Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
reason.com
reason.com
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.
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.
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.
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).
For most Americans it might add up to 7-10 hours a week or more.
That's a lot even over a few weeks.
That's not time walking with your kids or dog sniffing the flowers, that's the opposite.
I live in a major city. It is more like ~4 hours/wk for me. The car drives itself. It is very relaxing. It is my alone time for either thinking or listening to podcasts. I am in a nice air-conditioned, HEPA-filtered cabin and I can be on my own schedule.
What?? Caravan or road trip with regular car is a very common vacation in Europe. In France there are tons of free places to stop over the night. In the nordics you can camp anywhere that isn't close to someones house, even on private land. But no I wouldn't take the car instead of a 2-3 hour flight, especially as our cities have excellent public transportation.
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!
Mind you, there weren’t many who would walk to school like that in Australia, and the number has continued to dwindle. But there were some.
Fixed that when I asked if he personally called 911 and when he said no, "So, before we make this a lot more formal, are you understanding that you are now obstructing emergency services personnel in the performance of duty?"
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.
Can't help but think that this is just swinging things in the opposite direction.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Regardless, there are local laws against this.
Yeah, but maybe the laws are stupid and should be changed?
Some groups of people have absolutely endless amounts of grievances. They have made the grievances their entire personality. They will never be sufficiently satisfied with whatever concessions you make to them
this is a racist dogwhistle. _Homogeneous_ is code for racial or ethnic purity.
the things i read on hn...
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.
Another example: Greek football fans from Athens will literally murder their counterparts from Thessaloniki, and they're all just as Greek as each other [1]. You just have to draw a line in the sand and people on either side of it will start throwing stones at each other.
__________________
[1] Culturally of course. We're not a "race". Tiny little rant but with Nolan's Odyssey, there were the usual complains about Helen being played by a black woman etc. and people all over the internet were having fights about what real Greeks look like. Oh they have fair hair and light skin. No they have dark hair and olive skin. And so on. The truth is that most Greek families are like mine: one parent is fair-haired and light skinned (my dad: blond hair, green eyes, goes red in the sun; his mom: blond hair, blue eyes, skin like yogurt) and the other is dark-haired and dark skinned (my mom: brown hair, brown eyes, goes brown in the sun; her mom: black hair, black eyes, never sat in the sun). But stereotypes persist so me and one of my friends were asked how come we're both fair-haired with light-coloured eyes when true Greeks are brown and at the same time a friend recommended to me a concealer that was three tones darker than my actual colour even though I was standing right there in front of her eyes with my pasty-white skin. Race is not what it's made out to be. End rant.
Because Japan is the quintessential homogeneous westernish society that most are familiar with. UK and US are not homogeneous by any means. I could have said Poland or Estonia but that doesn't evoke an image of harmony like Japan does due to unfamiliarity (even though they too are largely harmonious).
> why is it that racial differences are also cultural differences?
Probably because race is equivalent to heritage which usually follows a cultural lineage unless one of the generations makes a big effort to assimilate to some other culture. Culture is inherited, and races are inherited. If a baby was born a completely random race unrelated to the parents, then this property wouldn't hold, but the way things are, race ~= culture.
> Like, don't all Americans, black and white, love their guns for example? Or love baseball?
No? Isn't it self evident that Americans don't all share a culture? Aside from the first generation immigrants that are obviously their own culture e.g. Chinatown, Black Americans have an entirely separate culture from White Americans, which have a different culture from Asian Americans. The only way this could change is if all the groups completely assimilate, which is not going to happen.
Race isn't the only factor of course: if all the Japanese heritage Americans moved back to Japan, there would obviously be cultural tension there despite being the same race. But just the way history worked out, in most places and cases that could reasonably happen, racial homogeneity is approximately equal to cultural homogeneity. And when trying to achieve that, it's a lot easier to see that a person is of your race than to see that they are of your culture.
People and groups with unlimited grievances (and, unfortunately, associated revenge fantasies).
Switzerland has less of this. So you can send your 5-year old for a long walk alone, knowing that your neighbors will be looking out.
(PP: even the word "rural" is seen as a dog-whistle, e.g. by the NYTimes.)
Listen: I'm a visible minority where I'm a citizen of, myself. I'm not shilling for racial homogeneity or totalitarian philosophy at all. I'm just sharing my lived experience that when there are lots of groups with lots of grievances against each other, there's less ambient, latent trust.
