Re: Mother arrested because 10 year old son walked alone to store

On 2025-02-22 11:44 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Three months ago, a mother took one child to the doctor. While at the
doctor, her 10 year old son, left home alone, walked a mile to the
store. Now, he didn't have her permission but it wasn't a big deal for
the mother as her son hadn't gone anywhere he wasn't familiar with.
 The cop that showed up at the house arrested her for reckless
endangerment, stating that it was illegal (in Georgia) for a 10 year old
to walk alone.
 Finally, prosecutors decide not to proceed but charges are dropped
WITHOUT prejudice, which allows them to be refiled again within two
years of the incident.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0CKus1J1DU

I remember reading about a case where a woman was arrested because her kids were playing in a park literally across her street while she was doing household chores and watching them through the window. In another case, the parents were arrested because their kids were playing in their own back yard but unsupervised.
If today's "standards" had been applied when I was a kid, every parent in town would have been arrested. I don't know of a single kid in our neighbourhood that was ever supervised in their own backyard. We were definitely "free range" kids. We were free to wander pretty much where we wanted subject to our own whims. We were warned to be careful crossing streets and we had to be home before the streetlights came on.
I was probably about 10 when my (younger) brother and I took the bus to a movie downtown. We had enough for bus fare and the movie but we had some kind of a mishap with the bus schedule and got to the movie after it had started. We wanted to see the whole movie so we decided to wait until the next showing, which got us home later than my mother expected. I don't recall her being particularly freaked out, just baffled about why we were so late. (I would have called her from downtown but the cost of the phone call would have meant we didn't have enough money for the bus home.)
A couple of years earlier, our parents had gone out to a movie and left us home alone, with no babysitter. (I don't remember *ever* having a babysitter.) While they were out, all the power went out. It turned out this was the great blackout tnhat hit the entire Northeast, including large swathes of Ontario. The movie was cancelled but my parents had a major challenge driving back because all the traffic lights were dead, causing traffic chaos, so it took a while. I found a flashlight and kept an eye on my brother while we waited for our parents to get home. If anyone was genuinely freaked out, I don't recall it. I suppose we all just went to bed eventually. I don't recall when the power was finally restored.
Nowadays, kids under a certain age HAVE to have babysitters when their parents are away and not just anyone but a *certified* babysitter who is a minimum age of 14 and has taken courses to prove they know what they need to do if a child in their charge has a medical emergency or whatever. I imagine that has helped save a life or two, especially as kids these days seem to be much more sickly in terms of diagnoses like ADHD and allergies, so that's obviously good. But what is all this incessant supervision doing to the sense of independence and exploration among kids? I fear it is putting them all in a frame of mind that doesn't challenge themselves or explore things because they're all waiting to be told what to do and what they can't do.
--
Rhino