Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond
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.
A passerby saw Sam and alerted security. One of the community's security 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.
https://reason.com/2026/09/02/virginia-mom-gets-6-month-suspended-jail-sentence-for-letting-5-year-old-walk-to-the-pond/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
94 replies
We have become much dumber in the quest to make life for children safer. I grew up in a city with 1.5M people. When I was six, I was driving around alone on my bike, visiting playgrounds and friends. What the mum did was perfectly reasonable and the response was insane.
And people act all confused as to why children don't play outside as often. Because people call the fucking cops on mothers.
A few years ago there was a huge outcry because a mother let her 8 year old son ride the NYC subway alone. So crazy.
When I lived in NYC about 15 years ago I saw kids that young riding the subway alone to school all the time! It’s not like they’re walking down an unlit alley at night, for god’s sake.
And cars like tanks and car centered environments.
The same people calling the cops in these situations also tend to be the ones saying "wHy DoN't KiDs PlAy OuTsIdE aNyMoRe!!!!1!" as if it's the kids' own moral failing.
This so fucking dumb! She did nothing wrong and bullshit. Makes me so angry. Growing up being able to go wherever and raising my kids this way. Bullshit they now traumatized that child and now this woman will always have CPS on her ass for life.
Keep in mind once they are on you they never truly go away.
Allowing a five year old to walk a few hundred meters inside a gated community where he knows his way around is fine. Allowing a five year old to be unsupervised in the vicinity of any body of water is at least questionable.
It wasn't drowning that the authorities here were using as concerns.
I didn’t say the reaction by the authorities is in any way justified. (I get that my post look a bit like I am)
I didn't say you were justifying it. I was pointing out that drowning wasn't a concern for the authorities in this case.
it should have been their ONLY concern
Back in the day a friend and I would take off across the golf course we lived off of. We were around 7 years old. A massive golf course (St George’s). We would walk for kilometers in any direction we found fun. 5 or 6 hours later we had no idea where we were and would knock on a door to any house around and asked to use their phone. Would call mom, gave her the address and she would pick us up. We did this for a few years.
It may be anecdotal but we were physically and mentally capable enough at that age to get around some fair distances, not get into trouble and not cause trouble. There is no reason kids should not be given some freedoms to explore and grow.
It's all about control. Anyone with even a scrap of dubious authority wants to control people, and everybody up the ladder piles on to whichever victim is found.
It also about liability, and wanting protect yourself from it. The USA is such a crazy litigious place
How is a kid ever supposed to grow and learn and gain confidence to navigate the world when their community is so anxious they wont even let you cross the street. If anxiety becomes the principal guiding emotion for raising children, we are going to produce adults with terrible anxiety disorders who never learned to embrace complexity or uncertainty.
I saw this play out with the family that used to live across the street from us. In the 90s, helicopter parenting was a new, shameful thing - and this family was all-in on it. There was only one house between theirs and the bus stop on the corner, yet the mom would drive her kids there and have them sit in the car with her instead of standing outside like the rest of us.
They never took walks or rode bikes around the neighborhood. They never went to the playground alone, even though it was literally at the end of our street.
My family had much more freedom - one of my older brothers was so comfortable with his surroundings that he even drew a map of our neighborhood from memory. I remember using that map when I first started riding my bike alone. We developed strong senses of direction that continue to benefit us today.
Anyway, one day the oldest kid was playing with my brothers. As a group, they decided to go to the playground. When it was time to go home, my brothers decided to take the long way around the block (instead of the straight way down our street.) They were almost home, only maybe 500 feet (about 150 meters) from the same bus stop corner I mentioned earlier, when this kid started flipping out, bawling his eyes out that they "were lost." The kid was so sheltered, he couldn't recognize the bus stop he'd been waiting at every school day for years by that point, just because they approached it from a different direction.
Nowadays, that kid's an adult who only ever leaves home for work. He's around 35 years old, and both him and his younger brother still live with their parents and isolate themselves. Ever since Covid, they do Halloween by setting up a candy chute through a window on their door so they don't have to open it and interact with anyone. It made sense in 2020, now it's just another way for them to avoid interacting with the rest of the world.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but really I'm just sad for them.
...going to produce adults with terrible anxiety disorders?! I think that ship has sailed.
Thankfully in reasonable places there's help for that. It would be nice if we could stop passing out abuse and enhancing it in our kids though. Those of you that have kids anyways.
Fuck, why don't they have this kind of energy when thy get reports of kids in genuinely horrific conditions.
I think it's important to note that this happened inside their gated community
like, exactly where it is most unassailable, wtf is even the point of the gated community if you can't let your kid out of sight
I have often said Virginia is the "no fun" state for multiple reasons. This one will go to the top of the list. JFC.
Headline is confusing. Mother is from Virginia, event occurred in Utah.
Did you read the article? The family had recently moved to Virginia from Utah. This happened in Virginia.
