What does it take for a parent to get arrested?
Surprisingly little.
Scott and Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texas, encourage their three boys to play outside on their own to build independence.
One day, driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So, half a mile from home, Heather stopped the car and told him, “Walk the rest of the way on your own.”
He’d done it before. But this time, before he got home, someone called the police.
“There’s a little boy walking down the sidewalk,” she told 911. “He’s a perfect target for somebody to kidnap!”
Police picked Aiden up and drove him home.
His parents share their story in our new video.
“You weren’t worried about (Aiden)?” I ask them.
“Not at all,” says Heather.
Scott adds, “It’s a safe neighborhood.”
It’s true. Based on data from the FBI, their town is among the safest in Texas.
Nevertheless, the cops arrested Heather! They kept her in jail overnight.
“It was terrifying,” she tells me. “I was just waiting, crying.”
The cop told her, “To have an 8-year-old … walk by himself, that’s a big problem. … We don’t know who’s in that white van.”
That’s just dumb, says Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids.”
“99.99% of white vans are guys coming to fix your toilet or mow your lawn.”
She says ignorant media mislead us about what’s really dangerous. News reports cite Justice Department data and claim “460,000 kids are reported missing every year!”
But that just means: “460,000 children are late for dinner, stayed at school and forgot to tell their mom. … The definition of ‘missing’ is missing for an hour!”
Kidnappings by strangers are extremely rare. Just being in a car is 400 times more dangerous.
“You don’t see people saying, ‘I could put Johnny in the car, but what if we’re T-boned?” Skenazy points out. “We’ve come up with a culture that sees a kid outside and fantasizes not just something bad but the very worst-case scenario.”
The officer who picked up Aiden argued the worst-case: “You have a lot of crazy people out here,” he told Heather. “I don’t trust my child out of range (of) about 20 or 30 feet from me.”
Twenty or 30 feet?
“It was a lot of his opinion,” Heather tells me.
Police officers can act on their opinions.
Local prosecutors went even further. They indicted Heather, claiming she placed her son in “imminent danger of death” and acted “against the peace and dignity of the state.”
Really!
When her employer heard that, Heather lost her job.
Good thing officials weren’t this obsessed with stranger danger when I was a kid. I walked half-a-mile every school day.
Crime was much worse then. Even including recent upticks, crime has dropped sharply over the past 30 years.
What’s changed is media hysteria. Any dramatic incident, anywhere, appears instantly on our phones. Frightened, gullible, math-illiterate officials say, better safe than sorry.
Now Scott and Heather say that, too.
“Will you drop your kids off again?” I ask.
“No!” says Heather. “We’re scared.”
“It’s not that we don’t think it was the right decision,” says Scott, “But what they decided for us was not very affordable. (Now) we don’t even leave them in the car to go into the convenience store,”
“Not because someone’s going to take them,” Heather adds, “but because someone’s going to see and call the police!”
Lenore Skenazy has persuaded eight states to pass “childhood independence” laws. They clarify that letting kids do things on their own isn’t abuse.
“You don’t want the government telling you when you can let your kids do things,” she says. “You know your children better than they do.”
Photo by Kahar Erbol on Unsplash
The one who called should be called out in the neighborhood. The cop should loose his job. And to the government no crime was committed so FU.
Live and let live.
So glad I met like minded parents when my son was little. We let them roam the streets! The most supervision we provided was yelling, “CAR” , when they were 4 and riding bikes out front. When they got older, we let them ride all over. They figured it out! There were parents who thought we were crazy. Our neighbor across the street would take her kids ‘outside to play.’ She put up traffic turtles (little plastic dolls with caution flags!), traffic cones and police tape every single time. And then she sat in her driveway. Not even kidding.
Did she demand a jury trial? If not, why not? If so, what was the verdict? If acquited, did she sue the police? If not, why not?
I back the parent’s decisions with their children , of course and are aware of the area that left to play or even , as the mother has chosen the disciplinary action! It will be a cold day in hell ! Before l, stop giving a child a choice to play outside, even go for a walk or hang out with friends at the public park. Seriously though life is going to happen regardless
As a kid in the 1960s I lived in Richmond Virginia and Toronto Ontario. In both places the distance limit for school bus transportation was 2 miles. We lived about 1.9 miles from school in both places so that’s how far I walked until I started hitchhiking. That took me all over North America by age 18 and while I had uncomfortable and obnoxious (no ride in the rain, sexual come-ons…) episodes, I never experienced an actual threat. I don’t think American and Canadian kids get a sense of real people in the real world beyond their personal sphere of experience and what they get electronically, for decades now.
Lol, I walked school alone at 5 in a city. I’d have to sue the town and the police directly.
To be blunt Cops just follow their training ORDERS in order to keep their careers and that requires quotas, that means destroying many lives, socio-economic hardships for political gain. Unethical as they must violate human dignity and their oaths to our Constitution and Republic.
Cops want to be loved but their natural low level of emotional intelligence restricts them.
In my Indiana neighborhood, my (now 32 and 34) yr old kids were “walkers” and had a half mile route to get to school. Prior to Covid, it was deemed unsafe and K-5 began to be bussed to school. During COVID times when kids went back to school, there weren’t enough bus drivers and it miraculously became safe to let kids walk half a mile! And to this day, kids are still supposed to walk. Parents aren’t seen as negligent in this case. Money is what matters.
Two historic anecdotes from a different time: (1) When I was in 2nd & 3rd grades (circa 1956), I occasionally walked the 1.2 miles home ( 1817 central ave to 2826 Belvedere dr Charlotte NC. (2) A few years later, when I was ~11 years old, much like in your story. I ‘called my mother’s bluff’ and got out of the car and walked several miles cross-country, crossing forest, field and RR tracks, to get home to 6718 Sardis Road (Mecklenburg Co., NC). Back then, 65+ years ago, no one cared. The nation was a safe place to live.
The cop deserved to have intense pain inflicted upon him. then be fired. The prosecutor is a lying Twerp. Dignity of the state my —.
To darn many Karens minding everyone else business. When I was 8 or 9 we road our bikes 4 or 5 miles to go swimming. At 5 we would walk or bike 2 miles to the canal to go fishing all day. This was all done with our and other parents blessings. We would leave the house anytime after 7am go home at 5 for supper and back out till dark unless we were sleeping out somewhere. Then you would go home the next day when you got hungry.