Karyann Parkinson let her 5-year-old son, Sam, walk half a mile to collect goose feathers near their neighborhood pond. Last week, a Virginia judge convicted her of a crime for it, and her family is now appealing.
Sam had made that walk safely six times already that morning, down a sidewalk buffered from the street by 10 feet of grass, through a gated community with round-the-clock security guards and a 25-mph speed limit.
A passerby spotted him and called it in. A guard marched the boy home and told him bad people would have taken him. Then came three patrol cars, a security vehicle, and two Child Protective Services caseworkers. CPS logged a “Level 2” finding against Parkinson for inadequate supervision, the trigger for a registry placement, while prosecutors separately pursued her in criminal court. She now carries a Class 1 misdemeanor conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a suspended six-month jail sentence, and a spot on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry, where she’ll stay for seven years.
I spent eight years in private security and executive protection before I earned my securities licenses and built a career assessing risk for a living, first for people’s bodies, then for their money. A 5-year-old walking a supervised sidewalk in a gated community with paid guards on every corner isn’t a crisis. It’s a Tuesday.
Here’s the part that should make every parent in the country furious.
Virginia already passed a law meant to prevent exactly this outcome.
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In 2023, its Legislature enacted the Reasonable Childhood Independence law, unanimously, narrowing neglect to placing a child in serious, obvious danger. Parkinson’s own attorney once interned in the office of the state senator who sponsored it. Prosecutors never challenged that statute in court, because they didn’t need to. They filed a different charge, delinquency of a minor, a law built for wayward teenagers, not a 5-year-old collecting feathers.
As one advocate for wrongly accused parents put it, nobody expects a boy to graduate from feather collecting to armed robbery by the time he’s fourteen. That’s not a plausible legal argument. That’s a prosecutor finding a side door around a law the legislature passed on purpose.
Parkinson isn’t an outlier.
The text of a related federal bill cites a woman in Illinois investigated for letting her 11-, 9-, and 5-year-olds play in a nearby park, a Maryland couple found responsible for neglect after their 10- and 6-year-old walked home alone, and a Georgia mother arrested when her 10-year-old walked a mile from the house. In May, Utah Republican Rep. Blake Moore joined Virginia Democrat Rep. Jennifer McClellan and North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx to introduce the Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act, which would require state child-welfare agencies to stop treating ordinary independence as evidence of abandonment.
Thirteen states have already passed some version of this law. Virginia’s own experience proves that passing a law isn’t the same as enforcing it.
I wrote last year about the resilience America has stopped teaching its children, and the bill for that failure keeps coming due.
Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson built an entire rule around this, telling parents not to bother children when they’re skateboarding, because managed risk is how a kid learns what he can handle. Virginia’s CPS apparatus has adopted the opposite rule: bother the child, arrest the mother, and call it protection.
The numbers say Peterson had the better argument.
In 2023, 40% of American high schoolers reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, 20% seriously considered suicide, and 9% attempted it. Those figures didn’t arrive because too many 5-year-olds were allowed to walk to a pond. They arrived because we’ve spent two decades stripping away the small, survivable risks that once taught a child he could handle himself, and replacing them with screens, structured schedules, and, apparently, squad cars. A kid never trusted with a sidewalk rarely grows into an adult who trusts himself with much of anything harder.
Prosecutors and caseworkers deserve some grace here. Nobody wants to be the office that let a genuine case of neglect slip through, and the rare horror stories are real. But the Justice Department’s own research puts the number of true stranger kidnappings, the kind involving a child taken and held, harmed, or killed, at somewhere between 100 and 150 a year nationwide, in a country with more than 73 million children.
We don’t arrest parents for buckling their kids into a car, a far more dangerous daily habit than a supervised walk past a duck pond. Fear isn’t a substitute for arithmetic, and a security guard’s imagination isn’t a substitute for either one.
My oldest son graduated from West Point and is training to fly Black Hawks. I didn’t build a man capable of that by keeping him a half mile from a pond his entire childhood. I built him and his brothers by letting them fail at small things, coaching youth teams where I watched other people’s sons do the same, before the world demanded that any of them succeed at something that mattered a great deal more.
Historian Ibn Khaldun noticed centuries ago that comfortable societies raise soft children, and soft children eventually make for hard times.
Virginia’s prosecutors, in their own small way, are proving Khaldun right one CPS case at a time.
Congress should pass HR 8757. Every state without a reasonable childhood independence law should pass one, and every state that already has one, Virginia included, needs to close the loophole that lets a prosecutor swap neglect for delinquency and land in the same place.
Until then, we’ll keep raising a generation of kids who learn early that collecting feathers can end with police at the door, and keep wondering, a decade or two from now, why they can’t handle much of anything on their own.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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