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

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

#111

Post by giarc »

KPGv2 wrote: post #14
ragazzina wrote: post #6

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.

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 ou…

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?

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

#113

Post by softwaredoug »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #19

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.

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

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

#114

Post by WarmWash »

neaden wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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

#115

Post by jopsen »

> 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).

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

#116

Post by MobiusHorizons »

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.

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

#117

Post by acomjean »

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.

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

#118

Post by stephencanon »

comrade1234 wrote: post #29

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…

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.

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

#120

Post by softwaredoug »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #116

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 “cont…

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.

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