Virginia has just criminalized a walk to the pond. A mom of five was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community. Let that sink in. Allowing a five-year -old to walk by himself inside a gated community is contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
In June, when Parkinson was preparing for the bar—and also happened to be eight months pregnant with her fifth child—she and her then-youngest, Sam, went for a bike ride, as they often do. They stopped for her son’s favorite activity: collecting goose feathers from the path near their community pond. When they got home, he asked if he could walk back and get some more.
Parkinson said yes. It’s a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she’d seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning, she says. Off he went while she made lunch.
A passerby spotted him and called it in. A guard marched the boy home and told him bad people would have taken him. Then came three patrol cars, a security vehicle, and two Child Protective Services caseworkers. CPS logged a “Level 2” finding against Parkinson for inadequate supervision, the trigger for a registry placement, while prosecutors separately pursued her in criminal court. She now carries a Class 1 misdemeanor conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a suspended six-month jail sentence, and a spot on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry, where she’ll stay for seven years.
And all of this happened despite the fact that Virginia has a law that is supposed to prevent ridiculous outcomes like this.
In 2023, its Legislature enacted the Reasonable Childhood Independence law, unanimously, narrowing neglect to placing a child in serious, obvious danger. Prosecutors never challenged that statute in court, because they didn’t need to. They filed a different charge, delinquency of a minor, a law built for wayward teenagers, not a 5-year-old collecting feathers.
We don’t arrest parents for buckling their kids into a car, a far more dangerous daily habit than a supervised walk past a duck pond. Fear isn’t a substitute for arithmetic.
This habit that prosecutors have of searching for some law that they can twist to fit the situation at hand needs to stop. And the judge who allowed this travesty to play out in his/her courtroom needs to retire. For God’s sake, A 5-year-old walking a supervised sidewalk in a gated community with paid guards on every corner isn’t an existential crisis. It’s a Tuesday.