Having read the other thread in the Pit and LavenderBlue’s disheartening assessment of the Jersey 'burbs, my husband and I were discussing whether we should really move to Montclair in a few years as planned. Right now I live in Jersey City and I have to say that there are gaggles upon gaggles of unaccompanied 6 to 13 year old (screaming/playing their heads off) playing in the local parks, roaming around our urban neighborhood and just being KIDS. I can’t imagine who would think to report their parents.
I live in fear of raising a kid without some grit.
I think the problem is the kid was completely unsupervised for however long mom was at work. Lets say mom left the kid at home and left for a 8 hour shift. That’s child abandonment if the kid is 7 or 8. Nine is sort of a grey area. I might let a mature 9 year old stay at home alone while I worked. But I’d want a neighbor or friend available to check in with the kid.
I can see why mom thought the park was ok. The kid could easily walk over to her job at McDonalds during the day. Let her know he was ok. If the kid was 10 or 11 there would be less of a problem.
I was allowed to go to the local park at 9. But only for three or four hours. I was expected back home for lunch or an afternoon snack. Then I could go back outside to play. Mom gave me some freedom but only for a few hours at a time. I was a latch key kid. I often came home on the school bus and mom was at work. Summers she’d leave me at home watching tv when she went to work. I wasn’t allowed to leave my yard. I had neighbors that checked on me during the day.
In this situation, it seemed pretty clear that letting her kid go to the park was the best choice of several sub-optimal choices. I don’t see how arresting her makes the situation better for anyone at all.
I agree arresting her was unnecessary and just made the family’s problems worse. I’m not sure what local services were available. There should be some adult supervised activities for kids in the summer. Maybe through a church or community activist program? She should have been directed to those programs instead of arresting her.
I agree the reaction is way out of proportion. I especially agree with **pbbth **that the authorities should be helping, not punishing. Not a crime. But this isn’t just a kid playing in a park, this is the mom dropping her at the park as a substitute for child care. Seriously, what’s a kid going to do for 8 hours in a park, every day? I subscribe to freedom for kids but not without limits–kids also need a certain amount of structure.
(I have two children. They’re teenagers now and my wife and I still have tension over how much freedom to give them. I think they should have a lot and my wife is a helicopter parent.)
I infer that you think it’s a bad thing that gang violence and sexual assault are now considered societal problems that we all have to deal with, instead of hushed up as shameful “private problems.” I consider it an advance in civilization.
I wouldn’t call it a “substitute”. And while there are certainly disadvantages to such a situation, there are also advantages – I imagine children who routinely spend time in parks, on their own, have skills and confidences that kids who never spend time unsupervised in parks do not have.
This is like the statistics that say you are more likely to be injured by a vending machine than a shark. Yes, numerically that is true, but that is because it covers people across the country who have no access to the ocean. If you compare children who are alone versus children with an adult you will find that it is always more likely that the child with an adult will be assaulted/beaten/poisoned/whatever. You know what kids with adult supervision are less likely to do? Light bottles of nail polish on fire so they can pour them on the pavement and watch the “liquid fire” like my friends and I did when we were kids. Or spraypaint the neighbors fence like my brother and his friends did when they were kids. Or throw bricks off the overpass like the kids that shattered my mother’s windshield. Or any number of horrifying things that kids do when they are alone that they wouldn’t have done if there had been responsible adult present.
What was mom’s plan if it rained? Was the kid expected to walk home from the park? Spend the day at McDonalds until mom got off?
Latch key kids need to be somewhere secure and safe. Like at home or playing in their own yard. Leaving a kid totally unsupervised at a park for the entire day just leaves me uneasy.
This mom needed counseling and some community support. Arresting her wasn’t the answer.
It doesn’t matter if adults are present at the park – my point is that children are far, far more likely to be assaulted by someone they know then by a stranger. So a kid at a public park in which unfamiliar adults are sometimes present, is still less likely to be sexually assaulted than a kid at home, at school, or at a church gathering.
Sure – so this is not a perfect scenario. It was the best of a bad group of options.
Jeez. I was a latchkey kid from third grade on, so I started maybe a year younger than the kid in the story. I used to walk to and from school, which was about a mile or so from my house.
You infer wrong.
My point in listing problems in order of seriousness (from a skinned knee to rape) was not to lump all those problems together as equal. My point was that it is a shame that we can’t separate them, and recognize that not all problems are critical…
Somehow, when we began to treat serious social problems with appropriate seriousness, we also began to treat non-serious problems with INappropriate seriousness.
Kids need supervision, more than in previous generations. But there’s no reason why 12-13 year olds can’t ride their bikes on city streets; or why, in the age of the cell phone, a 9 year old can’t be left alone at a playground.
Fortunately, this would be unlikely to happen in California. I pointed this case out to my wife, who works in child protective services. She said if someone did this in California CPS would get called in to evaluate the situation. They would work to provide services to get affordable child care for the mom but also warn her not to leave her child unattended at the park every day. If it turns out the 9 year old was being left at the park as a one-off thing, no further action would be taken.
However, its also possible she was arrested for more than just leaving her 9 year old at the park. With cases like these, its extremely easy to jump to conclusions about what really happened. At the end of the day, we only ever get to hear the parent’s side of the story, which can be quite different than reality.
A nine-year-old should be capable of taking care of herself for an afternoon at the park… but dropping them off at the park every day as a child-care solution is not something I’d find acceptable. My concern would be less about any danger the child could be in and more about what that says about the parent’s overall level of care for the child.
And I think we should not jump to conclusions on the basis of an article that is so vague about the details. But then what would CNN “report” on? It’s not like there’s anything more important going on in the world…
I think its safe to say that, in 100% of the cases where a child is assaulted they were in the presence of another person. Unless you’re counting assaults by robots or ghosts.