Here in Switzerland children start walking to school at around 5-years. Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.
It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
Twice a year you see the children practicing crossing streets. The police are out at the intersections and show the children how to do it. It's very cute. Also how to ride bicycles properly.
Young children also walk to the elementary schools near me. When I’m at the park with my kids, it’s common to see other very young kids show up alone on their bikes or on foot to play in the park. This is in the US.
I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
The US is a big country. The state this happened in has a similar population to the entire country of Switzerland. Laws and cultural norms vary across the country, but this story is unusual even for the location it happened in. That’s why it’s a news story.
As an international reader I'm missing some context here. Isn't a gated community supposed to be singularly safe? With private guards (like the guy who took the kid to his mom) patrolling and no strangers allowed in etc? Why did the guard tell the kid that "bad people" might take him? Where would those bad people come from? It really all does sound very weird.
> I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
That would still be pretty bad though. An absurd sentence like this should not end with the sentence being reverted but in changes that prevent it in the future, e.g. by updating laws or disciplining those that did not apply them correctly. This isn't just one person fucking up this is the security guard fucking up, the police fucking up, CPS fucking up and then the judge fucking up.
I'm also in the US, in a city in a populous state and I've never seen that, as a matter of fact it counts as child abuse in my state as well. Why don't you mention where you live and what state you see this within? Is it because what you're seeing is anecdotal in some particularly rich area? I can assure you leaving children under 16 unsupervised is illegal in most states.
> I can assure you leaving children under 16 unsupervised is illegal in most states.
This is absolutely untrue. Only 3 states have an age specific standard. Most states set no specific limits by age. The bigger problem is the vagueness of the laws we do have in place around child neglect which allows a cop or neighbor to be the biggest determining factor of whether you get a knock on your door.
Our neighborhood in the northeast US does the same (minus the hard prohibition against parents going with them). Our 5 and 9 year old walk to school daily, usually picking up the neighbors' kids (6, 6, 10, 9, 7, 7) along the way. If we happen to be free sometimes an adult will walk with them, sometimes we start walking with them and then stop for coffee with a neighbor while the kids continue on, sometimes they go by themselves.
I can't imagine living somewhere where that was prohibited.
I live in Colorado, we have a "free-range" law that protects parents allowing their children to play outside unattended. It's a bit sad that such a law needs to exist, but I'm glad we have it here.
In our neighborhood it's very common to see kids (including mine!) outside doing things by themselves. We bike with our oldest son to school (he's 7), but plenty of other parents let their kids bike to school on their own. I think it helps that we live in a city with good pedestrian infrastructure and lots of green spaces. The whole city is better for it and I wish more US cities would do the same. My sister's neighborhood in a different state feels like a very fancy prison, nice homes, but you can't even go to a park without getting in a car.
>> It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
> If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit.
It depends of the town/location and region. In our town, police had to be involved several times due to different issues with creeps targeting 12yo or less.
Edit:And I forgot, as it's Switzerland, police moved only because parents were accompanying their kids and almost done justice by themselves.
Protecting creeps is a national sport here too.
That's lovely. Also all the heartwarming ways things work in Japan where kids get a lot of autonomy and live their own little lives on the way to school, among other things.
I went to Japan a few years ago - I saw a lot of beautiful things, but the image of schoolchildren in their yellow hats on the train system is one of the most memorable/replayed in my mind.
Parents and Adults in America are often afraid. Sometimes rightfully so, sometimes not.
There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely, and it could be dangerous to even try to walk in areas that barely have walkable streets.
Europe can let this happen since their city planning is much better for people who either walk or bike to different areas. Some, like in Switzerland, even have extremely low crime rates as well. Still, a sentencing seems rough for letting a kid walk, in a probably safe area.
> There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely
This is very much not true. If there are any urban areas that have too much crime for kids to walk freely, it's a vanishingly small percentage, and certainly does not include gated communities in Williamsburg, VA.
Yes, I’m Swiss and walked to school starting around 5. I was hit by a car (due to bad judgment on my part) on the way back from school at 6, though, so it’s not all roses.
I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age, so I would not necessarily be super comfortable trusting them around those attractive nuisances, even though I’m on board with the “let them walk to school” policy. It’s a difficult balancing act.
> Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.
Can't help but think that this is just swinging things in the opposite direction.
Exactly. It’s a collective action problem — every car dropping off a kid incrementally endangers the kids walking to school, so if there is no enforcement whatsoever, we’d end up with everybody driving, and a situation worse than in US schools (because Swiss schools were largely not constructed with drop off zones in mind, and retrofitting them would be difficult with our land use patterns).
In my experience the kids form a peloton walking to school but there are adults walking with the youngest such groups. E.g. this website (never been to this town, just seems representative).
It'd be nice if you could back up your feelings with some reasoning.
The neighborhood is safe enough and the community is cohesive enough that kids can congregate along their way to school: go to their friend's house, meet at a park, etc.
It's researched enough that you can go and learn about it and challenge your feelings.
(Not the patent) I'm very much pro letting children roam freely, but police intervention for walking or driving with your own child is clearly overreach. The good intention does not change that.
And even as a German who already spent a lot of time in Switzerland, I've never heard of anything like that.
To join in on the therapy speak: it is very good to challenge one's feelings, let go, and then, by the merit of reason, realize that police intervention for spending commute time with your children is bonkers.
It is just a very unreasonable extension of a very reasonable position.
The GP dramatically exaggerated the state of affairs or perhaps it's how things are in their specific village/canton.
In French cantons you can bring your kids to school, you can drive them there and there are spots for stopping and all respective signage. But there is indeed a lot of very young kids walking to school.
I live in Zurich. I used to live in Pully, a suburb of Lausanne. It's much more car-centric in the French part. But at the same time our neighborhood had a Pedibus location where children met and walked to school from in a group.
> One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together.
That's what I did when I was in first grade. Suburban US, late 70s. Lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Met with the other kid who lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, walked to the house of a kid who lived at the other end of the street. Then the three of us got on the sidewalk of the main road and walked to the school.
Pedibus. So civilized. People in California don't believe half the things I tell them about life in Switzerland, such as "if you try to drive your kid to school the cops will chastise you" and "if you drive 40 in a school zone you'll automatically get a year in jail" and, of course, "gas is nine bucks".
The US is extremely car focused, which they often don't really realize. Things that are normal here (like everybody has a bike) conflicts with their cyclers vs drivers culture. Such a distinction simply does not exist here. Instead we have roads that are red with signs "Cars are guests". Or indeed city centers where cars aren't allowed.
When I go to the US I'm often surprised that you can't get to things that are only a km away by foot because a road is blocking you, no way to cross it.
As a naturalized American who lived in 3 other countries including two in Europe and who travels often all over the world, married to a European, etc I must say the US has its perks and it’s definitely in my top 5 countries to live. I lived mostly in the south and the east coast so I don’t have a full picture of the US as a resident. But it’s the same in Europe, living in Berlin is very different than living in Sicily, even Milan is very different than Sicily being the same country. So to be fair the US should be compared to Europe not to a particular country. The car culture in the US I think is fine because the country is built around it, the interstate system is pretty good and gas is cheap. I do like road trips very much, at my own pace not having to worry about train/flight schedules. In Europe taking long family road trips by car as we do in the US would be prohibited and even stupid in the eyes of many Europeans. I also like that you can talk to Americans everywhere and get to know people. In Europe you start talking to a stranger they look at you like you went crazy. Being social is part of having a good quality of life too, so the US ranks pretty high there.
I don't know what you mean with family roadtrips being prohibited? Maybe too expensive, that's all I can think of. Cheap motels are rare and, obviously, fuel is much more expensive. All other necessities are easily available and legal.
So in the beginning of your paragraph you say it's "very different" depending on where you are in Europe, but towards the end, you generalise the entire continent.
I travel all over the world for work(Though mostly Europe) and my experience has been that Europe is a very diverse place.
Currently outside London where you can absolutely chat with random strangers(I'm from Sweden, so obviously I don't).
On holiday in the Florida we walked to the gated entrance to the community to ask whether delivery drivers got access or we needed to pick it up at the gate. The way they looked at us, you would think we had two heads for arriving on foot.
I once walked into a drive through in Texas (Galveston) with a group of scientists there for a conference (because main restaurant was closed), we almost got shot (no not really but people felt very very threatened and threatened us)!
Our school started a chaperoned bicycle bus, and it’s enabled a number of kids who live 3-5 km away to engage in active transportation once a week that would have otherwise been unable to.
When I was a kid, about 3 decades ago, walking to school was a blast.
I had so much fun going there and going back on foot.
So much that when I was a teenager and my mother drove by my school one day and decided to pick me up, I was super unhappy, because I wanted to walk the 20 or so minutes with my friends to the bus.
When I had 9 hour school, I would need to wait 50 Minutes for a bus... or I walked the 5 kilometers home.
