A Virginia mother is challenging both a criminal conviction and her inclusion on the state’s child abuse and neglect registry after her 5-year-old son was stopped by security while walking by himself inside their gated neighborhood.
Karyann Parkinson said her son, Sam, had set out on a route he knew well through the community, passing a pond as he looked for goose feathers, when a security guard found him and escorted him back home.
The encounter soon drew the attention of police and Child Protective Services. Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant at the time, received a six-month jail sentence that was suspended, though the criminal charge has not been erased.
She was found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, which is a first-degree misdemeanor, and was added to Virginia’s Child Abuse and Neglect Central Registry for a seven-year period.
Parkinson said she recognizes why the idea of a young child being alone near water would alarm people, but she argues the broader context of what happened has been misunderstood.
“I didn’t send him to play at the pond,” she said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” “I sent him down the path that happens to go past the pond to collect goose feathers… I know that a lot of people have seen the headlines and seen ‘5-year-old alone at a pond.’ And I think if I saw that in isolation, I’d probably be alarmed, too.”
Parkinson described Sam as a child walking through a familiar area in the only neighborhood he has ever really known, saying the moment quickly escalated into a much larger controversy over her parenting. “But what this was, was a 5-year-old on a pathway that he’s very familiar with in his neighborhood that he loves,” she said, adding that others treated it as “a really drastic parenting choice.”
Speaking to Fox News, Parkinson said the most painful consequence has been her placement on the Child Protective Services registry. Because of it, she said, she will be barred from volunteering in Sam’s classroom until he reaches sixth grade.
“We need to stop parenting from a place of fear and a place, you know, of obsessing over the unknown or some boogeyman who’s going to jump out from behind a bush,” Parkinson said.
She said her son was “pretty shaken up” after the incident but has since recovered.
“We had to do a lot of reassuring him and telling him, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong,’” Parkinson said. “He would ask me, ‘Mom, am I allowed to ride my bike to swim practice? Am I allowed to ride my back to the tennis courts?’”
“Now it’s just a blip on his radar. It’s not really a part of his life anymore,” she added.