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.
I can't imagine living somewhere where that was prohibited.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Instead, the Mom is placed on probation for seven years and will have monthly visits from CPS.
These were the same people who insisted in the 90s that we teach every kid about stranger danger while the actual causes of that kind of stuff, which has always been overwhelmingly someone known to the family, is ignored.
The same people who insisted you were going to be constantly bombarded with offers of free drugs which had of course been spiked to kill you, or that your halloween candy would definitely be poison because one time a weird uncle harmed their family that way, or that "Rainbow Parties" are a real thing that anyone should have ever cared about.
These people are insanely credulous, and live in perpetual fear of whatever Nancy Grace insists is coming to kill them tomorrow.
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.
Norwegian here.
I rescued a girl one year older than me from a small stream/brook that had grown a bit larger due to rainwater when I was 7 years old.
Also walked to/from school alone from when I was 6 years old. I remember parents were allowed to walk us to school the first week, and then we were supposed to get there on our own. About 1km walk.
I'm very, very pro "let them walk to school on their own", and my daughter has walked to school on her own since she was 6 or 7.
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.
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.
However, looking at say, Downtown Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, the amount of crime does seem to increase overall. This is partially due to density, and also poverty. Saint Louis, a good chunk of Louisiana, parts of the South (Not including Texas), the Appalachian region, a good chunk of the Eastern United States barring New England, many of these regions have had issues with crime.
There's also the issue of crime happening in schools, including but not limited to drug sales (mostly between teenagers and not generally violent), and shootings (which is rare but far more common compared to other similarly wealthy nations).
Also I said Sometimes the Adults are scared due to truths, and exaggerations.
The "adult scared due to exaggerations" in this situation is you.
I would not feel safe walking the street, or being at home, or even being dead or in the afterlife, while such stupid and vindictive adults walk freely. Who knows what they'll get up to next!
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.
Not practically true at all. Everywhere has child endangerment laws, and I would bet that the vast majority of them can be readily used to prosecute the types of behaviors the free-range laws are meant to protect.
In Japan they call it a Katamari.
That seems excessive.
Huh? So if they live 10 miles away they must walk 10 miles? Surely not, but then how does it work?
What's the rationale for the parent being punished? I would understand the government employing programs to encourage parents to develop their child's autonomy, but forcing them under threat of punishment? What if there are particular circumstances, like medical conditions, or they keep seeing something sus along the way one week? How to go about things with a minor should ultimately be by the parent's judgment, since they're the most informed on their circumstances.
One can instantly figure out why it's pretty smart to have the school assert a policy here based on your following ideas that it "should ultimately be the parent's judgment" and what if "they see something sus."
The current child-, parent-, and civilization-damaging child management system in the US is the direct consequence of simply "I saw something sus" and "I'm the parent so I know what's best."
It's kind of funny that the post is about a parent being punished for giving their kid some autonomy and how that punishment reflects something being wrong with the US. Someone from Switzerland shares how they punish parents for not giving their kid autonomy in a certain way, and you come saying "it's pretty smart" and "civilization-damaging child management system in the US is the direct consequence of simply [...] 'I'm the parent so I know what's best.'", defending punishing parents for parenting...
I see that as the constant in both cases, and what seems backwards. The problem of the post isn't about whether or not the kid walks outside on their own; it's about people not respecting the parent's judgment in how they raise their kid. That problem also seems present in Switzerland by what's being shared and it's apparently what you'd like the US to switch to, which ultimately wouldn't be a switch.
You'd then have a post about a parent being punished for taking their kid to school under a given set of circumstances that makes the punishment unfair, the exact parallel of the current post.
> it's pretty smart to have the school assert a policy here based on your following ideas that it "should ultimately be the parent's judgment"
This is the same busybody mentality that leads to what happened to the mom of the post.
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.
Aunts and uncles, parents, coaches, family friends, community leaders, religious leaders, day care employees, etc
They never seem to even acknowledge that, let alone care about fixing it.
This was known from the statistics even before these people insisted every school teach children about "Stranger danger" because these specific people are utterly incapable of overriding primal fear, fed by "news" they insist on watching, with factual reality.
And before to say that I'm crazy or trolling, we need to remind that some estimates claim that until 300,000 small immigrant children could had vanished in the last decades after being taken by the USA government. Even if the real value is a tenth of that, we would be still talking about a very concerning and astonishing cipher
And we need to remind that ICE has happily employed some very seedy people lately. Journalists disclosed some workers with a criminal past that includes sexual assaults to minors and that wouldn't be allowed to work with minors in any other circumstance.