I always choose to walk, even when it rained, because I was faster and I loved it!
I am curious how it will be with my daughter, once she goes to school.
Because today this is totally frowned upon. But I will not play taxi for her all the time. Occasionally, sure. But CERTAINLY not every day.
It's a high trust homogenous society without lots of different groups with all kinds of grievances about the past, present and the future. And it's probably rural, where everyone knows each other.
When I read the headline, I sided with the mother. But a five-year old having to cross four roads in total to and from (with vehicles going up 25 mph legally, and who knows how fast illegally) is a bit much.
It doesn't have to be homogeneous or rural, you just have to address the grievances, make sure everyone is adequately housed, has access to medical attention, and has something to do; and then you get peace.
Wait. Is it racial or is it cultural? There's a difference there.
Do you believe it's possible to have cultural homogeneity without having racial homogeneity?
Btw I think you're wrong: people can be extremely xenophobic with the folks from the next village over who are their cousins thrice removed. It's nothing to do with race or culture, just who's in the in-group and who's in the out-group, and what those are depends on a myriad of factors that "race" and "culture" are only convenient, but inaccurate, proxies for.
> It's a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she'd seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning
This is one of those frustrating things. You're just not allowed to not be scared with kids. If you aren't scared of letting your kid walk to a pond, you get punished for it. If you're not scared of the kidnappers, you have to be scared of the police. None of it is rational, it's different how many of us were raised, yet if you try to opt out the law gets involved.
They're heard of because it's so rare that media loves to broadcast them far and wide for the views. Like it's good to get people watching out for the kidnapped child as quickly as possible, but the media sensation causes paranoia in unaffected viewers.
A lot of the ones that do get broadcasted still end up being a relative too, but you wouldn't know unless you look into it after it get resolved and stops being talked about.
A lot of them are not even kidnapping in the colloquial sense. We hear "kidnapping" and think about being tied up in the trunk of a car but many of the actual kidnapping cases are more like "Bobby went to his divorced daddy's place for the weekend and hasn't been back on Monday." It's about the parents' custody and not about the kids' safety.
Genuinely curious…is it rare because there are less kidnappers, or because parents are more vigilant and there is less opportunity for them to commit the crime?
They're more common among relatives than total strangers.
About a year or so ago I saw on Nextdoor a neighbor posted about that some girl who always walked home from school whom he waves to when he sees her. One day she was walking slower than normal, and she ran to him scared, they didn't actually know each other, on the Ring footage you can see that a car that was following her drove off. Who knows if all these cameras are helping to prevent so many incidents, but the world is still as evil as ever. Just because its rare doesn't mean that you as a parent want to win the misfortune lottery.
> Just because its rare doesn't mean that you as a parent want to win the misfortune lottery.
If you want total safety from misfortune why have kids at all? Pregnancy and birth is one of the most dangerous things people choose to do voluntarily. 1 in 200 newborns die in the US. You could avoid that by not having kids!
Flippant I know. But at the end of the day to live is to take risks. Extreme risk avoidance will come back to bite you on a later day in the form of declining birth rates, increasing neuroticism and support for building a police state.
I swear human brains are programmed to have a "fear bank" of things to be scared of, and an allocation of fear that must be spent on items in the fear bank.
As society has weeded out all the things to fear over time, more and more far flung things get put into the bank, and more and more fear is allocated to the dwindling amount of things to be scared of.
I'm sympathetic with this sentiment but surely it's pretty rare the law actually gets involved? Our kids play outside a lot and no cops have ever raised an eyebrow (except for at our crazy drunk of a neighbor, where eyebrow raising is appropriate).
It’s Foucault’s interpretation of the panopticon. If we know that we may be watched — and punished — we self-police into following the norm, even if we do not know when we are being watched or that someone is necessarily monitoring us individually.
When I was a kid in the 80s none of this was an issue and I was free to roam. Starting in the 90s this became an issue and not only will parents not let their kids roam but the kids themselves have less interest because the norm is to stay in or only go out when supervised. You know you are doing something slightly wrong. It only takes occasional reminders like this to reinforce the rule, once established.
It's rare, but if it happens it is catastrophic. You will be paying a lawyer 10's of thousands of dollars and if you do have to plead out, the charges you plead to may look very bad on paper on a background check.
You should not be scared around dogs. Being scared may trigger a dog and then you would be responsible for attack!
There is no real reasons to be scared. Chances something bad happens are very low: almost no deaths, in worst case child gets mimor reconstructive surgery, and a fake trauma!
Dogs can attack with no indication or reason, some breeds take more of a lion's share for that than others. It is entirely reasonable to feel fear in the presence of a dog, especially if you've been the victim of an attack or seen one before. The conversation around responsible dog ownership is really delusional.
Here in Florida there's no just letting my 4 year old wander to a nearby lake, it might be the last time I ever see her. There's an assumption that alligators are in every lake, and next to my house I have two lakes visible the moment I come out of my front door.
If it's not the alligators, it's the careless older kids in e-scooters or e-bikes, if you're rolling your eyes, just note that one of those careless kids drove into my neighbors four year old, who went flying back because some kid was not paying attention, he was also by chance wearing a helmet because he wanted to ride his bike so he did not hurt his head, but he definitely had a bruise on his lower back.
Do I think there needs to be laws around this? No, though, should a child suffer because they have negligent parents? Also no. It hurts me more to think that having these laws is the only way to get some people to pay attention as parents.
How does this happen? There’s no silver lining which makes this conviction reasonable. If they can’t appeal, I hope they use Streisand to get the town or state of Virginia to vacate everything.
It happened because a neighbor was so disturbed by a child walking alone to report it, the police thought it was serious enough to refer for prosecution, and a prosecutor decided it needed to be charged using their office's limited resources. All insane.
The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent concern, they didn't take the simple step of approaching and talking to the child to see where they were going or if a parent knew where they were.
They charged her criminally instead of civilly, because in 2023 VA passed a 'free-range parenting' amendment to allow for actions that appropriate for the child's maturity and are not done in a grossly negligent manner that endangers the child. This is likely why the defense asked for comments from others on the child's maturity.
The criminal definition apparently has no such modification.
I hate to to say it but way to often "outrage" stories like this are written for engagement, not assessment.
The boy could have been spotted walking along a highway median, or similar detail that would kind of spoil the outrage effect. Lord knows the pedestrian hostile nature of modern infrastructure.
I'm not sure if this just bias from news stories but in general it feels like absurd things which would be avoided with just common sense from authorities tend to happen in the US.
Simple. Evolutionarily, the dumber you are, the higher the risks of dying, because you do stupid shit. Inversely, the safer the environment, the dumber people become, because not doing stupid shit stops being evolutionarily advantageous. Nature is pretty brutal so there is evolutionary pressure not to be dumb, but in modern civilization we have pretty much infinite resources dedicated to safety, which means there is a feedback loop "people are dumber -> more safety measures -> people are dumber -> more safety measures".
When you go to poor countries you'll realize just how much knowledge children posses on the topic on how not to die.
Old Enough! is a Japanese reality show that has been aired irregularly since 1991 on Nippon Television. The program depicts, in a documentary manner, the efforts of toddlers going on an errand on their own, buying groceries and delivering packages, accompanied by the camera crew.
depends. my kids school in china didn't allow me to let my kids bike to school without supervision. (well, actually, they couldn't stop me from sending them to school alone, but they would not let them out unless i was there to pick them up. (there was only one crossing on the route, and that was close to the school and didn't have a lot of traffic)
in germany on the other hand, there was a case where parents demanded a school bus for a 7yr old, but the court said the kids could take the public train to school on their own.
In the US, if you are in a residential neighborhood with a lot of kids, its also fairly typical for them to be out finding their playmates.
I would say if you're in a neighborhood where there's just like 1-2 kids, it may not be that typical. The kids parents might do more scheduled playdates.
Unfortunately in the US there are people that get annoyed about kids playing. And they are also the same kind of person that escalates things to the authorities / complains a lot about trivial things.
I started walking to school alone once I started 1st grade (at around age 7) and did it for about 5 years until my parents moved our family to a place outside of town where it was impractical to do so. I just checked Google Maps to be sure and it is about a 1.2Km / 0.75 miles, so a short walk for either an adult or a 7-year old.
A few months ago I had a heated argument with my father, stepmother and wife because I (half-joking/serious) told my almost 8-year daugher that next year we will start practicing her going to school by herself. You would not believe the stink all of them raised telling me I was irresponsible, yadda, yadda, what about child molesters/ kidnappers, yadda, yadda, too many cars and the usual non-sense you usually hear about this.
Again I went and checked on Google Maps just to be precise and the walk between our house and my daughters school is... 500 meters / 0.31 miles.
