Up until I read the part about the parents being very religious, I had an answer for you:
Nintendo.
Seriously. I know of quite a few children that either are always playing video games or watching tv. This tends to be the case more with boys than girls, in my experience.
Well if they’re watching TV, Dad and GM can’t be too worried about exposing them to sinful ideas.
Maybe they’re worried about safety. Did they just arrive in the states? Maybe they have an exaggerated fear of child predators and the like. Given how every child abduction makes national news, I can’t really blame them.
Can you make friendly overtures to them? If you have the time and inclination that is. That might be a good way of finding out what’s going on.
Given that children can be horrible little savages, it is also possible that at one point these children wanted to play outside, tried to play outside, and were bullied/harassed by other children to the point that they now no longer want to go out to play.
I wouldn’t read too much into the singing religious stuff and symbols. My sister and I had to memorize two Sanskrit slokas and sing them every night along with the multiplication table from 2-25 (up to multiplied by ten) and I wouldn’t call my family ultra-conservative. What are they painting the porch with? Chalk? I suspect it’s the grandmother and I know those little designs outside on the stoop are big in Gujarat.
My guess is that they’re being required to study above and beyond homework. My sister and I were required to do this although my parents waited until after 6th grade to start the “extra” homework. However, I know many people who got additional maths problems from like the age of 5, though!
I did all of this - memorize the Sanskrit slokas, although I had to recite, not sing, had extra homework, writing & maths, and still got outside.
They are painting with chalk, and *sindoor * I think. And yes, it’s the grandmother. That doesn’t bother me, it’s their porch and the tiny bit we share (I do have to get out) is always clean. Actually none of it *bothers * me, just makes me go :dubious: .
I don’t know how involved you want to get, but you might offer to watch the kids sometime if they want to play outside. Maybe the father and grandmother are just too busy to spend time watching the kids while they play outside.
There were a few kids in my ultra-diverse immigrant neighborhood that didn’t get out much.
Mostly, their parents thought that school, family and religion should be their main focus and didn’t really see the value in them running around with god-knows-who all over the neighborhood. They honestly didn’t see why the community of family and church shouldn’t be enough for a kid- why should they need to be fooling around with these strange foreign kids that most likely don’t share the same values, when they have a whole family of people that love them? After all, they can hang out with other kids several times a week at church, and they really ought to be spending their time trying to get the edge on life and learn what they need to learn to be an adult, not dilly-dallying around.
Honestly, the families themselves were probably a little isolated- away from their community, away from the home they probably loved, away from their language and away from what they know and feel safe in. Their life was pretty much work and family, and they never stopped missing what they left. The psychological risks of trying to reach out to this foreign land was a lot to confront, and so they tried to recreate what little bits they could in the bounds of their apartment walls. And it takes a while to realize that your kid is never going to be fully part of that world, so they try to keep them in as long as they can.
of course, YMMV.
This would be the only part that worries me–8 and 6 is a little young for that. You might want to mention it in your call to CPS. 