Posted on 09/03/2026 7:48:38 PM PDT by Red Badger
The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.
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A mom of five was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community.
Until very recently, Karyann Parkinson lived in leafy Williamsburg, Virginia. She and her husband, Dallin, moved there from Utah so Parkinson could attend William and Mary Law School.
In June, when Parkinson was preparing for the bar—and also happened to be eight months pregnant with her fifth child—she and her then-youngest, Sam, went for a bike ride, as they often do. They stopped for her son's favorite activity: collecting goose feathers from the path near their community pond. When they got home, he asked if he could walk back and get some more.
Parkinson said yes. It's a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she'd seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning, she says. Off he went while she made lunch.
A passerby saw Sam and alerted security. One of the community's security guards escorted the boy back and gave Parkinson an earful. Pretty soon there were three cop cars, just as many cops, a security vehicle, and two Child Protective Services (CPS) workers at Parkinson's door.
CPS ended up investigating her for abuse and neglect.
The cops, meanwhile, charged her with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. CPS found the allegations substantiated and placed Parkinson on the state's child abuse and neglect registry. She will remain there for seven years.
The ordeal reached its nadir last week when a judge convicted Parkinson of the delinquency of a minor charge, a first-degree misdemeanor. This comes with a six-month jail sentence.
While the judge immediately suspended the sentence, pending good behavior and compliance with CPS' conditions, the conviction remains. Parkinson assumes this means she will not be able to volunteer in her kids' schools. She fears it could also mean she will not get her law license.
So let's look at how the events unfolded.
Parkinson is no newbie to parenting. She graduated Brigham Young University in 2012 with a degree in family science. She then became a family life educator and spent three years as a live-in behavioral specialist at a residential treatment center. There, she and her husband, a marriage and family therapist, oversaw the care of 35 girls.
In Virginia, Parkinson spent one summer interning at the Institute for Justice and another working in the law office of former Virginia state Sen. Jill Vogel (R–Winchester). Vogel was actually co-sponsor of the reasonable childhood independence law that passed in Virginia, unanimously, in 2023.
The bill says that neglect is only when you put your child in serious, obvious danger. So what happened?
When the security guard brought Sam back to Parkinson's house, he told the boy that his mom had done something she wasn't supposed to, and that bad people would want to take him if he was out alone. "This scared the crap out of him," Parkinson says now.
She admits she was upset with the guard and asked him where in the homeowners-association rules it says that a child can't walk by himself. The guard said it was against the law anyway and called the police.
When the first cop arrived, Parkinson told him, "I don't have any interest in talking to you." This did not make things go smoother. The cop called for backup and summoned CPS.
At that point, Parkinson asked her husband, who was having lunch with their daughter, to come home. "I told [the authorities] that kids need to be able to take reasonable risks," he says, "in order to grow up non-anxious." CPS responded, he recounts, that "a 5-year-old child can never be unsupervised."
Parkinson admits now that she is embarrassed by her confrontational demeanor. But of course, that was not the primary issue. The issue was whether her son could handle a walk in this community with 24-hour security, a 25-mph speed limit, and three golf courses.
CPS opened an investigation and found Parkinson guilty of a "Level 2 finding" for lack of supervision. That's what put her on the child abuse and neglect registry. The family immediately appealed.
As for the criminal charges: Parkinson believes the "delinquency of a minor" charge was an attempt to bypass Virginia's reasonable childhood independence law.
David DeLugas, founder and executive director of ParentsUSA, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal help to parents wrongly accused of neglect, scoffed at the charge. "Delinquency?" he asks. "Is the kid going to rob banks at 14 because he collected feathers at age 5?"
At the trial, the security guard, his boss, and the police testified against Parkinson. The CPS worker testified that Sam seemed happy and healthy when she saw him that day. Parkinson's friend testified to Sam's maturity, and that he could be trusted to walk to the pond without going rogue.
The James City County family services specialist assigned to Parkinson's case declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements. The prosecutor in the Commonwealth Attorney's Office for James City County said the same.
Parkinson's attorney, Andrew Gordon, took the case pro bono and argued that the only real "evidence" against the mom was that Sam was 5, and that, hypothetically, a host of horrible things could have happened.
But of course, a host of horrible things can happen at home or in a car or anywhere. We don't arrest moms for driving their kids to the store, even though they could be hit by someone running a stop sign. Hypothetical dangers are not reason enough to condemn a person. And neither is hypothetical immaturity. No one proved that the boy was incapable of walking a few blocks safely by himself. After all, that would have been difficult to do, seeing as he had already done it without issue.
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“. CPS found the allegations substantiated and placed Parkinson on the state’s child abuse and neglect registry. She will remain there for seven years.”