In a single generation we went from "your starting school for the first time? time to fend for yourself, you will do fine" to "you are a snowflake that needs to be protected at all times and must not be allowed to alone in any circunstances".
PS: To give more context, I don't live in the US but in a small EU country with a low crime rate, on a town that indeed is busy but very safe.
People should watch the Netflix version of Old Enough! - it is a Japanese show where young (!) children 3-5 year old walk around the neighborhood doing chores. The one scene I recall was where a child was supposed to carry a fish to the butcher and was being followed by hungry cats.
It blows my mind that a bunch of adults, prosecutors, CPS employees, etc all decided the fair, reasonable and best thing to do was prosecute and punish this mother.
Sounds like there is very little crime happening in their precious gated community that they've got to trump up everything they can to justify the budget wasted on them
American here, it seems to vary by location. I walked to school as a grade school student (Midwest) and where I live now (Orange county, California) I regularly see swarms of kids biking to school.
This particular situation seems ridiculous. I’d be furious if I lived there.
The average income of Orange county California is over double the national. Safe to say this kind of lifestyle is reserved for the rich and not for the people.
>The average income of Orange county California is over double the national. Safe to say this kind of lifestyle is reserved for the rich and not for the people.
The average income where I lived when I was five was not (nor was my family's) "double the national" and I walked to school (kindergarten and first grade) along this route[0][2] every school day.
In fact I tried to go to school during hurricane Agnes[1] and the strong winds actually pushed me back up the hill, so I went home -- no big deal.
In fact, I haven't even thought about that in decades. Ahh, childhood memories!
On top of this is a pregnant mother of 5.
With all the decrease in fertility, maybe the woman that managed to make their children independent enough to allow them to have 4 siblings should be given a freaking medal.
There’s plenty of ways to trust your very young kids and raise them to be independent. Allowing them to walk alone for half a mile crossing roads is not one of the them. Kids can behave very differently when they are with their parents or other adults. So you can’t assume because they do something with you all the time they will stick to the same behavior and rules without supervision. At 5 years old their brains are still way too mature, they lack any judgement and impulse control, it doesn’t matter how smart you think your child is. Once they reach 9-10, that’s a different story.
What seems odd to me whenever this debate comes up is the failure to differentiate between:
- the child must never be unsupervised
- I/we think the child should never be unsupervised
We have less and less space between an opinion or recommendation and legal requirement. On a wide range of subjects people go straight to “require”, unwilling to simply express their opinion and move on.
I walked myself to and from kindergarten every day. Approximately the same age, same distance, and it went through a park with water. That was normal.
The extreme neuroticism toward children having any kind of agency these days is unhealthy for everyone involved. Social media turned being neurotic into a virtue.
I am struck by the fact that arguments for or against within this thread are only about perceived safety (something hard to know at a distance) and not the substance of the law involved. Does Virginia actually have laws prohibiting unsupervised 5 year olds? If so what is the minimum age at which children are allowed outside unsupervised? Does it also apply to leaving children at home unsupervised? The charge of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” would suggest the minor’s behavior had to be illegal, which does not appear to have been discussed.
Honestly by modern “standards” all parents from probably the 90s and earlier would be just be thrown in jail.
Pre cell phones kids of all ages would just disappear for the whole day and show up back home for dinner. Nobody knew where they were. Nobody cared. Could be in the woods somewhere, off at the mall. And it was fine. Kids built bike ramps in the woods and jumped off them, sometimes someone broke an arm. Nobody sued.
> Parkinson admits now that she is embarrassed by her confrontational demeanor.
Which was the real crime. To be fair, many places outside the US not respecting the police is a illegal -- but genuinely not enough that an office would be justified in as much as indicating that the officer is armed (which usually counts as use of force).
That sounds awful. This kind of case doesn't seem like something you should let a single person decide on their own, judge or not. Is she not entitled to a jury trial because it's a misdemeanor or something? If she can find the funds/support somehow it totally seems worth appealing all the way to the supreme court.
Yeah, it's not really clear from the article. Wild that you can get on some list of abusers without a jury trial. Maybe she waived her rights? Can that even happen?
>CPS responded, he recounts, that "a 5-year-old child can never be unsupervised."
I would immediately move from that neighborhood and that city, if they do not have roots with neighbors or kids' friends. These are people who see her as a bad parent for letting their child outside the house.
>The James City County family services specialist assigned to Parkinson's case declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements. The prosecutor in the Commonwealth Attorney's Office for James City County said the same.
So the state doesn't have to answer to the public about why they interpret their laws to mean a 5 year old can never be alone. Show me the statute where there is an age cutoff.
Feels like these people made enemies, except that too many separate groups came down on her at once. What awful people.
I feel even if CPS or cops got involved, they can just take the kid home, no need to escalate things to charging the mom.
That said, there may be details we don't know here. This particular article is written from one bent, and the officials didn't comment on the case as is common in child-related prosecutions.
CPS type agencies all around the world wield immense power and are staffed by power hungry narcissists who get off on threatening to take parents' kids and coming up with demands they must follow
I guess they're trying to overcompensate for years of brutal child slavery with kids working in textile mills, tobacco processing, agriculture, mines, and factories.
Honestly it depends on the situation and saddly the common sense of everyone.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and in the neighboring town a child went missing.
Pre internet there was still a lot of worry. We got talked to by my parents who were too busy to change their day to day. Being kids we weren't very concerned (I don't think we thought it could happen to us)
It was a rural/suburban type area (my high-school walk home from the bus was 1 mile). I was given free range, and did a lot of exploring of trails and things unsupervised with my brother and friends. It was probably too far in the other direction with lax supervision. We never ran into big trouble, but cellphoneless us last century, we had to be hard to track. But that was the way things were. Playground games were rough too (I had a dislocated elbow that says maybe too rough sometimes..) but we got through.
I'm of the generation where one of my responsibilities as a kid was walking to the neighborhood liquor store to buy cigarettes for my dad, so I'm empathetic. But if she was found guilty by a jury, I'm guessing there's more to the story.
> Parkinson's attorney, Andrew Gordon, took the case pro bono and argued that the only real "evidence" against the mom was that Sam was 5, and that, hypothetically, a host of horrible things could have happened.
You get what you pay for, I guess.
> David DeLugas, founder and executive director of ParentsUSA, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal help to parents wrongly accused of neglect, scoffed at the charge.
Sounds pretty cool; do they have a better record of legal wins?
In the US a kid cannot walk half a mile on their own inside a gated community patrolled by security guards? This sounds more dystopian than all the AI talk.
"I told [the authorities] that kids need to be able to take reasonable risks," he says, "in order to grow up non-anxious."
"Gated community" tells you everything you need to know. If you want to live amongst busybody, nosy, fearful and controlling people, move to a gated community.
The article really glosses over the fact that the kid was 5yo walking to a pond. It mentions it at the very start and then never brings it up again. That's the part that got me: the mom gave her 5yo permission to go to a large body of water unsupervised.
I'm a parent of three and strongly believe in letting your kids roam around (indeed, I live on acreage and taught my kids about the venomous snakes and spiders in our area, and then let er rip). But a 5yo who specifically asks to go back to a large body of water unsupervised is a bit too much for me.
Reason always strikes me as an opinionated libertarian media outlet, and this article really feels that way to me, where they keep playing up the "walking on the street" type stuff, the "we're too afraid of kidnappings" part, but not the fact that a 5yo unsupervised at a pond is by far the most dangerous part of this entire story.
Even as a kid of the 80s, I never saw 5yos out and about unsupervised, let alone by a pond. 5yo is possibly preschool.
Religious conservative, likely politically so, whose college degree was in family science at BYU—a degree Mormons steer their daughter into for her Mrs Degree—with experience in conservative politics at the state level who is responsible for passing a law giving parents a lot of freedom to let their little kids run around by basically saying "unless they're in immediate danger, YOLO"? So of course a reasonable judicial system tried to find a way to stop this wild behavior perpetrated by a woman with self-dealing political sway.
Article does not pass the vibe check. Letting your PRESCHOOL age kid go to a pond alone is pretty damn irresponsible, and Reason is trying to gin up anti-gov't feelings when this is probably the best possible outcome. Mom gets slapped on the wrist for fucking up in a way that just barely skirts a law she helped get passed and politicians were too stupid to think about before passing.
Myself and my siblings all lived on a fairly large rural farm with 2 large bodies of water that we always hung around unsupervised from about 4 y/o onwards. We loved catching bullfrogs and watching the fishes and stuff. Our mom gave us very strict/scary warnings about never going in and being careful, but other than that we were pretty free thankfully. 5 y/o with a good warning seems totally fine.
That depends? My first swimming lessons were in Kindergarten when I was 4-5. We were visiting public baths "unsupervised" (they still had lifeguards of course) by the time I was 8.
