After Naked Toddlers Kept Neighbors Calling the Police, a Shanghai Family Moved Out
Four young children ran naked through a Shanghai compound for days while their mother said she 'couldn't control them,' and police were called up to three times a day. The family has now moved out — and China is debating what its law really demands of parents.
For most of last week, residents of a compound in Shanghai's Minhang district could watch four small children run naked through the courtyards and stairwells — almost every day. Their mother, whose family of two adults and four children had moved into a ground-floor flat only days earlier, told neighbors she "couldn't control them." The oldest of the children is five or six years old. The police were called so often that officers were dispatched up to three times in a single day.
The account came from a resident surnamed Liu, who told Qianjiang Evening News he witnessed the scene on Sunday and reported it to the police; another neighbor confirmed it. By Monday afternoon the compound's property manager said the police were handling the matter — the property, he noted, had no authority over tenants — and a community officer confirmed the outcome: after repeated coordination, "the family has moved away."
The case might have ended as a strange local anecdote, but it landed in the middle of a much older argument about what Chinese law and society expect of parents. A lawyer quoted by the paper, Gong Jingjing of Yingke law firm's Shanghai office, explained that children under eight are legally incapable of recognizing or controlling their own conduct, which places an absolute duty of supervision on their guardians — and parental inaction, she warned, can itself constitute a crime.
On Weibo the debate went further. One widely shared comment invoked last year's case in Yunnan, where a toddler found crawling naked outdoors was found to be healthy but raised by parents who had let him imitate the family dog. "Public space is not your own bedroom," the post read. "A child's nature is lively, but that doesn't mean public order can be ignored. Saying 'I can't control them' sounds more like an excuse for failing to guide them."
The recurring suggestion that parents should be "certified" before they have children — a phrase that resurfaces with every case like this one — is less a policy proposal than an expression of exasperation. Raising a child, as the same post put it, "isn't just giving birth; it's teaching a child shame, respect for public space, and the responsibilities of guardianship." The family's new address is unknown. What residents are still asking is who answers for a child when the answer at home is "I can't.