They made it about halfway home when the police picked them up. You've heard these stories before, about what happens when kids in paranoid, hyperprotective America go to and from playgrounds alone.

I bet you can guess the sequence of events preceding and after: Someone saw the kids walking without an adult and called the police.

The police tracked down the kids and drove them home. The hitch this time is, when the police got there, they discovered that they were meddling with the wrong family.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv explicitly ally themselves with the "free range" parenting movement, which believes that children have to take calculated risks in order to learn to be self-reliant. Their kids usually even carry a card that says: "I am not lost. I am a free-range kid," although they didn't happen to have it that day.

They had carefully prepared their kids for that walk, letting them go first just around the block, then to a library a little farther away, and then the full mile.