Assuming the kid wasn't even planning to enter the water, I see no inherent problem here. We seem to be operating on the assumption that unsupervised children will immediately succumb to sudden and irrational urges to kill themselves in creative ways.
> We seem to be operating on the assumption that unsupervised children will immediately succumb to sudden and irrational urges to kill themselves in creative ways.
That’s like 90% of parenting until kids age out of it. That being said, my 2.5yo kid can swim well enough today that I’d have no qualms at all about them being at a neighborhood pond by themselves in a few years.
I understand ponds can be dangerous, and every year kids drown in various bodies of water, but you're probably more likely to get hurt by a vehicle crossing the road... so should the limit be "the road". Can the destination change the verdict?
>> A mom of five was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community.
Surely allowing your children to roam freely would be a major benefit of a gated community?
"they" like to gaslight us that cities are safer than ever. That it's social media scaring us into thinking our cities are less safe.
But in actually safe countries (Japan, Switzerland, Singapore) kids are already taking themselves to school around 5 years old and parents aren't getting criminal records for letting their children explore their independence.
American society has become paranoid, and as a parent I find this extremely disheartening. It was refreshing when a family from Europe moved in down the street and their kids would come over by themselves and knock on the door to see if our kids could go out and play. Very few American families do that (gotta set up a whole play date in advance, drive over even if it's a few blocks -- which all seems way over the top until you read about something like this and don't want to risk get accused of neglect by some stupid neighbor who sees your kid walking the neighborhood and decides to call the police.
I blame the media, mostly, for the fear / paranoia that seems to have captured us in the past decades. Sure, media was always sensational, but it was local. Now stuff travels through social media and the internet and so you might be in Maine but hear about every weird thing that happens in Florida or Arizona.
I mean I wouldn't let me 5 year old cross busy streets by himself in my neighborhood... People drive while staring at their phones going 45 mph in a 25... Maybe we should start punishing people who make the roads so dangerous in the first place...
I wonder if people who are down-voting you actually have children. I even know someone who's kid just died in a pool when no one was watching... My kids almost drowned themselves multiple times when they were below 5 yr old and they are trained to swim... My brother fell into a pool when he was little, and had to be saved... the list goes on and on... edit: Apparently it's the leading cause of death for 1-4 year olds...
That's what happens when there are few children and many adults all with strong opinions on how the few children should be raised. Back in my days (millennials) there was abundance of children and they knew that adults are a danger to be avoided.
my dad and mom grew up in Peru and they tell me that at that age they were basically outside all day, getting lost in the woods, taking buses to the soccer stadium, etc etc. IDK - my son is about to turn 5 and we do helicopter him a bit, ... there needs to be a healthy balance.
Reminder that Utah has laws preventing this outcome ("free range parenting laws") and other states can follow suit with enough outcry. Utah is the best state to raise children for this and many other reasons.
I hate this comes from Reason (along with an opinion piece at the bottom about regulation is always bad), but the story itself is disgusting and a complete government overreach.
On the one hand, we tell parents they’re accountable for their kids, which is fair and reasonable. Then we build a society where parents cannot dedicate themselves to being effective parents because they both must work, unless they have enough wealth and privilege to afford (and find) child care services or can have one parent stay at home full-time. Then if said lucky-ass parent decides in their wisdom that their kid is mature enough to roam a secured neighborhood with active security patrols on their own, they get prosecuted criminally for daring to let their child develop confidence and independence.
It’s nauseating, and I’m tired of this “stranger danger” bullshit along with the societal hostility towards adults and children alike. We can - and must - do better than this shit.
And to add more nonsense, iirc collecting (possessing) bird feathers, that they shed naturally, is illegal in the US under the name of protecting migratory birds.
That is a matter of practicality of just enforcing the laws around protecting migratory birds. You can't possess the feathers of protected birds, and it doesn't matter how you got them.
Research the massively destructive bird feather trade in the 19th century if you want context for why the law is that broad.
You should check out a Japanese show called "Old Enough!".
I have a 7 year old and a 4 year old. The 7 year old started back at school after the summer holidays and some of her friends had to be taken into class early, showed signs of having anxiety attacks and distress. While I'm slightly hypocritical here, we live on a busy road so it's not really suitable for them to go wandering alone, we do try to give them as much autonomy as we can.
I'm pretty sure the societal pressure to helicopter around children constantly is a net negative to their well-being.
Five is too young. Sure they can do the right thing most of the time, with their mom watching. But they don't have good judgement and are easily distracted. Especially with a pond involved. I would never let my kids around an open body of water alone.
I don't know how old you are, so maybe you've forgot how it's like to be that old, but by 7 you're way past that age... crossing streets is not like going to war..
I think this is probably the reason why these cases come up
people age and then they think that a 10 year old is a toddler, and then they enforce that belief upon them
Here in Switzerland children start walking to school at around 5-years. Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.
It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
Twice a year you see the children practicing crossing streets. The police are out at the intersections and show the children how to do it. It's very cute. Also how to ride bicycles properly.
Young children also walk to the elementary schools near me. When I’m at the park with my kids, it’s common to see other very young kids show up alone on their bikes or on foot to play in the park. This is in the US.
I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
The US is a big country. The state this happened in has a similar population to the entire country of Switzerland. Laws and cultural norms vary across the country, but this story is unusual even for the location it happened in. That’s why it’s a news story.
As an international reader I'm missing some context here. Isn't a gated community supposed to be singularly safe? With private guards (like the guy who took the kid to his mom) patrolling and no strangers allowed in etc? Why did the guard tell the kid that "bad people" might take him? Where would those bad people come from? It really all does sound very weird.
> I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
That would still be pretty bad though. An absurd sentence like this should not end with the sentence being reverted but in changes that prevent it in the future, e.g. by updating laws or disciplining those that did not apply them correctly. This isn't just one person fucking up this is the security guard fucking up, the police fucking up, CPS fucking up and then the judge fucking up.
I'm also in the US, in a city in a populous state and I've never seen that, as a matter of fact it counts as child abuse in my state as well. Why don't you mention where you live and what state you see this within? Is it because what you're seeing is anecdotal in some particularly rich area? I can assure you leaving children under 16 unsupervised is illegal in most states.
Citation needed. A kid that's 15.5 yrs old is more than able to be unsupervised for a few hours. c'mon.
The only state that I can find with the oldest age defined is 14 in Illinois (but it's defined as "for an unreasonable period of time").
Most states otherwise don't define it (~38 states), and of the ones that do, it's between 6-10.
> I can assure you leaving children under 16 unsupervised is illegal in most states.
This is absolutely untrue. Only 3 states have an age specific standard. Most states set no specific limits by age. The bigger problem is the vagueness of the laws we do have in place around child neglect which allows a cop or neighbor to be the biggest determining factor of whether you get a knock on your door.
Our neighborhood in the northeast US does the same (minus the hard prohibition against parents going with them). Our 5 and 9 year old walk to school daily, usually picking up the neighbors' kids (6, 6, 10, 9, 7, 7) along the way. If we happen to be free sometimes an adult will walk with them, sometimes we start walking with them and then stop for coffee with a neighbor while the kids continue on, sometimes they go by themselves.
I can't imagine living somewhere where that was prohibited.
I live in Colorado, we have a "free-range" law that protects parents allowing their children to play outside unattended. It's a bit sad that such a law needs to exist, but I'm glad we have it here.
In our neighborhood it's very common to see kids (including mine!) outside doing things by themselves. We bike with our oldest son to school (he's 7), but plenty of other parents let their kids bike to school on their own. I think it helps that we live in a city with good pedestrian infrastructure and lots of green spaces. The whole city is better for it and I wish more US cities would do the same. My sister's neighborhood in a different state feels like a very fancy prison, nice homes, but you can't even go to a park without getting in a car.
>> It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
In Japan they call it a Katamari.
> If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit.
It depends of the town/location and region. In our town, police had to be involved several times due to different issues with creeps targeting 12yo or less.
Edit:And I forgot, as it's Switzerland, police moved only because parents were accompanying their kids and almost done justice by themselves. Protecting creeps is a national sport here too.
That's lovely. Also all the heartwarming ways things work in Japan where kids get a lot of autonomy and live their own little lives on the way to school, among other things.
I went to Japan a few years ago - I saw a lot of beautiful things, but the image of schoolchildren in their yellow hats on the train system is one of the most memorable/replayed in my mind.
Parents and Adults in America are often afraid. Sometimes rightfully so, sometimes not.
There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely, and it could be dangerous to even try to walk in areas that barely have walkable streets.
Europe can let this happen since their city planning is much better for people who either walk or bike to different areas. Some, like in Switzerland, even have extremely low crime rates as well. Still, a sentencing seems rough for letting a kid walk, in a probably safe area.
> There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely
This is very much not true. If there are any urban areas that have too much crime for kids to walk freely, it's a vanishingly small percentage, and certainly does not include gated communities in Williamsburg, VA.
