When I was a kid, I spent quite a few years of my young life living in Pflugerville, TX. Back then, it was a small but thriving town that had its own town fairs, a hike and bike trail that spanned the length of the town, a movie theater, and most importantly to us, a Dairy Queen. Even as an elementary school kid, my younger brother and I would walk from our home, through our neighborhood, and into the school blocks away.
As we got a little older, but not by much, we would hop on our bikes and ride out of our neighborhood, all the way down the hike and bike trail, and hit the Dairy Queen at the end of it.
Our parents never worried all that much about us venturing out like that. In fact, they couldn't wait to get us out of the house, and that was a good thing. We got solid exercise, learned independent thinking, and got into and out of our own trouble. One can learn a lot of valuable lessons by making mistakes, and as a kid, you'll make a lot of them when unsupervised. It was a good time.
That was over 20 years ago. If my childhood was recreated today, I would be locked in a house and my mother would be locked in a jail cell for daring to let me roam around by myself.
That's what's happening in America today, and it's one of the most egregious things the government is doing to the American family.
Anna Kaladish Reynolds recently wrote about this issue at The Federalist, and she does a very good job of highlighting how disgusting this problem is in "the land of the free."
Reynolds detailed the story of Brittany Patterson, a mother of four, living in Mineral Bluff, Georgia, a town of only 370 people. It is the definition of a quiet town, sparsely occupied and very wooded. Her 10-year-old son would often play by himself on their 16 acre property, including in the woods, but one day he decided to walk into town to the Dollar General, where a woman saw him walking by himself and called the police. The police scolded Patterson, who in turn scolded her son for walking by himself without telling anyone, and she thought that was that.
However, later that night, things took an unbelievable turn:
Patterson returned home, scolded her son, and assumed that was the end of the incident. Later that evening, however, the 41-year-old mother was handcuffed, put in the back of a cruiser, had her mugshot and fingerprints taken, and put in jail.
Patterson said, “I was shocked, surprised, disbelief,” Patterson said. “Couldn’t really understand what was going on or why. “They told me to put my hands behind my back and then I had to ask to tell my children goodbye.”
The warrant states that Patterson “…willingly and knowingly endangered her juvenile son’s bodily safety.”
As Reynolds writes, Patterson is hardly the only person who went through something like this:
The story about a mother arrested for letting her son take a walk may sound shocking, but it is not the first of its kind. Patterson found attorney David Delugas, who is defending another mother arrested for letting her 14-year-old daughter babysit her siblings.
According to a 2022 article from Reason, a mother let her 7-year-old play in the park under the supervision of a friend teaching tai chi in the park nearby while she ran into the local grocery store to grab a Turkey from Thanksgiving. She too wound up in handcuffs and was placed on a list of people considered unfit for childcare:
And yet the state of Arizona has decided that the incident demonstrates Sarra's unfitness to care for children. Leaving two kids to fend for themselves even briefly—in a perfectly safe public park, with an acquaintance nearby—was an act of negligence, in the state's view, and one that warrants Sarra's placement on a list called the Central Registry.
People who are on the Central Registry are prohibited from working with children, even in a volunteer capacity. The Central Registry violates basic tenets of due process in numerous ways: It is run by an administrative agency, the Department of Child Safety (DCS), and the standard for placement on the Central Registry is probable cause—mere suspicion of wrongdoing, in other words.
There are a lot of ways the government can overreach, but I've always considered its ability to worm its fingers into controlling how parents raise their children to be the most despotic of all, and it's still an issue that's happening today.
I think many people pardon this intrusion because it's based on care for the children, which you'll find this is an excuse used by a lot of authoritarians to pass off their control-focused legislation with.
But the brutal truth is that this kind of "care" isn't care at all. It rips apart families on the basis that the government can do a better job parenting your children than you can. It's a signal to Americans that the government has more authority over your child than you do, and that it will wield that authority if you give them any flimsy excuse.
I can't help but wonder how many parents keep their children locked up in America and under constant supervision, not because they're terrified they might come to harm or be kidnapped, but because the state will come down on them after one phone call from a nosy Karen. I have a very strong feeling that America isn't a country of helicopter parents, it's just filled with parents unwilling to risk being taken from their kids.
What kind of free country are we living in, if that's our mentality?
And what does this do to our children? Nothing good.
Lower resilience to failure, delayed maturity, increased entitlement, social difficulties, depression, lower motivation, poor problem-solving skills, low self-efficacy, and a whopping load of increased anxiety. I don't think it should be any mystery why the sale of mind-altering drugs like Xanax are more profitable than they've ever been.
This isn't exactly new information. The Journal of Child and Family Studies released findings that showed the "helicopter parent" approach is ultimately destructive.... back in 2013.
Our children are prisoners of our own state governments, it's just sold as good and responsible parenting.
Since when is government good at telling us what is and isn't responsible and good? I think we've gotten some pretty solid examples of how it's not over the past decade or so.
Not that there hasn't been state-level pushback. To be fair, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Colorado, and others have been passing laws over the past five years that protect parents who let their kids roam.
My advice? Familiarize yourself with your state's laws, and if they're too tight, make it clear they need to be loosened. Make it a big deal. Get your friends and family involved. Get your neighbors to raise a stink about it.
Because if you don't, one day you might have CPS and a few officers show up at your door with handcuffs, and telling you that the state will now take over your parenting duties because it knows better than you.
It doesn't. Make that very clear.