I may be mistaken but the only way CPS could do this without going to court would be if the mom was cooperative and agreed to let CPS investigate putting herself under their authority. Once there getting out of it is verrry difficult.
NEVER, and I repeat NEVER put yourself under the authority of any gov’t body that can deprive you of your liberty, especially whey it comes to your children. Make the SOBs work for it. Engage an attorney. Don’t believe anything CPS tells you because they do lie. Make sure decisions are based on actual statute and not on “guidelines” which don’t have the force of law.
Why is it poor judgment to let a 5 year old walk around his own neighborhood? Remember this is in a gated community.
That's one reason kids can't play in thier own front yards....PERVERTS, KIDNAPPERS and MURDERERS ARE EVERYWHERE!
In my hometown, we walked to the bus stop to get to kindergarten at the far end of our block and waited for the boys without mom, walked to first grade with neighbor kids without mom, which included walking through a shopping center on the way.
At 9 years old and if you passed a swim test and a life guard signed the back of your pool pass, then you could go to the community pool all day without your parents . They gave you some change to buy ice cream ir frozen candy bars from the snack bar…..we spent all summer there as kids.
I remember going fishing a few miles from home at maybe age 8. Alone. This was a gated community. I was a baby Boomer,….we wandered all over, in and out of yards and woods, in and out of friends” homes. Our mothers were home until the mid 1970, when they started working. …but we had all sorts of freedom when we were kids…..going all over town on bicycles to baseball practice….Little Laegue at age 9. Five years old? Alone? There were so many kids around, we couldn’t be alone, until we had solo stuff to do. This mother did nothing wrong. Liberals are sick people who hate boys. I once got sent home from school after a class trip, where on, I bought a knife out of a vending machine at a truck stop stop along the way. I was showing the knife to my friends, when the teacher confiscated it, I was sent to the principal’s office when we got back to school after the trip….I was 8 or 9 years old. My mother had to come to school to get me from the principal’s office. When we got home, my mother handed me my knife back and said “ just don’t bring it to school, ok?” I understood that…& never did. I just thought it was a cool knife and mothers did not hate boys in those days. They want to punish this mother for letting her boy be a boy. It is why they paid to live in a gated community.
When I was 6, I was walking daily to school, alone.
Together with all my classmates.
When I was 10 or 11 a friend and I rode our bikes about 20 miles from Geneseo IL to the Rock Island Arsenal and back. Might have made it to Iowa if the gate guard hadn’t turned us away.
It starts out innocent enough. Then by 10, he'll be catching and strangling them for their feathers.
Asinine...says a lot for the “gated community”.
Gated Community is a breeding grounds for ‘Karens’...........
Why I’d never live in one or an HOA or any place where I can see my neighbors. I prefer privacy.
My kids wandered in the Lincoln National Forest at 5.
I guess some people can raise more able children than others.
If she had killed the kids and claimed postpartum depression they’d be cheering her on.
In the 50’s, I started school at 4 (turned 5 that November) - walked half a mile to/from the school all by myself.
“My kids wandered in the Lincoln National Forest at 5.”
Well, my kids trekked to Everest Base Camp on their own, at 8 and 10 years old. I wouldn’t recommend kids at that age do that now, as things have changed.
When I was five I had about 20 square miles of open prairie as my own personal playground that I shared with about ten other kids. We rode bikes, motorcycles, camped out, hunted for tarantulas and red racers, had BB Gun Wars (one pump... one pump only... yeah right) and had a blast. It was my home away from home from age five until we moved when I was twelve. We had to dodge teenagers who were out there smoking and riding their own motorcycles and would beat the crap out of us if they caught us, we stayed away from the underpass because there was a scary guy living under it, and feral dogs. We had broken bones from crashes and falls, bloodied noses and busted lips from fighting with each other, and several cases of dehydration (Colorado summers are no joke). Good times. The scariest thing that happened to us was playing in “caves” that were literally washouts between the berm of a gully and the other side of the berm. My dad very quickly put a stop to that. We had no idea how much dirt was over our heads and what would’ve happened had they collapsed. Letting a five-year-old walk a couple of blocks to a pond in a gated community with security... c’mon. Hemming mama up like that... I sincerely hope this backfires on everyone who had a hand in getting paper put on her.
When I was 5, I was walking to school every school day. The nanny state is ever growing.
We also used to ride in the back of pickup trucks and NO ONE used seatbeats.
ON REAL WESTERN RANCHES-—KIDS ARE ON HORSES & HELPING WITH CATTLE DRIVES
Mine did just as soon as they could ride a horse. Probably 7 or so. Kindergarten anyway.
Sam was 5, and that, hypothetically, a host of horrible things could have happened.
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She could have strangled him.
Good thing he was out of the house.
goose feathers?
Better check if those feathers are from a federally protected species.
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