Mum jailed for letting a 10 year old go for a walk
Reason reports:
It was dinnertime on October 30, 2024, when police handcuffed Brittany Patterson in front of three of her four children and drove her to the station in Fannin County, Georgia. She was then fingerprinted, photographed, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit.
Her crime?
Hours earlier, around noon, Patterson had driven her eldest son to a medical appointment. Her youngest son, 11-year-old Soren, intended to come along but wasn’t around when it was time to leave.
“I figured he was in the woods, or at grandma’s house,” says Patterson, who lives on 16 acres with her kids and her father. (Her husband works out of state). There is no shortage of family in the vicinity. Patterson’s mother and sisters live just two minutes away.
Soren, however, was not playing in the woods. He had decided to walk to downtown Mineral Bluff, a town of just 370 people. It’s not quite a mile from his house.
And for that she was arrested!
At the age of ten I was walking around the neighbourhood as a kid.
On Great Barrier Island, you often see kids walking all over the island – sometimes miles from their homes.
A few weeks ago my seven year old asked me to pull the car over and drop him off so he could walk home (around 500 metres). I was slightly nervous about this, but agreed. It’s my job to work out acceptable risk and balance that against fostering independence. I’m working on him taking public transport by himself when he is eight.
The role of the state is to intervene only when it is clearly neglect, not to second guess parenting choices.
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