What does it take for a parent to be arrested?
Surprisingly few.
with scott Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texasencourages his three sons to play outside on their own to help them become more independent.
One day, while driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So Heather stopped the car half a mile from her house and said, “You can walk the rest of the way.”
He had done it before. But this time, someone called the police before he got home.
“There’s a little boy walking down the sidewalk. He’s an easy kidnapping target!” the person told 911.
Police picked Aiden up and drove him home.
“You weren’t worried [Aiden]? ” I ask them.
“That’s not true,” Heather says.
“This is a safe area,” Scott added.
That’s true. Based on data from the FBI, their town among the safest In Texas. (Related: John Stossel: What would you do if you came home to find a stranger living in your house?)
Nevertheless, the police arrested Heather! They kept her in jail overnight.
“It was scary,” she tells me. “I was crying as I waited.”
The officer told her, “It’s a big problem to let an 8-year-old… walk by himself. … We don’t know who’s in that white van.”
That’s just ridiculous, says author Lenore Skenazy.free range children”
“99.99% of the white vans are people coming in to fix the toilets or mow the lawn.”
She says an ignorant media is misleading us about what is really dangerous. news Report cited Department of Justice data and Claim “460,000 children are reported missing every year!”
But that just means “460,000 children are late for dinner, stay at school, and forget to tell their mothers.” …The definition of ‘missing’ is missing for an hour!”
Abduction by strangers is extremely rare. Just being in a car is 400 times more dangerous.
“I don’t see anyone saying, ‘You can put Johnny in the car, but what if we’re T-bones?'” Skenazy points out. “We’ve come up with a culture where we look at our kids outside and fantasize about not only something bad, but the worst-case scenario.”
The police officer who came to pick up Aiden insisted on the worst case scenario, telling Heather, “There’s a lot of crazy people here.” “I don’t trust my child outside of my bounds.” [of] It’s about 20 or 30 feet from me. ”
Is it 20 feet or 30 feet?
“That was a lot of his input,” Heather told me.
Police officers can act on their opinions.
Local prosecutors went further. They charged Heather with putting her son in “imminent danger of death” and acting “against the peace and dignity of the nation.”
Really!
When her employer found out, Heather lost her job.
I’m glad when I was a kid that officials weren’t so obsessed with unknown dangers. I walked half a mile to school every day.
Crime back then was even worse. Even with recent increases, crime is plummeted Over the past 30 years.
What has changed is the media hysteria. Dramatic events appear instantly on our phones, no matter where we are. Frightened, gullible and math-illiterate officials say it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Now Scott and Heather say so too.
“Can you send the children again?” I ask.
“No!” says Heather. “We’re scared.”
“It’s not that we don’t think it was the right decision,” Scott says. [Now] I don’t even leave my kids in the car to go to the convenience store. ”
“Not because someone will take you away, but because someone will find you and call the police!” Heather added.
Lenore Skenazy persuaded 8 states to pass through Act on “Children’s Independence”. They make it clear that forcing children to do things on their own is not abuse.
“We don’t want the government telling us when our kids can do something,” she says. “You know better than your children.”
Mr. Stossel posts a new video every Tuesday on JohnStossel.com about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Scammers, Fraudsters, Fraudsters and the Liberal Media’s Scourge”.
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.
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