All that is a matter for the lemonade vendors’ parents, not the cops, Mr. or Ms. Government Shrinker.
If I see young children doing door to door sales, I’m calling the police too. It’s dangerous for young children to be going around to strangers’ houses with an adult accompanying them, and someone who sees them has no way of knowing whether their parents are aware they’re doing this.
It’s not like this officer arrested the kids. It says he “shut down the stand”, and it doesn’t say anything about any of their parents being on the scene to have any input, so most likely none of the kids’ parents were nearby enough to actually know what was going on. Given the lack of mention of any parents interacting with the police, it sounds like parents at the location where the stand was actually set up weren’t home.
This sounds like it may have been kids who set up a lemonade stand in one kids yard, with other kids helping out, but with the various parents thinking the kids would all be staying in the yard of the one kid’s home. Then some of the kids had the bright idea to go around knocking on doors trying to drum up business (and they may well have been splitting up, with only one or two children going to a home, while others stayed at the stand or went to other homes). What if one of these kids ends up knocking on the door of a pedophile, and out of sight of the other children?
If this was the scenario, and you’d been a parent who thought your young child was in Billy Smith’s front yard at a lemonade stand, and had no idea your child was actually going around the neighborhood knocking on strangers’ doors, you’d be thankful for a neighbor calling police to come check things out and put a stop to the operation.
Yes, the parents should have the final say as to what their children do, but when it’s not clear the parents are aware of what their child is doing, and a reasonable parent would regard it as dangerous, it’s just being a good neighbor to check into it, and call the police if you get the sense the kids’ parents are unaware of the activity. The police officer probably “shut down” the stand after ascertaining that the parents of at least some of the kids were not available to check with re permission.