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.
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.
What the fuck‽
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.
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
Fuck, why don’t they have this kind of energy when thy get reports of kids in genuinely horrific conditions.
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.
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.
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Fear is a strong tool to control people. If she won’t fear the community, she will fear the state.
Meanwhile if she had killed her kids…
Mistrial!!!
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
Because people call the fucking cops on mothers.
And cars like tanks and car centered environments.
The same people calling the cops in these situations also tend to be the ones sayinghe ones saying “wHy DoN’t KiDs PlAy OuTsIdE aNyMoRe!!!1!” as if it’s the kids’ own moral failing.
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
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.
