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!
8 Comments
Excellent Article! On its face, this case is ridiculous, heavy handed, bullying and mean. Good thing Karyann is a trained lawyer (not yet called to bar) and working in family issues. Previously, Karyann worked as a research assistant analyzing successful family dynamics and used that research to help families navigate crisis. She led a chapter for the Federalist. She’s raising 5 + kids in a gated, guarded community, and letting kids walk to a pond in the community should be a perk of having a safe community. The attack, trial and sentence smells like retribution to me. If you look at her areas of work, if someone wanted to shut her up, they could target her for some frivolous action, to let her know that she can and will be targeted, if she continues to pursue whatever she was working on? Just a theory, I don’t’ think it was a nasty neighbor because of the police reaction and the heavy hand of the judge. They must have wanted to cause trouble for her, and let everyone else know that ‘we can get you, no matter how frivilous’.
In addition to the point about the kid not becoming a delinquent because he was collecting goose feathers without an adult nearby (as quoted in the Reason.com article Lenore so expertly prepared), I note that the AGE of the child (or adult) should not matter without context, which means the CAPABILITIES of the child (or adult).
Regardless of age, does the person have the physical abilities, judgment, awareness, intellect, and skills to handle the specific circumstances? The 75-year-old is old enough, unless dementia or a hip replacement makes it unsafe. The 17-year-old is old enough, unless his risk-taking history makes being “unsupervised” unsafe. Let’s stop asking “how old was the child?” Instead, let’s ask “how capable was the child of being safe in that specific circumstance?”
Don’t focus on the age of the child, but whether that child was capable of being unsupervised for his goose feather gathering fun.
Yes, every parent is just one “concerned” person away from handcuffs and jail, children in foster care, and enormous legal fees. ParentsUSA takes on these cases (visit our YouTube channel and website to see Britt Patterson and Melissa Henderson and more), but we need an ARMY of attorneys, which our limited resources cannot yet fund.
We want to change legislation to include a right of action against those who infringe on parents’ right to decide, which would help stop or slow down the nonsense.
We have additions that require LEO, 911 Dispatch, and CPS to determine if the child appears to be hurt, in distress, or in imminent risk of harm from an identifiable source. If “yes” is not the answer to one of those protocol inquiries, then government LEO and others would be prohibited from acting contrary to the parent. Without such restraints, LEO and CPS will evade the Childhood Independence Act (a good piece of legislation but not foolproof or “government” proof).
#parentslove –> #parentsdecide
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I was born in 1940. My parents told me to be home for dinner. And I seem to have turned out OK.
The arrogance, the hubris, the smug ignorance going on this article. Even a smart, well-behaved fie year old only has the lived experience of a five year old. The idea that you can state categorically “that you know your child”, jeez, really? No surprises ever from your kids-sure. Also, how about some due diligence here on how many children die in ponds when both they and the pond are unsupervised. Since the boy wanted to pick up goose feathers, how about some research on the behavior of geese.
I am a pediatrician. I was asked once by local social services for some guidance on a couple of kids who were reported to social services because the elementary school kids were walking to school unsupervised. The road was not lightly traveled, but there were sidewalks. It was the kind of walk I did went I went to elementary school, unsupervised. There had been a recent article in the American Academy of Pediatrics about the world being scared out of their meconium by the fear of kidnapping, molesters, monsters and other mythical mishaps vs the real problem of obesity and helicopter parenting. I checked out the route myself, and the Social Service people were grateful for backing them up on “this is not abuse or neglect.
As others here have stated, the capabilities of the children to navigate the world is the issue. There are real dangers everywhere, but this court in Virginia is rather ignorant of statistics, child psychology, and sociology. The application of the law does not make sense if one is unaware of the real world.
If the child had gotten in the pond and drowned what would the comments be!
This BS is sick, and has to stop. When I was five I walked to and from school alone, and spent most of every day out of sight of my mom. So did all the other kids.
I would love to know how the child was delinquent. I would also love to know what lawyer she hired to defend her here. Hopefully she didn’t represent herself. It just seems as like an open and shut case. But James State County is corrupt so I guess you never know.