The sad truth is that lots of recent recordings prove that criminals are now allowed to shop for children in the streets and parks and take them somewhere with them, as long as this children aren't white. And some of this children are not seen again. Nobody in the government can explain were they went.
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.
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.
That's why they don't go outside. You can teach them to run from the panel vans; teaching them to run from the police (who were called by some Karen) is much more difficult.
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.
It's too conceptually big for some people to put into the 'fear bank' to be relied upon.
For the threat to be near-universally relied upon, it needs to:
(a) have a physical presence, and
(b) be within 2 orders of magnitude of size to trigger physical alertness (tick -> herd of elephants), but also
(c) not be (immediately dangerous/lethal that the only solution is to never meet it)
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.
The criminal definition apparently has no such modification.
E: removed a double ‘likely’
Joke's on them because now she has rights.
I'm being a little hyperbolic but not nearly as much as I wish I was. The .gov can make just about anything stick if it's civil. Criminal is where your rights really kick in.
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.
I'd call security too. Not my monkey, not my circus.
Take off my uniform.
My partner spent several years in childcare, both at centers and as a nanny. We're out in public and she sees a crying child? She goes to it, talks to it, hugs it perhaps, reassures.
Me? Not a chance. For better or worse, societal conditioning is that that is something I as a male /do/ /not/ /do/. Because it's nefarious that I'd even want to.
Many of us find it frustrating, though exposure is almost random. Someone who used to live on our street used to get very upset about trash cans being visible from the street, for instance. I think this person moved in the last two or three years because the passive aggressive HOA letters about this apparently heinous nuisance have stopped. But among groups of affluent people, I find that a small percentage never outgrew the tattle-tale phase and still behave in such a way into their sixties, seventies and eighties.
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.
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.
Though in this case the kid was walking all in a gated community.
It's far from improbable that a family court judge would have a bone to pick. Law enforcement gets a weird lens about public safety because of selection bias.
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.
The American version - https://youtu.be/VhGTtWsW9F8
SNL parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhGTtWsW9F8
Here is the Virginia code on contributing to the delinquency of a minor: https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter5/secti...
The only portion that is even remotely relevant is:
> (b) renders a child delinquent, in need of services, in need of supervision, or abused or neglected as defined in § 16.1-228;
However, here is that section: https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/16.1-228/
Paragraph 2 is the relevant one:
> No child whose parent or other person responsible for his care allows the child to engage in independent activities without adult supervision shall for that reason alone be considered to be an abused or neglected child, provided that (a) such independent activities are appropriate based on the child's age, maturity, and physical and mental abilities and (b) such lack of supervision does not constitute conduct that is so grossly negligent as to endanger the health or safety of the child. Such independent activities include traveling to or from school or nearby locations by bicycle or on foot, playing outdoors, or remaining at home for a reasonable period of time.
I would think that in order to justify a conviction, prosecutors would have had to overcome the above by showing evidence that this particular child is INCAPABLE of safely walking to a nearby location within his neighborhood, or that the child ACTUALLY DID put himself in danger, i.e. by entering the pond.
Something tells me that evidence does not exist, and the judge ruled based on something other than a correct reading of the law.
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.
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.
https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_163.545#google_vignet...
>A person having custody or control of a child under 10 years of age commits the crime of child neglect in the second degree if, with criminal negligence, the person leaves the child unattended in or at any place for such period of time as may be likely to endanger the health or welfare of such child.
It seems like a much healthier way to live than in constant fear.
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.
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
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.
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.
they are probably right and I can certainly bet my money there are way way more cars in small EU country than there were 30 years ago (assuming you had her at least at 30, if later, then the difference will be even starker)
my kids school is ~1.1km walk, son is walking to/from school by himself maybe from 3rd grade (8.5yo) with classmate(s), I still walk my 4th grade (8yo) daugher to school in the morning (unreliable/inconsistent slow classmate living nearby), at least I get some exercise working from home (if I didnt have time to walk them and help them with backpacks I would probably let them go by themselves earlier)
the main reason I still walk her is crossing the road, because I consider Prague roads dangerous even for adult pedestrian, let alone for kid, too many crazies driving here cars
other big reason is heavy backpack when they have to lug tons of books/workbooks
on the way back they go home either with classmates or together already for years, used to pick them up only in 1st and maybe 2nd grade
I will say, we have a LOT of elderly retired people who live here. It's not uncommon to hear sirens because someone is having a medical episode, and the security office is helpful with responding to those and helping with EMS. They are also helpful for doing well checks on the elderly when they haven't been responsive to others.
