If someone called CPS and reported the incident, CPS would have no choice but to investigate. There is a child abuse and neglect hotline, people can make anonymous tips. I am familiar with one case where a woman left her sick baby alone in the car while she ran in to the drugstore to get medicine for it - she didn't bring the baby because it was raining, and she didn't have an umbrella. Someone called in her license plate, and CPS got involved. She already had a prior finding of neglect for letting her eight-year-old come home to an empty apartment after school, and she didn't think she had done anything wrong in either incident, so CPS went to court with it.
My point being that, depending on where you live, once CPS is called, by law they have no discretion, they have to do SOMETHING, even if it's just investigate and then drop it. This is to prevent the horror stories we are all familiar with where CPS did nothing to intervene and children were murdered, etc.
I don't know about you, but for me having CPS investigate me and my family would be traumatic. My younger son broke his arm falling out of his top bunkbed ~ he was shaking off his sheet. I had gone for a walk, and Chris was washing dishes, and Nick sat on the railing, and tried to shake his sheet himself, and fell and broke his arm. He needed emergency surgery, and they kept him overnight after the surgery. Even before he went to sleep the hospital social worker interviewed him to find out what happened. I knew what was what, and stayed out of it, but it still made me feel bad, especially because Ben had also broken his arm the year before ~ he put all his weight on a stair railing that was screwed into the wall, and it broke loose from the wall, and he fell down the stairs. So they had to investigate, just to see if they needed to refer the incident to CPS.
I don't need the kind of trouble you are risking when you discipline your child with corporal punishment in public. |
