What does it take for a parent to get arrested?<\/p>\n

Surprisingly little.<\/p>\n

Scott and Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texas, encourage their three boys to play outside on their own to build independence.<\/p>\n

One day, driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So, half a mile from home, Heather stopped the car and told him, “Walk the rest of the way on your own.”<\/p>\n

He’d done it before. But this time, before he got home, someone called the police.<\/p>\n

“There’s a little boy walking down the sidewalk,” she told 911. “He’s a perfect target for somebody to kidnap!”<\/p>\n

Police picked Aiden up and drove him home.<\/p>\n

His parents share their story in our new video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“You weren’t worried about [Aiden]?” I ask them.<\/p>\n

“Not at all,” says Heather.<\/p>\n

Scott adds, “It’s a safe neighborhood.”<\/p>\n

It’s true. Based on data from the FBI, their town is among the safest in Texas.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the cops arrested Heather! They kept her in jail overnight.<\/p>\n

“It was terrifying,” she tells me. “I was just waiting, crying.”<\/p>\n

The cop told her, “To have an 8-year-old…walk by himself, that’s a big problem….We don’t know who’s in that white van.”<\/p>\n

That’s just dumb, says Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

“99.99 percent of white vans are guys coming to fix your toilet or mow your lawn.”<\/p>\n

She says ignorant media mislead us about what’s really dangerous. News reports cite Justice Department data and claim “460,000 kids are reported missing every year!”<\/p>\n

But that just means: “460,000 children are late for dinner, stayed at school and forgot to tell their mom….The definition<\/a> of ‘missing’ is missing for an hour!”<\/p>\n

Kidnappings by strangers are extremely rare. Just being in a car is 400 times more<\/em> dangerous.<\/p>\n

“You don’t see people saying, ‘I could put Johnny in the car, but what if we’re T-boned?” Skenazy points out. “We’ve come up with a culture that sees a kid outside and fantasizes not just something bad but the very worst-case scenario.”<\/p>\n

The officer who picked up Aiden argued the worst-case: “You have a lot of crazy people out here,” he told Heather. “I don’t trust my child out of range [of] about 20 or 30 feet from me.”<\/p>\n

Twenty or 30 feet?<\/p>\n

“It was a lot of his opinion,” Heather tells me.<\/p>\n

Police officers can act on their opinions.<\/p>\n

Local prosecutors went even further. They indicted Heather, claiming she placed her son in “imminent danger of death” and acted “against the peace and dignity of the state.”<\/p>\n

Really!<\/p>\n

When her employer heard that, Heather lost her job.<\/p>\n

Good thing officials weren’t this obsessed with stranger danger when I was a kid. I walked half a mile every school day.<\/p>\n

Crime was much worse then. Even including recent upticks, crime has dropped sharply over the past 30 years.<\/p>\n

What’s changed is media hysteria. Any dramatic incident, anywhere, appears instantly on our phones. Frightened, gullible, math-illiterate officials say, better safe than sorry.<\/p>\n

Now Scott and Heather say that, too.<\/p>\n

“Will you drop your kids off again?” I ask.<\/p>\n

“No!” says Heather. “We’re scared.”<\/p>\n

“It’s not that we don’t think it was the right decision,” says Scott, “But what they decided for us was not very affordable. [Now] we don’t even leave them in the car to go into the convenience store.”<\/p>\n

“Not because someone’s going to take them,” Heather adds, “but because someone’s going to see and call the police!”<\/p>\n

Lenore Skenazy has persuaded eight states to pass “childhood independence” laws. They clarify that letting kids do things on their own isn’t<\/em> abuse.<\/p>\n

“You don’t want the government telling you when you can let your kids do things,” she says. “You know your children better than they do.”<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.<\/strong><\/p>\n