The time of free-range children is coming to an end. Remember when it was okay to walk alone to a friend’s house or go to a park? Now, those simple independent pleasures are considered bad parenting – potentially even criminally so. At least it was for Brittany Patterson of Georgia, who was arrested because her ten-year-old son walked less than a mile to town.
On October 30, Patterson took her eldest son to a medical appointment. She would have taken her youngest, ten-year-old Soren, had he been there when they left. Soren decided to walk to Mineral Bluff on his own, a town of only 370 people and not quite a mile from where he lives, to shop at the Dollar General store. The family lives on 16 acres with Patterson’s father. Her mother and sisters live just two miles away.
A woman saw Soren walking, asked if he was okay, then called authorities and reported “a juvenile in the roadway,” even though the boy said he was fine, according to ABC News. The Peach State defines neglect by a parent as a “failure to provide a child with adequate supervision necessary for such child’s well-being.”
Law enforcement soon arrived to pick up Soren and take him to his grandfather’s. Patterson said the sheriff asked if she knew her son was downtown, and she admitted she didn’t. “I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident,” she said. But the sheriff did not agree. “She [the sheriff] kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or ‘anything’ could have happened,” Patterson told the outlet.
Later that evening, the sheriff returned with another officer and arrested Patterson in front of three of her four children. She was released later on $500 bail. The next day, the Division of Family and Children Services visited and then a few days later, gave the mother of four a “safety plan” to sign. It required her to assign a “safety person” to be a “knowing participant and guardian” to watch over her children whenever she leaves home. And more, she had to download an app on Soren’s phone so that he could be tracked and monitored.
Patterson refused and contacted Attorney David DeLugas, the head of the nonprofit ParentsUSA that provides pro bono legal services to help parents who have been wrongly accused or prosecuted for child neglect. The authorities said they would drop the case, which could see the mother imprisoned for a year, so long as she signed the document. “I just felt like I couldn’t sign that and in doing so, would be agreeing that there was something unsafe about my home or something unsafe about my parental decisions and I just don’t believe that,” she told ABC News.
Penalties for Parenting
Patterson isn’t the only mother to be arrested for her parenting. In 2022, Melissa Henderson, who also lives in Georgia, had to go to work during COVID-19. She left her 14-year-old daughter to babysit four younger siblings. The youngest, a four-year-old boy, went outside to play with his friend and was gone about ten or so minutes before the young girl realized it. The friend, by the way, lives across the yard. Deputy Sheriff Marc Pilote said in his report that the boy could have been hurt or kidnapped, run over by a vehicle, or “bitten by a venomous snake,” according to Reason. District Attorney Jeff Langley said the officers claimed the boy was “wandering naked in a thunderstorm,” only he was actually wearing a shirt and there wasn’t a storm.
He added that the 14-year-old girl had “some measure of learning disability,” which made her unsuitable as a babysitter, the outlet reported. She had been diagnosed with ADHD – despite this, however, she was also vice president of the 4-H Club, had a GPA of 4.45, broke school records in varsity track, “completed the Red Cross Childcare program, and is certified in CPR,” Reason added.
Like Patterson, Henderson was arrested in front of her children and jailed but was released on bail shortly after. She, too, hired the services of DeLugas.
Children Yearn for Freedom
The Journal of Pediatrics published an article in 2023 that examined reasons for why children are so depressed and anxious. As reported by Let Grow, the article found that, “over the decades, as children’s independence and free play have plummeted, their mental health has, too. The article concluded that this is not just correlation – it is causation.” One of Let Grow’s goals is to improve state laws so that children can have some independence. Currently, only Utah has “explicitly protected children’s right to engage in independent activities.” Furthermore, “Let Grow conducted a 50-state survey of criminal and child protection laws and found most states fail to distinguish reasonable independence from neglect or endangerment.”
Since when did it become a crime to allow children to walk to a friend’s house or into a small town that is less than a mile away? While laws protecting children are necessary, restricting kids from being able to be safely independent and criminalizing what many would argue is solid parenting is making it so that free-range children are no longer allowed in America. Is it time to put our children in sterilized plastic bubbles?
