Earlier this summer, Karyann Parkinson of Virginia was arrested for allowing her 5-year-old son to walk to a neighborhood pond within their gated community by himself to gather goose feathers. He had to traverse two crosswalks — and based on the 5-year-olds you know, maybe that sounds like a problem. But Parkinson’s son had already made the trek six times that same day; the arrest came when she let him go a seventh time. Maybe you assume something awful happened on that walk. That would be incorrect.

Allowing her son to walk alone wasn’t a decision Parkinson made on a whim, she told The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig. Plenty about the moment shaped her call: she’d just biked to that same pond with the 5-year-old in question, was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, was in the middle of making lunch and studying for the bar exam. But before all that, Parkinson and her husband, a marriage and family therapist who counsels anxious young adults, had deliberately built age-appropriate challenge and risk into their children’s lives. When officers arrived, he tried to explain, to no avail.

Police and Child Protective Services didn’t care. Parkinson was charged, and just 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’ll remain for seven years. Her lawyers have appealed, and she’ll receive a new trial. In the meantime, the same 5-year-old who walked himself to the pond so confidently in June was left deeply distressed to learn that his walk had caused something very bad. And his mother, with 15 years of parenting under her belt, has started to doubt herself. “Am I really crazy?,” she’s asked herself lately.

I’m blown away that this is the state of modern-day parenting — mothering, more specifically — in the nation that gave us The Little Rascals and The Baby-Sitters Club. The stars of the latter were 13 and 11, left in charge of actual babies. I was a card-carrying fan-club member, and I still revere Kristy’s Great Idea.

Anyhow, noting the decline in the U.S. birth rate, Bruenig suggests that it may stem in part from the steep expectations placed on today’s mothers. Those expectations are partly why I birthed one child and am done, as I’ve mentioned in this very newsletter before. Who among us could live a quality life while consumed by what another person is doing every waking hour of the day — even when that person is our own child? Sometimes I need a 15-minute break before my kid and I play basketball. To get it, I let her walk to the park alone. Admitting that feels like a total setup for crucifixion.

Let me justify my choice now: I do it because she’s grown unreasonably anxious about all the strangers who might offer her candy or lure her into a large, windowless van (thanks, YouTube). And I could think of no better way to show her that things like that mostly happen in movies. 

I grew up in a neighborhood considerably worse than the one we occupy now — rife with poverty, gang activity and crack cocaine — and not once did I run into trouble walking to the park. I was young when my parents divorced and I spent a lot of time looking after myself and my cousins. My mother couldn’t have managed any other way; she had to work, as did every other trustworthy adult in our lives. She had no choice but to push me toward independence and sound judgment in her absence. I was eight the first time I spent a few hours home alone. I had the best time watching Nickelodeon and eating too much bubblegum.

Considering all that, I’m even more disturbed by how many mothers can relate to Parkinson’s experience. Bruenig notes that, in 2008, Lenore Skenazy was accused of child abuse for letting her 9-year-old child ride the New York City subway alone. For elder millennials born and raised in NYC or even Chicago, that was just normal. In 2020, a Georgia mother of five was arrested for letting her 14-year-old daughter babysit her younger siblings during the pandemic. And in 2024, another Georgia mother was handcuffed after her 10-year-old walked into town, less than a mile from home. In none of these cases did a child come to any harm.

Rather, they illustrate what Bruenig calls a “vise” — financial demands squeezing ever tighter on the one side and unreasonable, socially inflated expectations on the other. Most families now need two full-time incomes to get by, but the same adults who roamed freely as latchkey kids find that a child left alone today is grounds for criminal prosecution. Our children are all the worse for it — and so are we.

I know human trafficking is a real danger, and parents are far more attuned to it they once were. Still, stranger abductions account for less than 1% of missing-child cases. We’re teaching our children to fear what they’ll likely never encounter, while robbing them of the confidence that can only be built through their own trial and error, independence and agency. It seems like every other week now, I’m telling my daughter to try solving a problem on her own before she asks for help. But I must teach her independence. After all, the goal is for her to live a healthy life without her father and me one day.