A mom and dad who let their kids, 7 and 10, walk to the grocery in a city outside of Charlotte, NC, are grieving today because the 7-year-old ran into the street and was killed by a car.
If you had to decide on a punishment for the parents, would you:
A – Arrest them for manslaughter, set bail at $1.5 million, and forbid them from attending their son’s funeral?
B – Decide they’ve been punished enough?
The authorities in Gastonia, NC, chose option A.
Jessica Ivey and Samuele Jenkins are facing felony charges of involuntary manslaughter and child neglect, as well as a misdemeanor child neglect charge, according to The NC Beat.
The brothers went to the store together.
The tragedy occurred on May 27. The mom said it was the first time she allowed the kids to walk to the store. A witness said the older boy tried to grab his little brother from running, but the younger brother broke away.
The Gastonia Police Department issued a statement that said that while they extended the parents their “deepest sympathies” for their “heartbreaking loss,” the investigation revealed that the children were unsupervised on their walk.
As if that’s a smoking gun. As if no kids have ever walked unsupervised to the store. As if any parent who lets their kids run an errand is guilty of a crime.
“In such cases, adults must be held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure a safe environment for their children,” the police declared.
Who can ensure perfect safety?
Must be held accountable for an unpredictable tragedy? Would they be held accountable if the boy had been eating dinner and choked to death on a brussels sprout? What if the parents had been at home and the boy slipped in the bathtub and died of a brain injury? How can parents ever guarantee a perfectly “safe environment”?
And, by the by, if the authorities really want to teach the parents a lesson…do they think the parents haven’t learned one? Who is served by this arrest? Do they think the surviving brother is going to do better after all this, knowing “that his failure to save his bother resulted in sending his parents to prison?” asks David Pimentel, a law professor at the University of Idaho. “Does anyone believe that 10-year-old will be better off in foster care while his parents rot in jail?”
Making helicopter parenting the law of the land.
The parents were arrested because our country has come to believe two things:
1 – That any child who is unsupervised anywhere for almost any amount of time is automatically in danger.
Which means that:
2 – Any parent who trusts their kids to do anything on their own just doesn’t care if they live or die.
This modern-day delusion – that any parent who doesn’t hover doesn’t really care if their kid is safe — is what allows the authorities to act as if Legend’s parents deliberately did something so evil it warrants felony charges.
But in fact what the parents did was something normal, rational, and common. “Ten-year-olds and 7-year-olds have been walking to and from school, unaccompanied by adults, for over 100 years,” says Pimentel.
An impossible parenting standard.
The implications of this prosecution “are very troubling for parents everywhere who can never provide a guarantee against their kids getting hit by a car, even if they were right there with them,” notes Diane Redleaf, author of They Took the Kids Last Night and Let Grow’s legal consultant.
The sad truth is that often when something awful happens to a child it’s not the result of bad parenting. It’s the result of bad luck. Blaming parents just means we have a scapegoat and can continue to believe, with an incredible lack of rationality or compassion, that bad things only happen to the children of bad parents.
3 Comments
This is not just about the impossible parenting standard, it’s also about the crazy standards (or lack of them) we have for drivers over pedestrians. The lady that killed him was not charged. She was found not to be at fault – even though she was operating dangerous, potentially fatal machinery, in an area it is possible for people to enter the street, at a speed where she could not stop in time to avoid hitting someone.
Putting aside the fact that it’s perfectly fine for a 7 year old to walk to the store, this kid would have been hit just the same if the parents were walking with him. The failure of responsibility to ensure a safe environment lies with the neighborhood designers and the driver. The parents can’t do it.
Parental rights begin at conception and end at birth; and the only choice the parents have is to keep or kill the child. After birth, the child belongs to the State and the parents exist as mere caretakers.
Drivers need to be held accountable for murdering pedestrians, kids and adults alike. The size of vehicles combined with distraction from phone usage makes walking anywhere harrowing. From what I’m reading this kid was trying to cross the road and an almost 80 year old mowed him down. By all means, go after the parent and not grandma (who shouldn’t be driving!).