CPS: Mom Can’t Let Her 3 Kids—Ages 6, 8, and 9—Play Outside by Themselves
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Pearisburg, Virginia, social services says kids must be watched—at all times—until they turn 13.
Emily Fields’ three kids—a boy, age four, and two girls, ages 6 and 8—were playing outside. The Fields live in the quiet town of Pearisburg in rural western Virginia. It was there, on a May afternoon in 2021, that Fields’ 4-year-old kicked a soccer ball across the road toward the neighbor’s cat, which he avoided hitting.
The neighbors yelled at him and took his ball. But it didn’t end there.
“My sister had actually been outside, watching them,” says Fields, who homeschools her kids. By the time Fields got home, 15 minutes later, her kids and sister were inside. They told her what had happened. Fields walked her son to the neighbors’ house to apologize.
“They began to scream and yell,” says Fields. “They said that everyone in the neighborhood thought I was a horrible mother, and that my children abused animals, and they were going to call [child protective services] every day until my children were taken away.”
The neighbors did indeed call child protective services (CPS). The agency dispatched two caseworkers to investigate the soccer ball incident the very next day.
CPS had also been called to the Fields home three years earlier, when someone reported the kids, then ages 2, 5, and 6, for playing outside while unsupervised.
Those are young ages, of course. But they were not unsupervised, according to Fields, who says she was watching them from the window. Every 10 or 15 minutes, she would pop outside to check on them.
“All around our house and the neighbors’ houses is cleared land with few trees and no wells, cisterns, piles of rotting wood to harbor snakes, or anything that would present a true danger to them,” says Fields.
She spent much of her own childhood outside and wanted that for her kids, too. “So I’d let them play in the backyard, and the [contiguous] backyard of a neighbor who’s amenable to that,” she says.
But one day in 2018, when she and her kids came home from a nature walk, they found two CPS workers parked in the driveway. Fields let them inside the house, where they checked to make sure there was food inside the refrigerator and that nothing else was out of place. Then they told her that the children needed to be supervised at all times, until they turned 13 years old.
A few weeks later, Fields called CPS to find out if she was being formally charged with neglect and learned that her case had never officially been opened. That was the end of the matter—until 2021.
To investigate the ball-that-didn’t-hit-the-cat incident, two CPS workers—one from the previous call, one new one—came to the house. Fields’ husband and sister were there, along with the three kids, so “all six of us took this meeting,” says Fields.