GTFOH with that nonsense.
That's why I said it was a harsh sentence for a probably safe area at the end of my statement, why so angry?
Because even beyond this area being safe, your claim that "There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely" is wrong.
Yes, I’m Swiss and walked to school starting around 5. I was hit by a car (due to bad judgment on my part) on the way back from school at 6, though, so it’s not all roses.
I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age, so I would not necessarily be super comfortable trusting them around those attractive nuisances, even though I’m on board with the “let them walk to school” policy. It’s a difficult balancing act.
> Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.
Can't help but think that this is just swinging things in the opposite direction.
No, it’s to counteract the desire of parents dropping of their kids in front of school with their car and causing traffic jams.
Exactly. It’s a collective action problem — every car dropping off a kid incrementally endangers the kids walking to school, so if there is no enforcement whatsoever, we’d end up with everybody driving, and a situation worse than in US schools (because Swiss schools were largely not constructed with drop off zones in mind, and retrofitting them would be difficult with our land use patterns).
The original comment makes it sound like you'd get a police visit for walking with your kid to school though, which is hopefully a misunderstanding.
In my experience the kids form a peloton walking to school but there are adults walking with the youngest such groups. E.g. this website (never been to this town, just seems representative).
https://pskerzers.ch/pedibus/
It'd be nice if you could back up your feelings with some reasoning.
The neighborhood is safe enough and the community is cohesive enough that kids can congregate along their way to school: go to their friend's house, meet at a park, etc.
It's researched enough that you can go and learn about it and challenge your feelings.
(Not the patent) I'm very much pro letting children roam freely, but police intervention for walking or driving with your own child is clearly overreach. The good intention does not change that.
And even as a German who already spent a lot of time in Switzerland, I've never heard of anything like that.
To join in on the therapy speak: it is very good to challenge one's feelings, let go, and then, by the merit of reason, realize that police intervention for spending commute time with your children is bonkers.
It is just a very unreasonable extension of a very reasonable position.
The GP dramatically exaggerated the state of affairs or perhaps it's how things are in their specific village/canton.
In French cantons you can bring your kids to school, you can drive them there and there are spots for stopping and all respective signage. But there is indeed a lot of very young kids walking to school.
I live in Zurich. I used to live in Pully, a suburb of Lausanne. It's much more car-centric in the French part. But at the same time our neighborhood had a Pedibus location where children met and walked to school from in a group.
Sure. In a good way.
> One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together.
That's what I did when I was in first grade. Suburban US, late 70s. Lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Met with the other kid who lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, walked to the house of a kid who lived at the other end of the street. Then the three of us got on the sidewalk of the main road and walked to the school.
This is the way.
Pedibus. So civilized. People in California don't believe half the things I tell them about life in Switzerland, such as "if you try to drive your kid to school the cops will chastise you" and "if you drive 40 in a school zone you'll automatically get a year in jail" and, of course, "gas is nine bucks".
The US is extremely car focused, which they often don't really realize. Things that are normal here (like everybody has a bike) conflicts with their cyclers vs drivers culture. Such a distinction simply does not exist here. Instead we have roads that are red with signs "Cars are guests". Or indeed city centers where cars aren't allowed.
When I go to the US I'm often surprised that you can't get to things that are only a km away by foot because a road is blocking you, no way to cross it.
The US has very low standards for its lifestyle.
We're told we are number ONE in everything but in fact its usually 40 or 20 when you actually go look at things that matter.
We never really notice because we think filling a big house in the suburbs with garbage from Costco is living the dream.
As a naturalized American who lived in 3 other countries including two in Europe and who travels often all over the world, married to a European, etc I must say the US has its perks and it’s definitely in my top 5 countries to live. I lived mostly in the south and the east coast so I don’t have a full picture of the US as a resident. But it’s the same in Europe, living in Berlin is very different than living in Sicily, even Milan is very different than Sicily being the same country. So to be fair the US should be compared to Europe not to a particular country. The car culture in the US I think is fine because the country is built around it, the interstate system is pretty good and gas is cheap. I do like road trips very much, at my own pace not having to worry about train/flight schedules. In Europe taking long family road trips by car as we do in the US would be prohibited and even stupid in the eyes of many Europeans. I also like that you can talk to Americans everywhere and get to know people. In Europe you start talking to a stranger they look at you like you went crazy. Being social is part of having a good quality of life too, so the US ranks pretty high there.
I don't know what you mean with family roadtrips being prohibited? Maybe too expensive, that's all I can think of. Cheap motels are rare and, obviously, fuel is much more expensive. All other necessities are easily available and legal.
So in the beginning of your paragraph you say it's "very different" depending on where you are in Europe, but towards the end, you generalise the entire continent.
I travel all over the world for work(Though mostly Europe) and my experience has been that Europe is a very diverse place.
Currently outside London where you can absolutely chat with random strangers(I'm from Sweden, so obviously I don't).
On holiday in the Florida we walked to the gated entrance to the community to ask whether delivery drivers got access or we needed to pick it up at the gate. The way they looked at us, you would think we had two heads for arriving on foot.
I once walked into a drive through in Texas (Galveston) with a group of scientists there for a conference (because main restaurant was closed), we almost got shot (no not really but people felt very very threatened and threatened us)!
The last time I was in the US - a couple of decades ago, I admit - people were aghast that we walked to a store just a few hundred meters away.
3 people stopped and asked whether they can drive us somewhere... I mean, super friendly people, but... it's just a few hundred meters, come on!
You were the wild west, once!
Well, everybody rode their horse everywhere in the Wild West.
Our school started a chaperoned bicycle bus, and it’s enabled a number of kids who live 3-5 km away to engage in active transportation once a week that would have otherwise been unable to.
When I was a kid, about 3 decades ago, walking to school was a blast.
I had so much fun going there and going back on foot.
So much that when I was a teenager and my mother drove by my school one day and decided to pick me up, I was super unhappy, because I wanted to walk the 20 or so minutes with my friends to the bus.
When I had 9 hour school, I would need to wait 50 Minutes for a bus... or I walked the 5 kilometers home.
I always choose to walk, even when it rained, because I was faster and I loved it!
I am curious how it will be with my daughter, once she goes to school.
Because today this is totally frowned upon. But I will not play taxi for her all the time. Occasionally, sure. But CERTAINLY not every day.
It's a high trust homogenous society without lots of different groups with all kinds of grievances about the past, present and the future. And it's probably rural, where everyone knows each other.
When I read the headline, I sided with the mother. But a five-year old having to cross four roads in total to and from (with vehicles going up 25 mph legally, and who knows how fast illegally) is a bit much.
It doesn't have to be homogeneous or rural, you just have to address the grievances, make sure everyone is adequately housed, has access to medical attention, and has something to do; and then you get peace.
>homogenous society
this is a racist dogwhistle. _Homogeneous_ is code for racial or ethnic purity.
It's okay to acknowledge that diversity has some downsides, and homogeny some upsides. We can be intellectually honest enough to admit this, right?
are you asking if it's ok to acknowledge the upsides of racial purity?
the things i read on hn...
It isn't ok to acknowledge that racial (cultural) homogeny has any benefit to a society whatsoever?
Wait. Is it racial or is it cultural? There's a difference there.
Do you believe it's possible to have cultural homogeneity without having racial homogeneity?
Btw I think you're wrong: people can be extremely xenophobic with the folks from the next village over who are their cousins thrice removed. It's nothing to do with race or culture, just who's in the in-group and who's in the out-group, and what those are depends on a myriad of factors that "race" and "culture" are only convenient, but inaccurate, proxies for.
> It's a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she'd seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning
She was always with him when he did that. Not the same as him doing it alone.
Regardless, there are local laws against this.
> Regardless, there are local laws against this.
Yeah, but maybe the laws are stupid and should be changed?
I'm in Zurich which is far from rural. Not really very homogenous either - it's 50% non-Swiss.
I would imagine they're referring to cultural and behavioral homogeneity, not necessarily national or distinctly ethnic homogeneity.
I'm sorry that you have to be around Germans, Austrians, Italians, Spaniards, and—worst of all—the French. Nobody should ever go through that.
There are 150 nationalities in Zurich.
Imagine implying that Swiss Germans and German Germans look upon each other with familiarity instead of wariness or even suspicion.
True. I can let a kid ride a bicycle in Amsterdam but not London.
or worse, Dublin.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a five-year-old crossing small roads like that.
This is one of those frustrating things. You're just not allowed to not be scared with kids. If you aren't scared of letting your kid walk to a pond, you get punished for it. If you're not scared of the kidnappers, you have to be scared of the police. None of it is rational, it's different how many of us were raised, yet if you try to opt out the law gets involved.
Stranger kidnappings are basically unheard of. It's never been a safer time for kids in terms of crime like that.
