Being a mother is one of the most rewarding jobs in the world. It is also exhausting and can be stressful, especially when raising five children. Mothers deserve some grace when deciding what is best for their sons and daughters.
That is why the prosecution of a Virginia mother, Karyann Parkinson, is so disturbing.
Parkinson was eight months pregnant with her fifth child in June when she walked with her 5-year-old son, Sam, through their gated community in Williamsburg. Sam stopped near a neighborhood pond to collect goose feathers, one of his favorite activities. After they returned home, he asked if he could walk back for more.
Parkinson knew the route, and she knew her son. She told him he could go and come straight back.
A neighbor saw the boy walking alone, called security, and a guard returned Sam home just 20 minutes later. The guard called police. Police called Child Protective Services. CPS found that Parkinson had inadequately supervised her son and placed her on Virginia’s Child Abuse and Neglect Central Registry for seven years. Police also charged her with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A judge convicted her and imposed a suspended six-month jail sentence.
This is a travesty, the busybody nanny state interfering where it has no business.
Most of the blame belongs to Williamsburg-James City County Commonwealth’s Attorney Nate Green. Prosecutors are entrusted with discretion because not every questionable decision should become a criminal case. Green’s office had ample opportunity to decide that a mother allowing her son to walk through his guarded and gated neighborhood was not a crime.
Police and CPS should have exercised similar judgment. Once officers established that Sam was not lost, knew where he was going, and had his mother’s permission, the matter should have ended.
Then there is the neighbor. Concern for a 5-year-old walking alone is understandable. But whatever happened to simply looking out for other people’s children? Ask the boy if he is OK. Ask where he is going. Walk with him if you are worried. Calling an authority should not be our first instinct when an adult sees a child alone. It is, indeed, a reflection of the distortions in our excessively risk-averse modern culture that seeing a child walking alone is regarded as unusual, even an aberration.
Virginia law makes the prosecution even harder to defend. It criminalizes willfully creating conditions that render a child abused or neglected, but it also explicitly protects reasonable childhood independence. A child is not considered neglected merely because a parent allows independent activity without adult supervision, provided the activity is appropriate to the child’s age, maturity, and abilities and that the parent is not grossly negligent. The law specifically mentions walking to nearby locations and playing outdoors as acceptable behavior.
Parkinson’s conduct seems to be precisely the kind of parental judgment Virginia lawmakers meant to protect.
America should encourage parents to raise self-reliant children, not threaten good parents with jail because they allow a child to develop independence by going on a little adventure alone. A society that treats every unsupervised childhood moment as neglect will produce neither confident children nor capable adults.
Children do not acquire judgment and self-reliance automatically at 18. They learn those necessary traits by walking places alone, solving small problems, encountering manageable risks, meeting minor challenges, and discovering that they can function without their mother or father hovering nearby.
Yet modern parenting is moving in the opposite direction. Children spend less time roaming neighborhoods and navigating the world themselves today than they did a generation ago. Adults complain that children spend too much time indoors staring at screens and grow up unprepared to stand on their own.
We owe mothers more charity and children more than a reflexive call to the authorities. If a child needs help, help them. If they seem lost, talk to them. Take some responsibility for the children around you instead of summoning the state.
Parenting is difficult enough already. If we tell prospective parents that responsible child-rearing requires constant surveillance and that one stranger’s disagreement can bring police, CPS, prosecutors, a criminal conviction, and years on an abuse registry, we should not be surprised if more Americans conclude that having children simply is not worth the trouble.