By JOHN STOSSEL
What does it take for a parent to get arrested?
Surprisingly little.
Scott and Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texas, encourage their three boys to play outside on their own to build independence.
One day, driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So, half a mile from home, Heather stopped the car and told him, “Walk the rest of the way on your own.”
He’d done it before. But this time, before he got home, someone called the police.
“There’s a little boy walking down the sidewalk,” the individual told 911. “He’s a perfect target for somebody to kidnap!”
Police picked Aiden up and drove him home.
“You weren’t worried about [Aiden]?” I ask them.
“Not at all,” says Heather.
Scott adds, “It’s a safe neighborhood.”
It’s true. Based on data from the FBI, their town is among the safest in Texas.
Nevertheless, the cops arrested Heather! They kept her in jail overnight.
“It was terrifying,” she tells me. “I was just waiting, crying.”
The cop told her, “To have an 8-year-old … walk by himself, that’s a big problem. … We don’t know who’s in that white van.”
That’s just dumb, says Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids.”
“99.99% of white vans are guys coming to fix your toilet or mow your lawn.”
She says ignorant media misleads us about what’s really dangerous. News reports cite Justice Department data and claim “460,000 kids are reported missing every year!”
But that just means: “460,000 children are late for dinner, stayed at school and forgot to tell their mom. … The definition of ‘missing’ is missing for an hour!”
Kidnappings by strangers are extremely rare. Just being in a car is 400 times more dangerous.
“You don’t see people saying, ‘I could put Johnny in the car, but what if we’re T-boned?” Skenazy points out. “We’ve come up with a culture that sees a kid outside and fantasizes not just something bad but the very worst-case scenario.”
The officer who picked up Aiden argued the worst-case: “You have a lot of crazy people out here,” he told Heather. “I don’t trust my child out of range [of] about 20 or 30 feet from me.”
20 or 30 feet?
“It was a lot of his opinion,” Heather tells me.
Police officers can act on their opinions.
Local prosecutors went even further. They indicted Heather, claiming she placed her son in “imminent danger of death” and acted “against the peace and dignity of the state.”
Really!
When her employer heard that, Heather lost her job.
Good thing officials weren’t this obsessed with stranger danger when I was a kid. I walked half-a-mile every school day.
Crime was much worse then. Even including recent upticks, crime has dropped sharply over the past 30 years.
What’s changed is media hysteria. Any dramatic incident, anywhere, appears instantly on our phones. Frightened, gullible, math-illiterate officials say, better safe than sorry.
Now Scott and Heather say that, too.
“Will you drop your kids off again?” I ask.
“No!” says Heather. “We’re scared.”
“It’s not that we don’t think it was the right decision,” says Scott, “But what they decided for us was not very affordable. [Now] we don’t even leave them in the car to go into the convenience store.”
“Not because someone’s going to take them,” Heather adds, “but because someone’s going to see and call the police!”
Lenore Skenazy has persuaded eight states to pass “childhood independence” laws. They clarify that letting kids do things on their own isn’t abuse.
“You don’t want the government telling you when you can let your kids do things,” she says. “You know your children better than they do.”
Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Cops have become social enforcement clowns.
Can’t walk home can’t put up politician sigh can’t wear certain clothes can’t have an American flag can’t say what’s on your mid
GO TO JAIL.
Rob a store shoot at someone steal a car assault someone and you get a slap on the hand.
What a great country this was as the cops are enforcing political views and putting people in jail and causing thousands of dollars of Financial harm to innocent people .
My sister and I walked a mile to school everyday in the beginning. She was 6 and I was 5. When I got home, I would play outside. Sometimes I would walk to the laundry mat 4 blocks away and crawl around in the fuzz behind washers and dryers looking for dropped coins. A pack of gum cost five cents back then. People are the same today as they were then as far as bad guys, it’s some parents who have become woke. I believe it’s what helped us win two world wars. It helped me become independent and not afraid to get off the front porch.
When I was 8 years old, I walked a mile each way to school in Wrangell.
I was killed several times by strangers, and also suffered lifelong injuries from having to walk 2 miles a day, instead of getting healthy and in shape.
Oh….wait, no I didn’t.
I did walk the mile each way, but I escaped unscathed. (*whew! Wipes brow)
This modern infantilization of children is why we now have young people entering the workforce who are totally incapable working unsupervised, or coping with the most basic aspects of adulthood.
I’m talking about the young people who are constantly posting videos of the most mundane, everyday things happening to them, and part of their narration is that “I was literally shaking” in fear.
So instead of your kids learning the ropes independently, keep them in. Hand them a video game! Maybe a cell phone! Let their brains turn to mush in a safe environment.
A little scar tissue isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It builds character and furthers along the evolutionary process. Parents still have to be parents. Can’t or shouldn’t count on the entire village to raise your child.
More of John Stossel, please!
The police are militarized it’s actually scary. They are not public servants anymore. I’m not sure what they are.?? Just as a teenage girl with a knife gets gunned down while not endangering anyone but herself. Unfortunately we can’t trust police anymore.
Heck when I was 8 I was fishing by myself without a life jacket as often as I could. 59.1/2 years later I’m still here.