Social Services involved after 6 year old finished marathon...

[unclebilly]

Why cant people mind their own business? I see the complainant as a jealous parent who thinks their obese, video game playing kids ought to be as eligible for the olympics as kids who begin training at 5-6 years old for the love of sport...

https://globalnews.ca/news/8826929/parents-six-year-old-marathon/

Yesterday Child Protective Services (CPS) arrived at our home unannounced and interviewed our children, parents & grandmother. This is a scary process because usually children are interrogated away from parents, against their will, and their answers determine the agency's legal right to take away the kids. CPS requires SPECIFIC actions be reported like times, locations and specific abuses. Since these do not exist people had to make them up.
Someone reported that we dragged Rainier after mile 13 and across the finish line, pulling him against his will. All 8 family members and eye witnesses (including police officers), and our hours of footage reveal a different story - That Rainier is a young human who was very determined to finish and was never dragged ONCE on the entire 26.2 mile course. In a recorded interview with ABC, the day before, Rainier said that his biggest complaint about the ending was that he was so excited but had to hold our hands implying he wanted to go faster, not slower.

When world class olympians with international stages like Kara Goucher & Lee Troop use their large platforms to broadcast absolute moral imperatives without nuance they need to take responsibility when the public tries to enforce these moral imperatives. Witch hunts will be created.

Calling a government agency to have children taken away from someone because you don’t like them or something doesn’t “feel right” or because you can not conceive of a 6 year old that enjoys running, is morally reprehensible and a gross misuse of our governmental systems put in place to protect our children.
Our entire county has only 3 social service agents. The two of them that spent an hour with our family said they have a total of 60 backlogged cases of potential legitimate abuse and that we have nothing to worry about.

Instead of taking lead from the most unbalanced and competitive members of our society who issue universal edicts about how children should be parented it would be better if we looked at the evidence and discussed the pros and cons of running with children. Our family would benefit from these discussions and yours would too.

[LWJ]

I am pretty impressed. Kid should win a fricken medal. Parents too.

[masraum]

I saw the headline the other day but didn't read the story. Some Karen that thinks she knows better than everyone else reported them, I'm sure. Farkin' wankers.

[Pazuzu]

Freaking tattooed up, granola chowing, running when not being chased, plastic glasses wearing, who named their kid after a stupid mountain, wannabe fools. Oh, and dragging that brat for 2000 miles along the Appalachian Trail? Oh, and they're WAY too old to be parents.


Flip side...
For thousands of years, families endured all of that and more just to survive year by year, and kids obviously kept up. Children that age made the trip out of the Dust Bowl, kids that age made it into and them out of concentration camps, kids that age watched and helped while generations build the Great Wall...so why can't our kids, the toughest, best educated, best prepared, most healthy and stable kids in history, run/walk a marathon every now and then?