Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

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.

[dead]

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.

> 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?

The main lesson here is: don’t be confrontational with cops.