I'm not sure this is the right place to post this, or even what I'm asking exactly. We just got a letter in our mailbox from "your neighbour", who has expressed their concern because they feel we are not supervising our young children adequately in the neighbourhood. They have warned us that our neighbourhood only appears safe - that there was a rumour once about a paedophile somewhere - and that someone was murdered at a specific location a few blocks away once (I checked this one out: someone with a serious mental health issue had a psychotic break and killed their roommate... ten years ago...). The note is anonymous but, weirdly, done on the stationary of our local MP - maybe that's just the paper they had to hand, but we were wondering whether it was some kind of passive-aggressive signal that they might involve authorities, although they haven't said that they will.
Here's the deal: we have three kids, the older two of whom have sort of social anxiety issues, so it's very important to us to encourage social independence and a degree of "boldness" when cultivating social connections. One of our kids is very young - not in school yet - one is in primary, and one is a teenager.
We live in a cul-de-sac you'd basically never find unless you were looking for it, and our house is right across the street from a small playground only used by other people in the cul-de-sac. While we don't know who sent this note, we have introduced ourselves to everyone on the street. There is a strong parenting culture divide, which at least superficially seems to relate to immigrant status: basically, we're the only white family who uses the little playground, and we're not originally from this country either... Our kids have tonnes of people to play with - but all of them are very recent migrants who have almost no English (the little kids generally have the most). These are really nice people - very affectionate with their kids and very kind to ours. Even though we have limited ability to communicate, we all sort of watch our for one another's children - which means, among other things, if one of our group of parents is across the street at the playground, everyone else will send their kids out, because we all sort of rely on whoever is the most proximate parent.
Some of the parents hang out at the park the whole time they are "on duty", but two have very young infants, and tend to sort of walk a circuit around the park and the cul-de-sac while generally keeping an eye on things, while we often hang out in our own yard - sometimes working in the car port area, sometimes in the yard, sometimes sitting on the porch - rather than actually being across the street in the park. Our kids have been taught to walk around the cul-de-sac to get to the park, rather than crossing the street, so the walk between our house and the park is very safe, but it might not be apparent to someone that we are actually watching our kids, because we don't walk with them. If another parent is "on duty", we in fact might go back inside our house and get some things done: the custom - which emerged with anyone discussing it - is that the "on duty" parent will see everyone back home if they have to leave.
Over the past couple of weeks - and I suspect this is what has provoked the note - our house has emerged as a kind of hang out location for the littler kids in this group. Kids drift in and out all day, and go back and forth between our house and the playground. We had been thinking this was really lovely, and we had been particularly pleased at how much braver our middle child was becoming amongst this nice community situation. All this back and forth movement between our place and the playground winds up naturally as it starts to get dark. Last night, though, one of the little kids invited our daughter to come home with her once it got dark, so that they could light some sparklers together. My daughter clearly had some trepidation, but wanted to do it, and we let her walk across with her friend, and then walk home by herself (we're talking four houses away - no crossed roads). This morning, we got the note.
Again, my daughter wasn't actually unsupervised - my husband was outside working in the car port - although we were also doing our best to make /her/ feel like she was doing this on her own, without parental "backup" (since one of her struggles is to want us to facilitate things for her). I could easily see how it could look like a little girl was wandering around unsupervised after dark. That said, people could come up and ask us, rather than leaving an anonymous note that gives us no clue who to explain the situation to.
But honestly, I suspect the concern is less "sincere" than this. I'm trying to be charitable and assume that race/ethnicity isn't the major issue - so, in the spirit of generosity, let's say that there is at best a profound difference in parenting styles that happens also to align with a race/ethnicity divide on the street. Most houses in the cul-de-sac have kids the same general age, but lots of houses usher the kids from the door, straight into the car when going outside, and then straight back through the door again when they get back home. I'm cool with that - their families, their decisions. But I'm not so cool with someone deciding that our decision /not/ to do that, constitutes negligent parenting. Particularly not when it's anonymous and I don't even know how to address it head on.
To address a couple possibly qualifiers: the kids are /not/ loud or disruptive. We keep our windows open and are closer to the playground than any other house, and we can't hear them at all from inside.
And: the note isn't the first indication we've had that neighbours on the 'door-to-car' end of the parenting spectrum, disapprove of our sort of "it takes a village" thing - the dirty looks when we sat on our porch and handed out candy to trick-or-treaters at Halloween were... really something... The open stares we got when a family with members in hijab came to our door were... infuriating to be honest...
Unrelated to this, we are about to move - to another country as it happens. This actually makes me a bit more anxious about what could happen if they call some authority. It can take a while to resolve even the most nonsense of child protective service claims, and I don't know what would happen if some agency were to decide to check us out, and the date came when we were meant to fly out. So I suppose my question is: in this circumstance, would you be worried? Do we need to put on a hi-vis vest and hop up and down at the playground while our kids are there, to prove we are watching them? Would you assume this is just a blowhard and not worry that they could escalate it?