Posted on 07/30/2014 6:13:49 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
"I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was letting him go play,” she told the station.
As Dominic was passing by a public pool, lifeguards asked him where his mother was.
“They asked me a couple questions, and I got scared so I ran off to the park and then they called the cops,” Dominic said.
Police found the boy in the park playground playing with other children. He had a cellphone around his neck that was given to him by his mother, a police affidavit said.
Police took the boy home and the mother was arrested and charged with child neglect.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.washingtontimes.com ...
It wasn’t just what we were worried about, it was what we would allow.
I grew up in the 50s. My dad had been a Master Sgt in WWII. When someone would come down our street driving too fast, he occasionally ran out into the street and jumped in front of their car stopping them. Then he would tell them that they could not drive like that there — he would not allow it.
It is all in what will be allowed by the citizenry acting on their own.
If I wasn’t at school or in bed I was on my bicycle, sometimes 5-7 miles from home, in Southern California, and we had a maximum security prison on the outskirts of town.
She did however prohibit me from participating the neighborhood BB gun "wars".
He just seems, in my minds eye, to be representative of every one of them posting there.
Early 60s, I was 9 and would take 2 of my friends and ride into DC with my father, he would go to his office and we would roam the mall/museums/monuments all day, then ride a Greyhound bus back to a bus stop 2 miles from home, then walk home. I imagine an awful lot of parents in the 50s/60s/70s would have police records if the same stupidity reigned supreme back then.
Felony charge, so much better to take the child away and put him in some state funded foster home (big government, control thinking).
It depends on the neighborhood and the child. It's not uncommon for children to walk or ride bikes to playgrounds. Many have to walk further than that to school. Besides that, it's summer and it's likely there are a lot of watchful eyes and ears when the children are out playing.
Do you really think it's good that children can't go out and play without their parents being arrested?
But it’s OK to let your child cross the border into the US alone.
“He just basically kept going over that there’s pedophiles, and this and that, and basically the park wasn’t safe, and he shouldn’t be there alone,” Miss Gainey told the station.”
The same could be said about some public schools.
The world has changed.
The author Beverly Cleary, who was also a children’s librarian, wrote the Beezus and Ramona series of books in the 1950s, set in Portland, Ore.
Nine year old Beezus goes to an art program at the library in the company of four year old Ramona, and leaves her little sister outside in the playground while she paints, and this is NORMAL, HEALTHY, RESPONSIBLE behavior for that time and place, for big sister and parents.
I walked half a mile to kindergarten at five by myself in the late 1960s, but I was often very frightened. One generation later, all the children under twelve perhaps, were getting rides or parent escorts.
My mother had to convince my grandmother, her mother, that it was OK for us to be out after dark and the Gypsies weren’t going to take us.
You left,out the newest threat to kids, criminal illegal aliens.
We grew up in the ‘50s and 60s and we were allowed to go just about anywhere in town but never alone, we always had to have a sibling or a friend.
The sixties and early seventies were the age of therapeutic imprisonment. A lot of perverts pretended to be cured, got out and went somewhere else.
There was a serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game. In 1968 he was caught IN THE ACT raping and beating an eight year old so badly she almost died. He served 17 months, this after skipping bail and working in a summer camp. A little while later he assaulted a 13 year old. Two years served that time.
A man once exposed himself to the girl who lived across the street from me. All the men in the neighborhood went looking through the woods for him, but I don’t think they would have beaten him up, just held him for the police. My own father said it was all overblown, that the man was probably just trying to relieve himself, and didn’t realize a young girl was nearby. And he didn’t tell me to stay in sight of our house. Ah, the sixties-early seventies, a loathsome time.
I don’t think I was allowed to go far at age 7, but that was because I was the baby girl of the family. My brother and I would walk two miles down McGregor Blvd. in Ft. Myers, FL when I was that age. He was 9. I thought that was the greatest thing. I loved the sidewalks, the palm trees, the smell of South Florida! And I loved that we could walk by homes of great men in US history. I did not fully grasp their importance at the time, but I had been told about them.
My brothers disappeared all the time when they were young. We had no cell phones. But everybody knew my parents, so things were different. When one of my brothers was three years old, he ran away from home. We had a maid. She made him mad. So he decided to walk to my daddy’s store. The police picked him up just a few blocks from the store. It was three miles from our house. He made it a long way. Lol. No one was arrested. I think the maid was fired. My brother (the same one) had a runaway three year old son. I think he made it a few miles before being apprehended as well. They were in a small town, so it was no big deal.
It is sad. We have parks near us, but I won’t allow any of our younger children to go without an older sibling.
Wow! All of the places we played at, unaccompanied, in the 50s. We lived in a medium size city and walked along the creek that ran through our neighborhood, made our way several miles to the Guard armory to watch them load military equipment, made our way up to the old “hanging hill” to crawl through the stacked iron sewer pipes. My mother would have been in jail for life.
Pfft.
I had a park to play in.
It was the multiple acres of woodland behind the house.
Flipside, these days you don’t know if some creeper is in that park hunting your kids.
By the time I was 5 the only instructions were “be home by supper time.” I did have to tell my parents where I was going and with whom (if I was not alone).
And no wonder why kids today are so fat. Parents are too scared to let them out of the house to play.
Kids walk up to a mile to school every day, but can’t walk half that far to a park?
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