It’s a very normal and very healthy thing for children to be allowed to have some independence.
A woman from Wilmette, Ill., found herself under investigation because her eight-year-old daughter was spotted walking her dog around the block by herself.
According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, the police showed up at Corey Widen’s door after an anonymous caller contacted them to report that the girl had been walking alone. Although no charges were filed, Widen was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services over concerns that the walk meant that her daughter might be being neglected.
“For something like this to happen to me, there’s something really wrong,” Widen said. “The funny thing is . . . I’m a joke with my friends because my kids are around me all the time.”
Widen also told the Chicago Tribune that she can actually see most of her daughter’s route through her windows at home, so it wasn’t like she wasn’t keeping an eye on her.
It might sound ridiculous, but this is far from the first time that something like this has happened. As the Chicago Tribune notes, many other parents have had the police called on them for seemingly innocuous things such as leaving their children in the car for a few minutes on a cool day or allowing them to play in parks alone.
Widen was eventually cleared, as she should have been, but these kinds of investigations should not be happening in the first place. They are, for one thing, very strenuous. According to an article in Reason, a lot had to be done before Widen was able to be cleared. Investigators had to talk to everyone from her children to her other family members to her pediatrician — which is a total waste not only of their time, but also of government resources. After all, as Reason notes, there was absolutely no way that this case would have ever met the legal definition of neglect, which requires that the parent display “blatant disregard” for the child’s safety. There’s no way that a mother allowing her own child to walk around alone in her own neighborhood along a route where she was mostly visible would have ever met this definition.
It’s a very normal and very healthy thing for children to be allowed to have some independence. When I was a kid, I used to walk around the block by myself all the time. Sometimes, I’d even ride my bike further than that, and I still very much managed to not die. All my friends did the same thing, and they’re still alive, too. Looking back, I am very grateful that I was given the opportunity to exercise a small amount of self-reliance by having the freedom to roam my own neighborhood alone.
It’s obviously important to keep a watchful eye on your children, but I also believe it should generally be up to the parents to decide the levels of independence that their children can handle. Believe it or not, most parents actually know their own children’s capabilities better than the police or government officials do.
No child should be neglected, and it is very important that we do have services to investigate and stop any instances where that is actually happening. The thing is, though, we also shouldn’t be clogging up those services with needless calls like the one that was made on Widen.
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