They're heard of because it's so rare that media loves to broadcast them far and wide for the views. Like it's good to get people watching out for the kidnapped child as quickly as possible, but the media sensation causes paranoia in unaffected viewers.
A lot of the ones that do get broadcasted still end up being a relative too, but you wouldn't know unless you look into it after it get resolved and stops being talked about.
A lot of them are not even kidnapping in the colloquial sense. We hear "kidnapping" and think about being tied up in the trunk of a car but many of the actual kidnapping cases are more like "Bobby went to his divorced daddy's place for the weekend and hasn't been back on Monday." It's about the parents' custody and not about the kids' safety.
Genuinely curious…is it rare because there are less kidnappers, or because parents are more vigilant and there is less opportunity for them to commit the crime?
They're more common among relatives than total strangers.
About a year or so ago I saw on Nextdoor a neighbor posted about that some girl who always walked home from school whom he waves to when he sees her. One day she was walking slower than normal, and she ran to him scared, they didn't actually know each other, on the Ring footage you can see that a car that was following her drove off. Who knows if all these cameras are helping to prevent so many incidents, but the world is still as evil as ever. Just because its rare doesn't mean that you as a parent want to win the misfortune lottery.
> Just because its rare doesn't mean that you as a parent want to win the misfortune lottery.
If you want total safety from misfortune why have kids at all? Pregnancy and birth is one of the most dangerous things people choose to do voluntarily. 1 in 200 newborns die in the US. You could avoid that by not having kids!
Flippant I know. But at the end of the day to live is to take risks. Extreme risk avoidance will come back to bite you on a later day in the form of declining birth rates, increasing neuroticism and support for building a police state.
I swear human brains are programmed to have a "fear bank" of things to be scared of, and an allocation of fear that must be spent on items in the fear bank.
As society has weeded out all the things to fear over time, more and more far flung things get put into the bank, and more and more fear is allocated to the dwindling amount of things to be scared of.
I'm sympathetic with this sentiment but surely it's pretty rare the law actually gets involved? Our kids play outside a lot and no cops have ever raised an eyebrow (except for at our crazy drunk of a neighbor, where eyebrow raising is appropriate).
It’s Foucault’s interpretation of the panopticon. If we know that we may be watched — and punished — we self-police into following the norm, even if we do not know when we are being watched or that someone is necessarily monitoring us individually.
When I was a kid in the 80s none of this was an issue and I was free to roam. Starting in the 90s this became an issue and not only will parents not let their kids roam but the kids themselves have less interest because the norm is to stay in or only go out when supervised. You know you are doing something slightly wrong. It only takes occasional reminders like this to reinforce the rule, once established.
It's rare, but if it happens it is catastrophic. You will be paying a lawyer 10's of thousands of dollars and if you do have to plead out, the charges you plead to may look very bad on paper on a background check.
You should not be scared around dogs. Being scared may trigger a dog and then you would be responsible for attack!
There is no real reasons to be scared. Chances something bad happens are very low: almost no deaths, in worst case child gets mimor reconstructive surgery, and a fake trauma!
Your attempt at sarcasm really fell on its face. It is not reasonable to be categorically afraid of dogs.
Yet my SO is. No idea why, but she's really scared of them, especially dogs she doesn't know. Even a chihuahua is terrifying.
Dogs can attack with no indication or reason, some breeds take more of a lion's share for that than others. It is entirely reasonable to feel fear in the presence of a dog, especially if you've been the victim of an attack or seen one before. The conversation around responsible dog ownership is really delusional.
Exactly, fake trauma! And besides, all dog owners keep their pets on leash!
> Being scared may trigger a dog and then you would be responsible for attack!
This is victim blaming bullshit irresponsible dog owners love to spew
Here in Florida there's no just letting my 4 year old wander to a nearby lake, it might be the last time I ever see her. There's an assumption that alligators are in every lake, and next to my house I have two lakes visible the moment I come out of my front door.
If it's not the alligators, it's the careless older kids in e-scooters or e-bikes, if you're rolling your eyes, just note that one of those careless kids drove into my neighbors four year old, who went flying back because some kid was not paying attention, he was also by chance wearing a helmet because he wanted to ride his bike so he did not hurt his head, but he definitely had a bruise on his lower back.
Do I think there needs to be laws around this? No, though, should a child suffer because they have negligent parents? Also no. It hurts me more to think that having these laws is the only way to get some people to pay attention as parents.
This is proof to me this world is Hell.
How does this happen? There’s no silver lining which makes this conviction reasonable. If they can’t appeal, I hope they use Streisand to get the town or state of Virginia to vacate everything.
It happened because a neighbor was so disturbed by a child walking alone to report it, the police thought it was serious enough to refer for prosecution, and a prosecutor decided it needed to be charged using their office's limited resources. All insane.
The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent concern, they didn't take the simple step of approaching and talking to the child to see where they were going or if a parent knew where they were.
Perhaps the neighbor who called it in thought that if they approached the child themselves, they might be seen as a potential child molester.
If you automatically assume somebody approaching a child is a kidde fiddler (!) then your society has problems.
Yes. As a father of two (grown) children in the US, this is the default assumption for most men.
This is America
Welcome to ‘murica
They charged her criminally instead of civilly, because in 2023 VA passed a 'free-range parenting' amendment to allow for actions that appropriate for the child's maturity and are not done in a grossly negligent manner that endangers the child. This is likely why the defense asked for comments from others on the child's maturity.
The criminal definition apparently has no such modification.
E: removed a double ‘likely’
Virginia also has a free range kid law.
And in particular, the conviction here was delinquency of a minor. That's usually used to convict parents of teenagers whose kids do serious crimes.
I caveat to say, we don't know the full details. But it all seems pretty weak sauce.
I hate to to say it but way to often "outrage" stories like this are written for engagement, not assessment.
The boy could have been spotted walking along a highway median, or similar detail that would kind of spoil the outrage effect. Lord knows the pedestrian hostile nature of modern infrastructure.
That’s possible
Though in this case the kid was walking all in a gated community.
I'm not sure if this just bias from news stories but in general it feels like absurd things which would be avoided with just common sense from authorities tend to happen in the US.
> How does this happen?
Simple. Evolutionarily, the dumber you are, the higher the risks of dying, because you do stupid shit. Inversely, the safer the environment, the dumber people become, because not doing stupid shit stops being evolutionarily advantageous. Nature is pretty brutal so there is evolutionary pressure not to be dumb, but in modern civilization we have pretty much infinite resources dedicated to safety, which means there is a feedback loop "people are dumber -> more safety measures -> people are dumber -> more safety measures".
When you go to poor countries you'll realize just how much knowledge children posses on the topic on how not to die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough!
Old Enough! is a Japanese reality show that has been aired irregularly since 1991 on Nippon Television. The program depicts, in a documentary manner, the efforts of toddlers going on an errand on their own, buying groceries and delivering packages, accompanied by the camera crew.
The American version - https://youtu.be/VhGTtWsW9F8
https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279
In China, I would see kids who must have been 7 years old running around the streets or on public transit without adult supervision.
It seems like a much healthier way to live than in constant fear.
depends. my kids school in china didn't allow me to let my kids bike to school without supervision. (well, actually, they couldn't stop me from sending them to school alone, but they would not let them out unless i was there to pick them up. (there was only one crossing on the route, and that was close to the school and didn't have a lot of traffic)
in germany on the other hand, there was a case where parents demanded a school bus for a 7yr old, but the court said the kids could take the public train to school on their own.
In the US, if you are in a residential neighborhood with a lot of kids, its also fairly typical for them to be out finding their playmates.
I would say if you're in a neighborhood where there's just like 1-2 kids, it may not be that typical. The kids parents might do more scheduled playdates.
Unfortunately in the US there are people that get annoyed about kids playing. And they are also the same kind of person that escalates things to the authorities / complains a lot about trivial things.
There's a Netflix documentary about one such sad case https://www.netflix.com/title/82018736
This. Those of my friends with kids moved to neighborhoods and suburbs where other households of a similar age existed.
You see this in SF, with singles primarily living in the Marina, Russian Hill, or Rincon Hill and then upgrading to Mission Bay once they have kids.
One of the worst aspects of modern life. The most paranoid person decides what the right thing to do is.
American modern life. Vast swathes of the rest of the planet doesn't suffer from our unfortunate pathology.
The person who thought they cared about the child's welfare turned out to be the actual danger, and made the child's life much worse.
I started walking to school alone once I started 1st grade (at around age 7) and did it for about 5 years until my parents moved our family to a place outside of town where it was impractical to do so. I just checked Google Maps to be sure and it is about a 1.2Km / 0.75 miles, so a short walk for either an adult or a 7-year old.
