Mother Gets 6 Months For Letting Child Walk Alone In Gated Community
At age five I routinely walked - alone - into our small town’s downtown to buy Pall Malls for my mother at Mount’s corner store.
The shop was about 1/2 mile from our house.
I loved this errand, not only for the independence it gave me, but because my mom’s smokes cost around 25 cents a pack and she always gave me an extra dime to buy a Hershey bar.
It was a win-win situation. My mother got her cigarettes without pushing a baby carriage into town (we had one car and Daddy was at work) and I got a chocolate fix.
No one ever seemed to think that a 5-year-old walking alone was a cause for alarm and as I stood on tiptoe at the counter making my purchase, a bemused Mrs. Mount used to joke about how I should cut down on my smoking.
My, how times have changed.
Last week a law school student and mother of five in Williamsburg was sentenced to six months in jail - suspended - and listed as a child abuser for allowing her five year old to walk through her gated community collecting goose feathers. This is a neighborhood with security guards, a 25 mph speed limit and three golf courses.
Sounds like an upscale ghetto for wealthy busybodies with too much time on their hands.
Here’s an account of what happened from Reason.com.
Until very recently, Karyann Parkinson lived in leafy Williamsburg, Virginia. She and her husband, Dallin, moved there from Utah so Parkinson could attend William and Mary Law School.
In June, when Parkinson was preparing for the bar—and also happened to be eight months pregnant with her fifth child—she and her then-youngest, Sam, went for a bike ride, as they often do.
They stopped for her son's favorite activity: collecting goose feathers from the path near their community pond. When they got home, he asked if he could walk back and get some more.
Parkinson said yes. It's a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she'd seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning, she says. Off he went while she made lunch.
Everything was idyllic until a meddling neighbor spied Sam and called in the community security guards.
One of the guards escorted the boy back and gave Parkinson an earful. Pretty soon there were three cop cars, just as many cops, a security vehicle, and two Child Protective Services (CPS) workers at Parkinson's door.
CPS ended up investigating her for abuse and neglect.
The cops, meanwhile, charged her with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. CPS found the allegations substantiated and placed Parkinson on the state's child abuse and neglect registry. She will remain there for seven years.
The ordeal reached its nadir last week when a judge convicted Parkinson of the delinquency of a minor charge, a first-degree misdemeanor. This comes with a six-month jail sentence.
While the judge immediately suspended the sentence, pending good behavior and compliance with CPS' conditions, the conviction remains. Parkinson assumes this means she will not be able to volunteer in her kids' schools. She fears it could also mean she will not get her law license.
Ironically, Parkinson once interned in the office of State Sen. Jill Vogel. Vogel was one of the patrons of Virginia’s 2023 bipartisan “Reasonable Childhood Independence Bill” that unanimously passed both houses of the General Assembly.
The bill essentially defines child neglect as when you put a child in serious and obvious danger, not simply when you take your eyes off them or whenever a neighborhood Karen reports you to the authorities.
It was intended to put the brakes on calls to CPS for nonsense. Like allowing a child to be alone outside.
According to the account in Reason, Parkinson admits that she was confrontational with the guards, who scared her son, and also with the police who pounced on her. But this issue isn’t whether Parkinson was sufficiently submissive in the presence of authorities, but whether she put her child in danger.
She didn’t.
Parkinson is appealing. Not only to clear her name and to put knuckleheads in Williamsburg in their place, but so that she can someday obtain a law license.
Not to worry, Mrs. Parkinson. If Don Scott, who spent seven years in federal prison on felony drug charges, can somehow obtain a Virginia law license and go on to be Speaker of the House of Delegates, surely the state bar will forgive you for allowing your child to engage in unsupervised goose feather collecting.
We live in strange times when a woman who strangled her three kids may go free, but a loving mother who allowed her kid to walk around the neighborhood gets a jail sentence.
Make it make sense.
