as punishing parents for trying to raise independent children, [something that] used to be a value and now is worth a hefty fine or a stint in lock-up.”
After Izzy got home without incident the first time, Skenazy allowed him to ride alone again, this time on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). The security officers on his train weren’t happy. As she described it, the conductor wouldn’t listen to her son and radioed ahead to the next station, where the conductor held up the train until the cops came—the very stop where Izzy was getting off and his friend’s family was waiting on the platform to pick him up. The officer wouldn’t allow Izzy or the family to leave until he’d spoken to Skenazy.
Fluke, you say? No, because a couple of months later, when Izzy again rode the LIRR, Skenazy got another call requiring her to vouch for her son again. This time, the officer complained bitterly about the dangers of children riding alone, even though, as Skenazy pointed out, the LIRR rules state that any child over eight is allowed to ride the train unsupervised. “That doesn’t matter ma’am, what if someone tried to take him,” moaned the officer. To which Skenazy replied, “This is 5pm on a Thursday and I think that if anything bad was happening to [my son] the police would try to help him.” The officer only replied argumentatively, “What if two people were trying to abduct him?”
Such experiences reveal that the current default standard is that nothing is safe enough, says Skenazy, and police “are often in agreement that anything could happen.” Skenazy started a blog called Free-Range Kids, wrote a book, and became an advocate for changing the parental culture around allowing kids some freedom. She did a TV show and has appeared as a guest on dozens of interview programs and talk shows. At first she was talking mostly about changing the parenting culture. But now she spends a lot of time talking about reforming the law. What changed is that her experience with the police has been repeated over and over and over again by parents across the country and with far worse results.
Too often, authorities such as the local police or security officers impose rules of safety divorced from any real danger, by following what they perceive to be rules written so broadly as to be applicable to entirely innocent situations. In many cases, the police seem more worried about “what could happen” than even the most helicoptering parent, often overreacting in situations where nothing—nothing—has happened.
Such conflicts have visited injustice on some parents and have turned others into parental-rights vigilantes—a.k.a. Captain Mommies.
In July 2014, Debra Harrell of North Augusta, South Carolina, was booked for “unlawful conduct” toward a child for allowing her nine-year-old daughter to play at the playground near her home and her mother’s job. The cause of the complaint was another mother at the playground, who upon hearing from the girl that she’d been dropped off while her mother worked, decided it was best to call police to protect the girl. Did she need protection? According to other parents, indeed, she did. Lesa Lamback, who enjoys the park with her family, told a reporter that “you cannot just leave your child alone at a public place, especially. This day and time, you never know who’s around. Good, bad, it’s just not safe.”2
Skenazy has actually done the research, however. Given today’s crime statistics on abduction, as she explained to the New Yorker, it would take some effort to get your kid snatched away. “If you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped, how long would you have to keep him outside for him to be abducted by a stranger?” she asked Lizzie Widdicombe, her interviewer. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand years,” Skenazy said.3
The day of the alleged infraction regarding Harrell’s daughter, the playground was full of people; it was fine weather; and the girl could have walked the short distance home, where she had a key. Or she could have gone (and did go) to her mother’s job at McDonald’s to check in and have lunch. No matter. According to a lot of people, that isn’t good enough—children have to be watched every second, because you can’t know what might happen. What did happen as a result of alerting the police was bad enough, however. The girl was put into state custody because of her mother’s arrest. The mother was fired from her job for being in trouble with the law. (Her job was subsequently reinstated because of all the publicity.) Then the mother had to fight the charges, and a fund to help her was established. A lot of time and effort was taken up by the local criminal-justice and social-services authorities in order to find a solution to a nonproblem. Nothing had happened to the girl, which is a recurring theme in these cases.
PUNISHMENT WITHOUT A CRIME
Distance often doesn’t matter, as was evident with the arrest of 33-year-old Nicole Gainey. She was charged with child neglect in July 2014 after letting her seven-year-old son walk 800 meters from home to the local park. “I’m totally dumbfounded by this whole situation,” Gainey told a local TV station.4 “I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was letting him go play.” Gainey added that she planned to fight the felony charge. And fight she should, given that, at the time he was approached by police, Gainey’s son had a cell phone to call his mother, and he was playing with other kids whom he knew and who knew him.
Even when a parent is right on top of her kids, the law sees something out of the ordinary. A 2011 news item out of Houston, Texas, reported that one Tammy Cooper “was arrested and charged with child endangerment and child abandonment after her neighbor told police Cooper’s children, ages 6 and 9, had been abandoned.”5 In reality, the children were playing on the front lawn.
“After police arrived, Cooper told authorities that she had been sitting outside in a lawn chair watching her children the entire time.” No matter. She was handcuffed in front of her kids, even as the children pleaded with the police officer not to take their mom away. Cooper’s husband was away serving in the military at the time. Cooper was charged with “abandoning a child” even though she was with her children the whole time.
Cooper was reborn a Captain Mommy as she sued the LaPorte police department. According to her complaint, she “spent 18 hours in custody” and spent “over $7,000 in court and legal fees” before the unsubstantiated felony charges against her were dismissed. “The incident also led to an investigation by Child Protective Services, requiring Cooper to take her children to the CPS office in Houston,” where her children “were separated from her and interrogated by child abuse investigators. CPS found no cause for concern regarding the well-being of Cooper’s children and dropped the investigation.”6 As of December 2014, Cooper was still waiting for her case to go to trial so she could get her day in court. “I was hoping for some good news for Christmas but no!” she wrote on her Facebook page. “So I continue to be strong and pray for trial!! It must be nice to be all powerful and above the law to continue to keep this case from going to trial.”
A mom in Connecticut was charged with “risk of injury to a minor” and “failure to appear” after, according to Manchester’s police blotter, “she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza unsupervised.”
From the Johnson City, Tennessee, police blotter of June 7, 2012: “April L Lawson . . . 27 . . . was arrested by officers of the Johnson City Police Department and charged with child neglect. The arrest stems from a 911 call in reference to a missing child. During the investigation, officers discovered that Lawson had allowed her two children, ages 8 and 5, to walk to the playground.”7 Lawson had allowed her kids to walk to a nearby playground, but she became worried when she couldn’t find them later on (it appears they had gone to a neighbor’s house without telling her). When she called the police to help her find them, she became the focus of the investigation. Lawson was furious. “So I walked them across the street, watched them walk up the block to the park and went back inside. When the kids didn’t come home I sent somebody up here to bring them home,” Lawson explained. “I had no idea that I could get in this much trouble for just walking them up to a playground and play.”8