A few months ago I had a heated argument with my father, stepmother and wife because I (half-joking/serious) told my almost 8-year daugher that next year we will start practicing her going to school by herself. You would not believe the stink all of them raised telling me I was irresponsible, yadda, yadda, what about child molesters/ kidnappers, yadda, yadda, too many cars and the usual non-sense you usually hear about this.
Again I went and checked on Google Maps just to be precise and the walk between our house and my daughters school is... 500 meters / 0.31 miles.
In a single generation we went from "your starting school for the first time? time to fend for yourself, you will do fine" to "you are a snowflake that needs to be protected at all times and must not be allowed to alone in any circunstances".
PS: To give more context, I don't live in the US but in a small EU country with a low crime rate, on a town that indeed is busy but very safe.
People should watch the Netflix version of Old Enough! - it is a Japanese show where young (!) children 3-5 year old walk around the neighborhood doing chores. The one scene I recall was where a child was supposed to carry a fish to the butcher and was being followed by hungry cats.
I think I've seen that anime.
It blows my mind that a bunch of adults, prosecutors, CPS employees, etc all decided the fair, reasonable and best thing to do was prosecute and punish this mother.
Sounds like there is very little crime happening in their precious gated community that they've got to trump up everything they can to justify the budget wasted on them
This is so sad. America is really messed up. In other countries it is normal for a child to be allowed to walk on their own
American here, it seems to vary by location. I walked to school as a grade school student (Midwest) and where I live now (Orange county, California) I regularly see swarms of kids biking to school.
This particular situation seems ridiculous. I’d be furious if I lived there.
The average income of Orange county California is over double the national. Safe to say this kind of lifestyle is reserved for the rich and not for the people.
I was shocked that it happened to a white woman. I guess that’s why there’s an article about it
>The average income of Orange county California is over double the national. Safe to say this kind of lifestyle is reserved for the rich and not for the people.
The average income where I lived when I was five was not (nor was my family's) "double the national" and I walked to school (kindergarten and first grade) along this route[0][2] every school day.
In fact I tried to go to school during hurricane Agnes[1] and the strong winds actually pushed me back up the hill, so I went home -- no big deal.
In fact, I haven't even thought about that in decades. Ahh, childhood memories!
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Directions+from+5800+arlington+ave...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Agnes
[2] https://www.ps81.org/
On top of this is a pregnant mother of 5. With all the decrease in fertility, maybe the woman that managed to make their children independent enough to allow them to have 4 siblings should be given a freaking medal.
If that's the boundary then I must have been a really neglectful and abusive parent.
I maintain my, "what is abundance good for, if we can't make it safe for kids to walk places?!" stance. :(
There’s plenty of ways to trust your very young kids and raise them to be independent. Allowing them to walk alone for half a mile crossing roads is not one of the them. Kids can behave very differently when they are with their parents or other adults. So you can’t assume because they do something with you all the time they will stick to the same behavior and rules without supervision. At 5 years old their brains are still way too mature, they lack any judgement and impulse control, it doesn’t matter how smart you think your child is. Once they reach 9-10, that’s a different story.
What seems odd to me whenever this debate comes up is the failure to differentiate between:
- the child must never be unsupervised
- I/we think the child should never be unsupervised
We have less and less space between an opinion or recommendation and legal requirement. On a wide range of subjects people go straight to “require”, unwilling to simply express their opinion and move on.
I agree. It's one thing to think her action was riskier than you would like for your own child. It's another to think it should be a crime.
I walked myself to and from kindergarten every day. Approximately the same age, same distance, and it went through a park with water. That was normal.
The extreme neuroticism toward children having any kind of agency these days is unhealthy for everyone involved. Social media turned being neurotic into a virtue.
If this was the same in the 1970's my parents would have been executed and me and my siblings in a orphanage.
Actually the village would probably enjoyed that, I was a real "Swedish Emil" as a kid..
I am struck by the fact that arguments for or against within this thread are only about perceived safety (something hard to know at a distance) and not the substance of the law involved. Does Virginia actually have laws prohibiting unsupervised 5 year olds? If so what is the minimum age at which children are allowed outside unsupervised? Does it also apply to leaving children at home unsupervised? The charge of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” would suggest the minor’s behavior had to be illegal, which does not appear to have been discussed.
FWIW - Virginia has a free range kid law. And does not have a minimum age for supervision.
They charged the mom with delinquency of a minor to get around this. Usually reserved for teenagers that commit crimes.
We don't really know all the facts, and we only get one side of the story here. So we all need to keep that in mind too.
Honestly by modern “standards” all parents from probably the 90s and earlier would be just be thrown in jail.
Pre cell phones kids of all ages would just disappear for the whole day and show up back home for dinner. Nobody knew where they were. Nobody cared. Could be in the woods somewhere, off at the mall. And it was fine. Kids built bike ramps in the woods and jumped off them, sometimes someone broke an arm. Nobody sued.
The nanny state stuff is out of control.
The main lesson here is: don’t be confrontational with cops.
That sounds like a reasonable thing to say in a free society.
Everything is fine as long as we obey.
This is true; we should strive for this not to be true.
She was also 8 months pregnant, her 5th kid, and studying to become a lawyer... Thats a lot of stress right there....
> Parkinson admits now that she is embarrassed by her confrontational demeanor.
Which was the real crime. To be fair, many places outside the US not respecting the police is a illegal -- but genuinely not enough that an office would be justified in as much as indicating that the officer is armed (which usually counts as use of force).
That sounds awful. This kind of case doesn't seem like something you should let a single person decide on their own, judge or not. Is she not entitled to a jury trial because it's a misdemeanor or something? If she can find the funds/support somehow it totally seems worth appealing all the way to the supreme court.
Yeah, it's not really clear from the article. Wild that you can get on some list of abusers without a jury trial. Maybe she waived her rights? Can that even happen?
>CPS responded, he recounts, that "a 5-year-old child can never be unsupervised."
I would immediately move from that neighborhood and that city, if they do not have roots with neighbors or kids' friends. These are people who see her as a bad parent for letting their child outside the house.
>The James City County family services specialist assigned to Parkinson's case declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements. The prosecutor in the Commonwealth Attorney's Office for James City County said the same.
So the state doesn't have to answer to the public about why they interpret their laws to mean a 5 year old can never be alone. Show me the statute where there is an age cutoff.
Feels like these people made enemies, except that too many separate groups came down on her at once. What awful people.
I would have also immediately asked for their policy on how long children of different ages can be unsupervised.
I feel even if CPS or cops got involved, they can just take the kid home, no need to escalate things to charging the mom.
That said, there may be details we don't know here. This particular article is written from one bent, and the officials didn't comment on the case as is common in child-related prosecutions.
CPS type agencies all around the world wield immense power and are staffed by power hungry narcissists who get off on threatening to take parents' kids and coming up with demands they must follow
It's things like this that tell you the real state of your country.
I guess they're trying to overcompensate for years of brutal child slavery with kids working in textile mills, tobacco processing, agriculture, mines, and factories.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hiring-out-of-the-e...
This is insanity, I thought "gated communities" were sold on safety - the child should absolutely be safe there.
Honestly it depends on the situation and saddly the common sense of everyone.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and in the neighboring town a child went missing.
Pre internet there was still a lot of worry. We got talked to by my parents who were too busy to change their day to day. Being kids we weren't very concerned (I don't think we thought it could happen to us)
It was a rural/suburban type area (my high-school walk home from the bus was 1 mile). I was given free range, and did a lot of exploring of trails and things unsupervised with my brother and friends. It was probably too far in the other direction with lax supervision. We never ran into big trouble, but cellphoneless us last century, we had to be hard to track. But that was the way things were. Playground games were rough too (I had a dislocated elbow that says maybe too rough sometimes..) but we got through.
Was it a bench trial or jury trial?
I'm of the generation where one of my responsibilities as a kid was walking to the neighborhood liquor store to buy cigarettes for my dad, so I'm empathetic. But if she was found guilty by a jury, I'm guessing there's more to the story.
> Parkinson's attorney, Andrew Gordon, took the case pro bono and argued that the only real "evidence" against the mom was that Sam was 5, and that, hypothetically, a host of horrible things could have happened.
You get what you pay for, I guess.
> David DeLugas, founder and executive director of ParentsUSA, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal help to parents wrongly accused of neglect, scoffed at the charge.
Sounds pretty cool; do they have a better record of legal wins?
In the US a kid cannot walk half a mile on their own inside a gated community patrolled by security guards? This sounds more dystopian than all the AI talk.
"I told [the authorities] that kids need to be able to take reasonable risks," he says, "in order to grow up non-anxious."
I guess the system prefers to breed anxiety.
"Gated community" tells you everything you need to know. If you want to live amongst busybody, nosy, fearful and controlling people, move to a gated community.
> the system prefers to breed anxiety
a happy consumer consumes less than an anxious one :(
They’re also more dependent upon the state.
