called, she found herself charged with a crime along the lines of the ones excerpted from the Iowa criminal code above. She told her lawyer: “It doesn’t sound to me like I committed the crime I’m being charged with. I didn’t render him in need of services. He was fine. Maybe I should plead ‘not guilty,’ go to trial.” He warned her that “juvenile courts are notorious for erring on the side of protecting the child” and suggested that fighting the case might lead her to lose her child. Faced with that possibility she, of course, folded. Anyone would.

And there is a class and race component to this.  Low-income neighborhoods have a higher presence of police and social workers, raising the odds that parents there get reported. These parents are also far less likely to benefit from the presumption that they are making good decisions for their kids.

The answer is not a brighter legal line on the right age to range freely—kids really are too different for that—but a more collaborative child-welfare model. We should not be taking kids away from situations where reasonable minds honestly disagree about parenting decisions.  Rather, we should reserve punishment for those extreme situations where it’s below the standard that any parent should be treating this child.