My friend Jay and I were restless one Memorial Day long ago and decided to strike out on an adventure.
From our South Side Chicago neighborhood, we set out for the boonies, AKA, the ‘burbs. We didn’t know much about them, other than they were somewhere Out There. Perhaps there were forests. Or ponds.
We got on our bikes (mine was a Schwinn Stingray) and headed south and west.
Chicago, built on a prairie, has a grid street system. Every mile is a busy street. We passed 103rd Street, then 111th (each eight blocks is a mile) and made it to 159th. We also headed west under an interstate, passed shopping districts and industrial parks and ended up 14 miles from home.
By afternoon, we decided to head back or we’d be late for dinner. We drank some Cokes (paid for by paper route money) and pedaled home on achy legs.
We were 10 years old, on the verge of 11.
We didn’t ask permission. Our parents had no idea where we were. We were just out for the day, a normal circumstance. I’m sure I later told them of our proud accomplishment. I don’t remember being chastised for it.
I thought of that recently after seeing stories about Brittany Patterson, a North Georgia mom who was handcuffed at home in front of her kids and taken to jail. Her crime? Her son, Soren, unbeknownst to her, had the temerity to set off on his own to the store, a distance of one mile down a country road.
Soren is 10 years old, on the verge of 11.
I’ve written several columns over the years about helicopter parents, bubble-wrapped kids and a fear-obsessed society.
Credit: Courtesy photo
Credit: Courtesy photo
Such is life today, where worry about Stranger Danger, missing children and all sorts of other primordial fears has been collectivized by parents and is now, apparently, enforced by the nanny state.
A woman named Lenore Skenazy, who heads LetGrow.org and founded the Free-Range Kids movement, once told me that alarmism has become society’s initial impulse in child raising.
“It’s worst-first thinking,” she said. “You think of the worst possible thing (that might happen) from the outset.”
I spoke with Peter Gray, a Boston College psychology professor who last year co-authored a study which found that a decline in independent play in children is causing them problems with anxiety. That’s because they are unable to build confidence on their own.
“We’ve reached a moral position that it’s immoral to have a child do anything outside without an adult present,” Gray said. But it should be “up to the parents, not the state, to decide if something is dangerous, or not dangerous, for their child.”
The Pattersons live on a 16-acre tract up a hill that includes a forest and a flock of chickens.
Brittany Patterson picked up one of the birds and noted wryly to me that there’s a “herd mentality” surrounding how children should be raised.
Now, one’s initial hunch might be that Mama Patterson was nabbed by some well-meaning, liberal-leaning, safe-space craving bureaucrat.
No, she was hauled off by two deputies from the Fannin County Sheriff’s department, a North Georgia mountain county that went 82% for Donald J. Trump.
I remember talking with former Gov. Zell Miller about his hardscrabble upbringing in nearby Young Harris. It was a land of rugged individuals, a place where his widowed Mama hauled hundreds of rocks up from the river to build a home.
I don’t recall her getting dragged off by the law because ‘Lil Zell wandered off to some hollow.
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
Soren Patterson wandered off after his mom drove a sibling to the doctor. An hour later, a deputy called saying her son was in Mineral Bluff — a crossroads with a gas station, post office, flea market and Dollar General.
“Ms. Patterson seemed very unsurprised or concerned with this information,” the police report stated. It added that Soren “was visibly upset” by the interaction “and was unable to answer questions a child of his age should know.”
Ah, the markings of a crime.
The deputies were called by a Good Samaritan (or busybody, your pick) who saw the slight lad walking to town and followed him, thinking he was younger than his almost 11 years.
The woman pulled up and peppered the boy with questions. Finally, tired of her prying, he darted away. Soren told me he felt like he was “being stalked.”
Deputies brought Soren home and left him with his grandfather. They returned hours later to slap Patterson in cuffs, charging her with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor.
“Last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal for a kid to walk to the store,” Patterson told the cops, according to a bodycam.
“It is when they’re 10 years old,” responded the lawwoman, before leading her away.
The arrest warrant calls it a “gross deviation from the standard of care a reasonable person would exercise.”
Actually, that’s not true, says her lawyer David DeLugas, who heads up ParentsUSA, an org that represents parents who get sideways with the law in cases like this.
Authorities have told Patterson they’d let her go with a DFACS “safety plan,” which includes Soren having a GPS tracking app on his phone. She has declined.
In a phone call, the prosecutor on the case insisted to DeLugas that allowing the kid to walk on the road was dangerous.
But, DeLugas responded, “Just because it might not be something you would do or encourage or permit for your child doesn’t mean it becomes an unreasonable risk of significant harm [that would] subject any parent to second-guessing by others.”
Now, the nanny state is being second-guessed.
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