My parents would have been arrested, too.
Don’t let your 7 year old go to the park by his/herself. If you think that’s okay, wake up! However, these cops should be fired for arresting her. Probably tarred and feathered.
Boy oh boy would my mom be in deep doo-doo.
She didn’t even strap a cell phone to me. Don’t know if she even would have were they around then.
At the age of 7, a half mile is a bit far to let a child wander.
Everything is forbidden. Regardless of how this turns out, she will now have an arrest record and there will be certain things she cannot do without the king’s permission.
My great grandad brought up in NYC lived in the borough of Queens would take the subway to Manhattan just to walk around and look at stuff. He was eight at the time. No problems, no worries.
“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.”
She should sue the city for knowing that the park isn’t safe and NOT doing anything about it.
I can’t find it now, but there is a map that shows how far children are allowed to roam from home. In the 50s, it was something like 7 miles, which gradually got reduced down to less than a mile over time. Its a sad statement about both society and parents’ willingness to let their kids explore their community on their own.
The cops should be arrested for “neighborhood neglect” for wasting their time and our money on something as stupid as this.
I propose that if the cops or the city are responding to a “complaint” that the person who complained must be named in any charges/orders/etc. that are issued. That would stop the busybodies and free up our cops for real work.
before I was 8, we lived on a street where I would go out to play with my friends. the street was about a mile long and our house was in he middle. I had friends on both ends and would go to their homes without escort and we’d play outside until it got dark
when I was 8, we moved and the in the new town, it was similar except the area was less populated. by the time I was in 4th or 5th grade, I would ride my bike 2 miles to school.
this being said... there is a difference today compared to back then. back then, people weren’t hyper sexualized and if they found a pervert, he got his ass kicked. today, they let them out and allow them to continue. why? because then the people will gladly cough up more tax money for more cops and bigger govt
She got charged with a felony. There’s no law specifying an age limit for going to the park alone, btw, so this was just “at the discretion of “ the police. Ridiculous!
My parents would have been arrested for general creepiness if they followed me around as a 7 year old.
I was quite done with parental supervision at 5.
We played in the woods. Alone. All day. We had to come home by dark, which in June was 10:00 P.M. or so. Anything before then was considered weird.
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.
Felony charge, so much better to take the child away and put him in some state funded foster home (big government, control thinking).
But it’s OK to let your child cross the border into the US alone.
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.
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.