That being said, a lot of what they do is run radar and evidently do absolutely atrocious behavior like this. One of the flip sides of the retired population is that many of them devote their lives to reporting their neighbors to The Authorities – generally the HOA or security office. In this case, I guess the informant went straight to the cops.
- 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.
Very "interesting" times, indeed.
Have you seen this personally? Or are you repeating it blindly? Or do you not understand the difference between NGRI and innocent?
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.
This particular situation seems ridiculous. I’d be furious if I lived there.
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...
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.
Surely allowing your children to roam freely would be a major benefit of a gated community?
Look up her law firm, Holtzman Vogel. It's infamous.
Where did I say anything like that? I said that her story doesn't pass the smell test, that the only side presented comes from a very unreliable source who has a history of seeking outrage just like the outrage induced by this one-sided presentation of the case, and that both Reason and now you are gullible for blindly believing it. I said that it is very unlikely that she would be given that punishment under the circumstances stated, not that she should get that punishment under those circumstances. Obviously, she shouldn't if her story is to be believed. The whole point is that it is unbelievable.
Additionally, you don't have the right to a jury trial for minor offenses that carry a maximum sentence of less than 6 months in prison. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor in Virginia carries a maximum 12 months, but to my understanding it is possible for the prosecution to waive any greater sentencing in order to avoid a jury trial.
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).
Argue the law all you want, just don't break it or try to rationalize it after breaking it. The title is misleading, she was sentenced for neglect, not for "allowing" her child to do something. She told him to go to the pond unsupervised putting him at substantial unnecessary unreasonable risk, that's intent.
Furthermore when officials informed her that she was going against local regulations she doubled down and didn't want to hear it. "Point to the exact statute that says I can't do this insane thing" Ma'am please, nobody here does that.
This is your opinion. Presenting it as fact creates more problems.
Ponds are notoriously unsafe and even treacherous for small kids.
In any case this is law enforcers overreaching and creating unneeded and useless trauma in the family just because they can. Should never went so far.
5 year old kid who has been properly trained walking alone--I have no problem with that. My mother was blind, I was taught safe street crossing from an early age. I do not recall when I was crossing residential streets unsupervised, I do recall I was crossing major streets (at traffic lights) alone at 7. I'd take the bus to go visit grandma--no escort on either end.
But 5 year old unsupervised at a pond is another matter. Unless they have plenty of swimming experience that disturbs me.
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.
Actually the village would probably enjoyed that, I was a real "Swedish Emil" as a kid..
"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.
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.
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.
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.
More children ages 1–4 die from drowning than any other cause of death. For children ages 5–14, drowning is the second leading cause of unintentional injury death after motor vehicle crashes.
Wow that's a lot of assumptions baked into one sentence.
a happy consumer consumes less than an anxious one :(
Who would have thought that the actual anxious inducing situation came from trusted authorities, although well intentioned, causing harm to their community.
Very sad story. I hope this gets appealed.
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.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hiring-out-of-the-e...
It's literally a parallel world.
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.
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...
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.
This Mom had multiple chances to avoid this escalation: "Yes, thank you for bringing it to my attention. No, will not do it again." - Instead she decided to go full Karen(TM) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)) and went insane on the security, police, and child protection service.
You can argue that she had every right to be an idiot; but play stupid games, win stupid prices.
And with that also Agency, or lack thereof.
This is sad, very very sad.
Research the massively destructive bird feather trade in the 19th century if you want context for why the law is that broad.
Yeah, sorry kid, play inside. It's indeed safer there: you'll become a couch potato with anxieties and heart disease, but at least you won't get poisoned that much. /s
He is just a trojan horse that have trown usa under the bus. His agenda is not make amerika great again, just make trump great/rich again and the goverment is just a joke. Usa is just crazy, like kids cant play alone outside without parents gets called police on and gets sentenced.
We see usa as crazy, but one american that lived here in Europe told, its much crazy than we think. Then its really bad. At least there is some americans that still is sane.
Sorry for the rant, but it is so crazy to see the severe self-harming behavior usa is doing to themself.
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.
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.
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?
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