Karyann Parkinson is appealing a Virginia court’s decision to place her on a child-abuse registry after she let her 5-year-old son walk alone near a pond in their gated community. Parkinson’s conviction, which also included a six-month suspended jail sentence, has provoked nationwide outrage. The mother of five told Fox News, “We need to stop parenting from a place of fear and a place, you know, of obsessing over the unknown or some boogeyman who’s going to jump out from behind a bush.”
If a mother decides her child can wander around their neighborhood independently, who are the rest of us to decide he can’t? Why did neighbors call the community’s security team about this child? Why did the police have to get involved? And why, oh why, did a judge convict her? It is really only the last of these questions that is hard to answer. Because the truth is that everyone else seems to have acted in a perfectly reasonable manner.
Virginia’s “reasonable childhood independence” statute, passed a few years ago, says that unless you put your child in serious and obvious danger, you are not violating the law. It would be fascinating to see the transcript of the hearing and the evidence that found Parkinson, whose son has walked the path plenty of times and wanted to go collect goose feathers, fell into this category. Jonathan Adler’s account in The Free Press makes the decision seem bizarre and not in accordance with the law.
You can disagree with the judge’s decision, though, without faulting neighbors for reporting their concern or law enforcement for responding.
Like Parkinson, I live in a safe neighborhood. Drivers slow down for kids. And I’m definitely not worried about anyone jumping out of a bush. But if I saw a young child wandering without an adult, I might be concerned. And I’d be more concerned if I lived near water. It is common lately to hear that child protective services is overreaching and intruding too much into the lives of families. Far too often, though, they are not intervening enough in the lives of children we already know are in danger.
The body of 5-year-old Saylor Hayes was found on the same day the news broke about Parkinson’s son Sam. Saylor, who was autistic and nonverbal, had wandered off from her family’s vacation home in South Carolina near Myrtle Beach. She had a habit of going toward the water and was supposed to be wearing a monitoring device in case she did. Her parents, John Hayes III, 71, and Geordyn Hayes, 31, of Virginia, are facing charges of unlawfully placing a child at risk and willfully abandoning a child. They were not using the device, and the mother had been charged with child abuse with disregard for life in Virginia earlier this year.
I bring up Saylor because the truth is you have no idea which 5-year-old is wandering around near water. You could look at Sam and Saylor and see no difference in their age or fitness to be on their own. And if you think I’m just cherry-picking here, consider that just a few weeks earlier, the body of yet another 5-year-old autistic boy was found having drowned near his home in Florida.
Drowning is a relatively rare occurrence, but it is much more common than kidnapping, which is what most free-range parenting advocates generally talk about. Drowning is the No. 1 cause of death in children ages 1–4 and the second leading cause of accidental death in children ages 5–14, after motor vehicle accidents. All of which is to say that a very reasonable person might want to call the authorities if they see an unattended young child near a body of water. How young? Who is to say?
People who have pools in their backyards take some pretty serious precautions to make sure young children can’t get into them. Indeed, the law requires them to do so. And when parents don’t pay attention and a child drowns — because, say, they are on their phones gambling, or using drugs or drinking — public opinion comes down pretty hard on them. It’s not easy being the parent of young children. There are certain contexts in which even a 5-year-old requires vigilance.
Maybe a neighbor who is concerned should approach the child themselves, but frankly, in this day and age, approaching another person’s child can provoke such serious opprobrium (and even aggression) that I don’t fault bystanders for not wanting to get personally involved. And as for whether law enforcement should respond, the answer, of course, is yes. Indeed, police and CPS are always haunted by the question of whether they could have saved a child if someone had called sooner.
It is understandable that Karyann Parkinson would be upset by this intrusion (and she acknowledges getting pretty feisty with the responding officers), but it is also reasonable for people to inquire whether this is a 5-year-old who should be wandering alone near a body of water. Maybe instead of using this incident to kick off another round of complaints about the overreach of child protective services or “Karen”-bashing, we might give a few people the benefit of the doubt.