Edit: Thanks, yes it is a confusing headline and summary. Bottom line: Both UT and VA are very "no fun" states! :)
Strike that. Reverse it. Carry on.
My kids, up until 2019, had to walk or bike their way to school every day. Sometimes up to 10 miles. If they had trouble they could use their flip phones to call me.
Fear is a strong tool to control people. If she won't fear the community, she will fear the state.
That story was so wild I had to check what instance this is and have a look at the sidebar… damn.
It’s just a catch-all news community.
Yeah, I saw… but at first I thought I’d stumbled upon a dystopian short fiction instance. Didn’t think it was an actual real world occurrence.
I used to walk to the bus stop all by myself in 2nd - 4th grade. We didn't live in a gated community. This was like 1998. The modern child is too coddled /s
So...you didn't walk there, then? Which part is sarcastic?
That kids are coddled too much.
Would this be unusual or even news if this wasn't a white child and mother?
No because the kid and mother would be picked up by ICE
Meanwhile if she had killed her kids...
CPS and the police did investigate Lyndsey Clancy considering she's currently on trial. These authorities are using the same level of scrutiny and prosecution against this mother as they did Clancy which is clearly too much.
I'm just imagining all those people who would have seen all the documentaries about Japan and how they let little kids go to the shops alone but because there is an entire culture of everybody looking out, it's quite safe... Then they try that in their US neighborhood and blam! Prison! If that's not a sign that y'all are insane, I don't know what you need :/
Mistrial!!!
There was an article recently about a mother who often let her kid do this same thing, and she'd had a few people reporting her. The police always just said "yeah, there's nothing wrong here, that person was paranoid." I hope it's not the same mother.
What the fuck‽
When I was 5 years old, I would walk through a underpass to the store, buy candy with exact change, cross the highway using another underpass, and go visit a girl. My parents never freaked out. I'm in my 50s now.
while i do think the response was overkill, i dont think a five year old should be unsupervised around bodies of water. it takes 5 minutes to drown, and accidents happen.
Sure but that's the level of risk this mother was comfortable with for her son in this situation. Each child is different and some you can trust more than others.
She also has 4 spares!
At some point it becomes less about her risk tolerance and more about what we (society) deem too risky. I don’t think it’s appropriate to let a five year old around a body of water unsupervised.
Now, it seems like what she was charged with had nothing to do with that, and obscenely charging her for letting him walk a short distance unsupervised was overkill and I don’t support it. But a consequence of letting him around a pond unsupervised was warranted.
Virginia has a Reasonable Childhood Independence law
It seems that traveling to or from nearby locations by bicycle or on foot is clearly defined as not negligent.
I like how “reasonable” is in the name of the law, and I think that walking to and from a park is reasonable.
It’s the part about there being a pond that’s less-so.
Again, it comes down to how mature the child is and who do you think is the most qualified person to determine how mature a child is for handling a walk on their own?
I think you’re missing my point. It’s not the walk I object to, it’s the lake.
And you're missing my point. This mother felt comfortable with her son walking back to pick up goose feathers.
Why do you think you know better about what this boy can handle than his own mother?
It is possible he can swim. It's a lake, not an ocean with a tide.
You understand that kids are different from each other and some develop skills earlier than others, right?
there are laws around private pool ownership like fencing it in, BECAUSE young children are at heightened risk of drowning. 5 year olds are NOT capable of being around bodies of water safely without adult supervision. i dont know why this is so controversial. kids drown every day, especially kids this young who have very little common sense or sense of danger.
I'm from an island and my mother was a lifeguard, I could swim as soon as I could walk. My mom got shit for not watching me at the community pool after we moved to the mainland. Meanwhile back home tourists would let their kids play in the ocean with no concept of a rip tide. But hey, at least they were watching them real close, right?
It's controversial because every child and situation is different. Parents shouldn't be punished for taking necessary risks to help their kids achieve independence just because society gets anxious. It's controversial because society is especially critical of mothers.
it is a good thing that the community was looking out for your safety. it doesnt matter how well you can swim, if you slip and hit your head, your ability to swim becomes meaningless. children do dumb stuff all the time, there are reasons for the concern
Yes, anything can happen at any time. I could trip and hit my head anywhere, still. I could have a stroke. I could have gotten hit by a car on my way to school, which is the far more likely thing.
Sooner or later you gotta be comfortable with leaving the nest, and an anxious society raises anxious children who can't function as adults.
Meanwhile in Finland...
Seriously y'all are neurotic in the states.
Well if you think that way you're just wrong lmao. But sure go ahead and vote for more tough on crime politicians that's what we need in this country.
If you think I’m support charging the mom for letting her kid walk to a park you’re reading my comment incorrectly.
CDC drowning data of children since mods decided to remove my comments arguing against letting children walk around ponds without supervision. smh.
What are you talking about? I haven't moderated anything in this thread.
Edit: Well now I am because you called someone a jackass. Enjoy your temp ban.