In a quiet gated community in Virginia, Karyann Parkinson took a little bike ride with her 5-year-old son one morning this summer. They passed the grassy area where the boy loves to pick up goose feathers, next to a pond.
When they got home, the boy asked if he could walk back to get some more feathers. Parkinson, 8-months-pregnant, said yes.
The pond is half a mile away. The sidewalks are separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. The two streets he’d have to cross he had crossed hundreds of times before. Off he happily went.
Security!
A security guard brought him home. Someone had called to report a child unsupervised. And here we must pause.
An unsupervised 5-year-old is in danger if…there’s a real danger. If, say, they’re walking along a highway. Or if they are neurodivergent and apt to run into traffic. Or if they are the type who might jump into a pond willy nilly.
A parent knows their kid and their neighborhood – as my mom did. She let me walk to school at age 5, because back then we still thought of children as people, not puppies. No one accused my mom of endangering me.
Your mommy was BAD.
But that is what happened to Karyann. As the guard brought her son home, he told the boy his mom had done something very bad, and he could have been snatched.
True, the boy COULD have been snatched, just as he COULD have been gored by an ox, or hit by an arrow. But those possibilities are so remote, they shouldn’t have to factor into anyone’s decision. Stranger kidnappings are rarer than lightning strikes. Throw in the fact this was a gated community, filled with at least enough guards to respond instantly to “boy sighted outside” and they drop to near zero. Far lower than the odds of, say, mom driving her son to the dentist and their car getting hit by a truck.
A car accident like that would be tragic. But we don’t berate moms for chauffeuring their kids because something terrible COULD happen.
But what about the pond?!?
As for the pond: The boy didn’t jump in, because he’s not a pond-jumper, something his mom knows about him.
Street crossings? Again, 5-year-olds used to routinely walk to kindergarten. Presumably they crossed some streets.
So the guard brings the boy home. The mom asks where in the HOA rules it says a kid can’t walk in his own neighborhood. And that’s when the guard calls the cops.
The cops arrive. They call child protective services.
“Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor”
Everything escalates and pretty soon there are 3 cop cars, 3 cops, 2 child protective services workers and … the security guard.
The cops charge the mom with “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” The child protective workers put her on the child abuse and neglect registry. And a judge finds her guilty and sentences her to six months.
In jail.
He immediately suspends the sentence, so she can stay out if she abides by all the child protective services’ conditions. But what does all this mean?
Who gets to decide how you parent?
Even if you don’t want to send your child outside at age 5, or 10, or 53, that decision should be up to you, not the state, so long as you are not putting your child in obvious, serious danger.
A quiet walk to pick up feathers does not rise to that level. And pretending that a decent, loving mom did something wrong is no way to make kids safer. It’s a way to make parents too scared to let their kids do anything on their own, for fear of crossing some invisible and arbitrary line.
If we want to keep kids safe, gradually giving them independence makes sense. But if we want to keep them inside their whole childhoods, arresting moms is an excellent strategy.
NOTE: If you’d like to make it easy, normal and legal to give kids back some independence, please visit LetGrow.org . That’s the nonprofit I helm, carrying out the mission of Free-Range Kids!