All the kids in my neighborhood do this weekly in the US.
Have you ever taken care of a 5yo? They are certainly safer in public alone than a 3yo. How much more, hard to say.
The article really glosses over the fact that the kid was 5yo walking to a pond. It mentions it at the very start and then never brings it up again. That's the part that got me: the mom gave her 5yo permission to go to a large body of water unsupervised.
I'm a parent of three and strongly believe in letting your kids roam around (indeed, I live on acreage and taught my kids about the venomous snakes and spiders in our area, and then let er rip). But a 5yo who specifically asks to go back to a large body of water unsupervised is a bit too much for me.
Reason always strikes me as an opinionated libertarian media outlet, and this article really feels that way to me, where they keep playing up the "walking on the street" type stuff, the "we're too afraid of kidnappings" part, but not the fact that a 5yo unsupervised at a pond is by far the most dangerous part of this entire story.
Even as a kid of the 80s, I never saw 5yos out and about unsupervised, let alone by a pond. 5yo is possibly preschool.
Religious conservative, likely politically so, whose college degree was in family science at BYU—a degree Mormons steer their daughter into for her Mrs Degree—with experience in conservative politics at the state level who is responsible for passing a law giving parents a lot of freedom to let their little kids run around by basically saying "unless they're in immediate danger, YOLO"? So of course a reasonable judicial system tried to find a way to stop this wild behavior perpetrated by a woman with self-dealing political sway.
Article does not pass the vibe check. Letting your PRESCHOOL age kid go to a pond alone is pretty damn irresponsible, and Reason is trying to gin up anti-gov't feelings when this is probably the best possible outcome. Mom gets slapped on the wrist for fucking up in a way that just barely skirts a law she helped get passed and politicians were too stupid to think about before passing.
Myself and my siblings all lived on a fairly large rural farm with 2 large bodies of water that we always hung around unsupervised from about 4 y/o onwards. We loved catching bullfrogs and watching the fishes and stuff. Our mom gave us very strict/scary warnings about never going in and being careful, but other than that we were pretty free thankfully. 5 y/o with a good warning seems totally fine.
That depends? My first swimming lessons were in Kindergarten when I was 4-5. We were visiting public baths "unsupervised" (they still had lifeguards of course) by the time I was 8.
Assuming the kid wasn't even planning to enter the water, I see no inherent problem here. We seem to be operating on the assumption that unsupervised children will immediately succumb to sudden and irrational urges to kill themselves in creative ways.
> We seem to be operating on the assumption that unsupervised children will immediately succumb to sudden and irrational urges to kill themselves in creative ways.
That’s like 90% of parenting until kids age out of it. That being said, my 2.5yo kid can swim well enough today that I’d have no qualms at all about them being at a neighborhood pond by themselves in a few years.
I understand ponds can be dangerous, and every year kids drown in various bodies of water, but you're probably more likely to get hurt by a vehicle crossing the road... so should the limit be "the road". Can the destination change the verdict?
> So of course a reasonable judicial system tried to find a way to stop this wild behavior perpetrated by a woman with self-dealing political sway.
Wow that's a lot of assumptions baked into one sentence.
Even if we concede that it is irresponsible, which would very much depend on the individual child, it should not be a crime.
If I were the cop I would have cited the person who called the police for being a nuisance and went about my day.
>> A mom of five was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community.
Surely allowing your children to roam freely would be a major benefit of a gated community?
"they" like to gaslight us that cities are safer than ever. That it's social media scaring us into thinking our cities are less safe.
But in actually safe countries (Japan, Switzerland, Singapore) kids are already taking themselves to school around 5 years old and parents aren't getting criminal records for letting their children explore their independence.
Food for thought...
American society has become paranoid, and as a parent I find this extremely disheartening. It was refreshing when a family from Europe moved in down the street and their kids would come over by themselves and knock on the door to see if our kids could go out and play. Very few American families do that (gotta set up a whole play date in advance, drive over even if it's a few blocks -- which all seems way over the top until you read about something like this and don't want to risk get accused of neglect by some stupid neighbor who sees your kid walking the neighborhood and decides to call the police.
I blame the media, mostly, for the fear / paranoia that seems to have captured us in the past decades. Sure, media was always sensational, but it was local. Now stuff travels through social media and the internet and so you might be in Maine but hear about every weird thing that happens in Florida or Arizona.
I mean I wouldn't let me 5 year old cross busy streets by himself in my neighborhood... People drive while staring at their phones going 45 mph in a 25... Maybe we should start punishing people who make the roads so dangerous in the first place...
Letting a 5yo wander off unsupervised to a large body of water is pretty dumb.
I wonder if people who are down-voting you actually have children. I even know someone who's kid just died in a pool when no one was watching... My kids almost drowned themselves multiple times when they were below 5 yr old and they are trained to swim... My brother fell into a pool when he was little, and had to be saved... the list goes on and on... edit: Apparently it's the leading cause of death for 1-4 year olds...
I agree. The word "pond" is what immediately got my attention.
Legally mandated helicopter parenting? Small government amirite?
Should have said it was post preschool psychosis
This is insane. I grew up in India and I used to walk 10 minutes after school to get home everyday.
That's what happens when there are few children and many adults all with strong opinions on how the few children should be raised. Back in my days (millennials) there was abundance of children and they knew that adults are a danger to be avoided.
Reminder when talking to any authority: yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir else you a liable to get the boot. (Bonus: don’t be black)
my dad and mom grew up in Peru and they tell me that at that age they were basically outside all day, getting lost in the woods, taking buses to the soccer stadium, etc etc. IDK - my son is about to turn 5 and we do helicopter him a bit, ... there needs to be a healthy balance.
As a victim of an extremely overprotective parent growing up, it was all the media's fault for getting us there.
this is the definition of bullshit authority
Reminder that Utah has laws preventing this outcome ("free range parenting laws") and other states can follow suit with enough outcry. Utah is the best state to raise children for this and many other reasons.
I hate this comes from Reason (along with an opinion piece at the bottom about regulation is always bad), but the story itself is disgusting and a complete government overreach.
On the one hand, we tell parents they’re accountable for their kids, which is fair and reasonable. Then we build a society where parents cannot dedicate themselves to being effective parents because they both must work, unless they have enough wealth and privilege to afford (and find) child care services or can have one parent stay at home full-time. Then if said lucky-ass parent decides in their wisdom that their kid is mature enough to roam a secured neighborhood with active security patrols on their own, they get prosecuted criminally for daring to let their child develop confidence and independence.
It’s nauseating, and I’m tired of this “stranger danger” bullshit along with the societal hostility towards adults and children alike. We can - and must - do better than this shit.
honestly. fuck this, fuck this world we live in. I hate it.
that is all there is to say about this fucking bullshit
This is unfortunate because boomers love to extrapolate weird outlier headlines into a comfortable imagined reality.
And to add more nonsense, iirc collecting (possessing) bird feathers, that they shed naturally, is illegal in the US under the name of protecting migratory birds.
That is a matter of practicality of just enforcing the laws around protecting migratory birds. You can't possess the feathers of protected birds, and it doesn't matter how you got them.
Research the massively destructive bird feather trade in the 19th century if you want context for why the law is that broad.
How do you prove that feathers were shed naturally, without harming a bird?
a 5 yo walking around in a neighborhood without a guardian or supervisor doesnt sound like a great idea to me.
You should check out a Japanese show called "Old Enough!".
I have a 7 year old and a 4 year old. The 7 year old started back at school after the summer holidays and some of her friends had to be taken into class early, showed signs of having anxiety attacks and distress. While I'm slightly hypocritical here, we live on a busy road so it's not really suitable for them to go wandering alone, we do try to give them as much autonomy as we can.
I'm pretty sure the societal pressure to helicopter around children constantly is a net negative to their well-being.
Five is too young. Sure they can do the right thing most of the time, with their mom watching. But they don't have good judgement and are easily distracted. Especially with a pond involved. I would never let my kids around an open body of water alone.
I don’t think this should be a criminal charge but 5 seems a bit young to walk that far while crossing streets. At 7 I would be more comfortable
Here's the thing: It doesn't matter how comfortable you are, you're not the child's parent.
Yeah, and? Being a parent doesn't entitle someone to do anything they want
I walked to school alone when I was 4, crossing several streets. I bicycled when I was 5. This was typical of the time.
Really depends on the kind of upbringing of the child. In Mongolia 5 year olds are teaching their younger siblings how to ride a reindeer.
it shows how far we've come wrt infantilization in the west, it's really sad to see imo.
I don't know how old you are, so maybe you've forgot how it's like to be that old, but by 7 you're way past that age... crossing streets is not like going to war..
I think this is probably the reason why these cases come up
people age and then they think that a 10 year old is a toddler, and then they enforce that belief upon them
Not at all. We all did it when I was child that age in the 80s.