This past June, a Virginia mother named Karyann Parkinson took a bike ride with her 5-year-old son and stopped by a pond inside their gated community to collect goose feathers from the grass. The two of them rode back home, whereupon Parkinson’s son asked his mother if he could walk back to the pond by himself to fetch a few more feathers. Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, studying for the bar exam, and—perhaps most pressing—making lunch, agreed. The walk was relatively short, along a sidewalk 10 feet from the road and across two intersections with crosswalks, which Parkinson knew her son could navigate successfully (he had done so six times that morning). But on his way, the boy was spotted by a concerned passerby, who notified a community security guard, who in turn notified the police. Before long, several police officers were at Parkinson’s door, followed by Child Protective Services agents. Officials in the case decided to press charges against Parkinson, and last week she was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and placed on Virginia’s child-abuse-and-neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.
Parkinson told me that her son—who competently walked the security guard back to their house after politely explaining that he wasn’t allowed to get into cars with strangers—had become distraught upon learning that he had apparently done something very bad. And although the police treated Parkinson as though she were negligent, her husband, who works as a marriage and family therapist and sees a lot of anxious young adults, tried to explain to the officers that they had made a deliberate choice to let their children encounter appropriate levels of challenge and risk. But the officials remained unmoved. Two weeks later, two police officers showed up at Parkinson’s door with a warrant for her arrest. “It just kept escalating,” she told me. “No one was taking a step back and going, Oh, this is fine. This is a fine situation.” She gave birth to her baby a week later.
Last week’s guilty verdict, Parkinson said, has been disorienting. Having spent 15 years taking some pride in her mindful choices as a parent, she has lately been doubting herself—“and thinking, Am I really crazy?” Her lawyers have appealed the decision, and Parkinson will receive a new trial.
People are having fewer children around the world for a variety of reasons, but some observers suggest that the steep expectations placed on parents—and mothers in particular—may be at least partly to blame for the fertility cliff in the United States. In response to a pervasive atmosphere of parental stress, a number of social-media influencers and public intellectuals have recommended that parents just do less—no more assiduously planned birthday extravaganzas, no more enrichment programs scheduled from breakfast to bedtime, no more hawkish monitoring to rescue children from any hint of danger or discomfort.
[Derek Thompson: The great depopulation]
But even though working parents may long for the days when children were more independent—a wish reinforced by countless editorials declaring the wisdom of letting children roam freely, away from their screens—society seems to have irrevocably changed. Most families now include two parents working full-time, and although many of these adults enjoyed the unchaperoned pleasures of a latchkey existence, the sight of children left to their own devices now horrifies not only the neighbors but also cops and prosecutors. In other words, parents are caught in a vise made up of financial demands and socially inflated expectations around parenting.
Parkinson’s story is not unique. In 2008, Lenore Skenazy made national news when she published a column about letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway home after a trip to Bloomingdale’s in Midtown Manhattan, a decision that many people likewise characterized as a form of child abuse or neglect. Skenazy, who has since founded what she calls the Free-Range Kids movement, occasionally publishes stories about mothers who are arrested or locked up for letting their children enjoy what used to be considered ordinary childhood pleasures. In 2020, a Georgia mother of five was jailed for allowing her 14-year-old daughter to babysit her younger siblings during the pandemic, when schools and day-care facilities were closed but parents still had to work. In 2024, a mother of four in Georgia was handcuffed when her 10-year-old son was found walking into town, less than a mile from their home, while she was taking one of her other children to a doctor’s appointment. Parkinson’s story has become a national phenomenon in large part because Skenazy first called attention to it in Reason magazine.
Raising children comes with enough trade-offs without enforcing unforgiving standards for parental attention, entertainment, and supervision. Notably, none of the cases in which police arrested mothers for their presumed negligence involved children who had been actually harmed. One hesitates to admit to such a taboo practice in print, but my own 10-year-old daughter has ventured out unaccompanied to hang out with her friends or pick up a few things from the store, and although I have fretted over getting pinched by the police, she treasures those opportunities to establish some independence even more than I appreciate time away from monitoring and enabling her various whims and desires. Mixing in activities that don’t require constant parental oversight is unfortunately a daring practice these days, but it seems crucial to balancing work and other adult responsibilities with the demands of raising children.
This is not to say that allowing kids some independence comes without risks: Cars pose a threat, as does every child’s latent desire to engage in mischief. Unknown adults assailing children with ill intentions, though a terrifying prospect, is exceedingly rare; stranger abductions account for less than 1 percent of missing-child cases nationwide. But these risks may nevertheless be overstated in our social imagination because ours is a low-trust society; in other countries, young people are granted much more freedom because parents presume that the adults they encounter will be helpful and supportive.
What Parkinson, Skenazy, and many other parents understand is that independence is good for children, who stand to build confidence and competence by doing things on their own. And fostering that independence is, in the end, the primary goal of parenting. The job is hard and bittersweet by design: Every step they take in the world is a step away from you. This, of course, is where their journeys are destined to lead.
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