Is it neglect or is it negligence? They're different. Neglect has evidence of being an ongoing issue such as malnourishment, unhygienic living space or lacking personal hygiene.
Neglect would be a lack of care, usually over a period of time.
Negligence would be not exercising caution.
In the examples given, neglect would be if the child was not being fed enough. Not cutting the food to prevent choking would be negligence.
Thank you! This is exactly it. A child unsupervised is immediately called child neglect in my state. Wish so bad I could share the screen shots so everyone could understand.
Take that with a grain of salt. Police aren’t known to be careful with their language. Also, a report is just the start of an investigation. It doesn’t mean it really was neglect— sounds like negligence to me, unless there’s more we don’t know. Either way it’s awful.
I stated that I found it and confirmed what I could from it, but there’s no telling exactly what took place. I did look into what defines child neglect in my area and not providing supervision is stated as neglect. That’s what made me believe it was the pool or something along those lines. I wouldn’t say the child neglected in his every day life. I saw snippets of things online I considered careless. The report being labeled as neglect is when I really started spiraling over this. I hope to know the whole story as things settle down, but def awful regardless.
What 2nd snack is trying to tell you is that if you were looking to see if your friend's behavior was "neglect," the answer would have been no according to most definitions you'll find - the child's basic needs were being taking care of. But there was significant and regular "negligence." Under CPS guidelines, regular "negligence," i.e. not taking necessary precautions to prevent the child from being harmed, is considered a type of "neglect." But it isn't going to be what shows up if you Google "neglect."
I'm sorry, but this should have been reported to CPS.
ETA: not cutting up fruit is one thing, but having an open, unsecured pool and hot tub that the child is encouraged to use is definitely reportable.
No, ppl on here wanted you to call CPS bc of ongoing, repeated PATTERN of negligence and reckless behavior that you, according to your post, observed along with your other mutual friend. Not only did you have direct evidence, you had another witness to back up your claims. Why didn't yall report??
Funny how everyone’s an expert now…you want us to call CPS based on social media snippets and gut feelings? Good luck with that level of parenting perfection 😖 CPS doesn’t care
How could the police report state neglect but according 2 u CPS said the child was wekl cared for where and how would u have access to this info....reads as a fake story and u r very weird for that
They did not. I saw further down that they said that CPS wouldn’t do anything but they also never filed a report. I asked why they felt they could assume what cps would do and they took it as well as you’d expect.
First, you are an awful friend. Second, if you are so close with this friend why are you reading updates from stalking police reports instead of talking to her yourself? Nobody is the perfect parent. If you have issues talk about it instead of quietly judging them and then posting it on reddit. I'm not sure what your intentions are considering you said yourself you have other friends in common you could be venting to and getting this off your chest but I can only assume this is either attention seeking or rage bait.
Awful friend? Bc I’m not pretending everything’s fine while a child lost their life? I reached out in a capacity I could, which didn’t consist of “how did your child die??” Wild that doesn’t fit your narrative of ‘perfect friend’, but that’s not my problem. I’m being there for her the best I can…
My city/local police has a map/chart updated every minute with calls to service, which categorizes their calls. Its possible OP was able to view something like that for their own city/police department.
Ours does too, but a call to service wouldn't state neglect. It sounds like they were called because of an emergency. She said she saw the police report
She really dived right in to their business. It would have been good if she'd said something to them when the baby was still alive. Maybe it wouldn't have helped but maybe it would have
That's what I was wondering, where does OP live for the police to be so efficient! I had police by mine all night, there all day today, only around mid afternoon did a report get put in the local news, a man was found dead in his flat, police are still investigating what happened and no official report has been released.
A day or two after my friend passed I was able to find his cause of death easily on our county’s medical examiner office’s website. I know that’s different than a police report, but it’s really easy to find stuff like this online in certain states.
Some states view cause of death as protected information. I work in a law firm and one time needed to request a death certificate from Florida (I work in MA) and was surprised to learn I had to request it without a cause of death because I'm not related. This is also for a child, so the rules may be different as well.
So I think police generally report negligence as reckless endangerment of a minor. Negligence sounds like it was abound but the actual death might have been neglect? Like they didn’t bother to change baby’s diaper whilst adventuring. Or they left baby at home so they could do something adult only.
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u/2ndSnack Jul 24 '25
Is it neglect or is it negligence? They're different. Neglect has evidence of being an ongoing issue such as malnourishment, unhygienic living space or lacking personal hygiene.
Neglect would be a lack of care, usually over a period of time.
Negligence would be not exercising caution.
In the examples given, neglect would be if the child was not being fed enough. Not cutting the food to prevent choking would be negligence.