America’s Broken Parenting Culture Criminalizes Independence

After weeks of watching women in pink gather outside of a Massachusetts courthouse in support of child-killer Lindsay Clancy, America’s mothers finally have a real victim to rally for: Karyann Parkinson. The Virginia mother of five is a casualty of an overzealous criminal justice system and is serving a suspended six-month prison sentence.

Parkinson didn’t brutally murder anyone, but she was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She landed on the state’s abuse and neglect registry because she allowed her five-year-old son to walk half a mile to a pond in order to collect goose feathers.

Writing on the case for Reason, the queen of free-range parenting Lenore Skenazy explained, “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.”

Some important context: Parkinson was pregnant in June in Virginia when this much law enforcement showed up and lectured the mother of five on basic parenting. It’s no wonder she lost patience, and fast. Who among us wouldn’t lose her temper at such an overreaction in the face of a rational parenting decision?

Parkinson didn’t get in this much trouble because she actually put her son at risk. She ran afoul of the law because she got mouthy. Skenazy wrote, “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.”

Parkinson didn’t come to the decision to give her kindergarten-aged son freedom lightly. She was, like Skenazy, a committed and ideological “free-range parent,” of the belief that giving kids freedom is a vaccine for any host of issues plaguing most of today’s youth, from anxiety to depression.

Skenazy reported, “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. What was the “obvious danger” exactly?

The irony here is that the same week the news broke that Parkinson is only avoiding jail time “pending good behavior and compliance with CPS’ conditions,” Clancy, the Massachusetts mother of three, escaped a murder conviction after admitting to killing her three children.

It’s a frustrating and infuriating time to be a mother: those of us fighting to do it right, working to give our kids confidence and independence, are swimming upstream, one cranky security guard and patrol officer away from prison. Meanwhile, Clancy is comfortably tucked away not in prison, but instead in a mental facility.

There’s another contrast between these two mothers. Parkinson’s crime, if you want to call it that, came from believing her child was capable of more than the adults around him thought he was. She was willing to go against a parenting culture that increasingly treats children as both extraordinarily fragile and burdensome.

That culture has produced an entire vocabulary around how exhausting children are because we’re required to over-parent to such a degree. “Because kids.” “Mommy needs wine.” “Touched out.” “Overstimulated.” Children are simultaneously too vulnerable to walk down the street alone and so emotionally demanding that their mothers are expected to organize their entire lives around managing them.

Clancy herself participated in an attachment-parenting Facebook group, where she once described her son, who was three when she killed him, as “the most difficult human being” and wrote that “everything he does is a battle.” In photographs of the crime scene, beside a bloodied knife sat a wine mug bearing the words “Because kids.”

There is something deeply broken about a parenting culture that treats childhood independence as criminal while treating maternal resentment of children as so ordinary that we put jokes about it on t-shirts and coffee mugs.

If American mothers are looking for a reason to put on matching shirts and rally behind one of our own, we’ve been standing outside the wrong courthouse. Our solidarity belongs with the mother being punished for believing in her child, not the mother celebrated as a victim after killing hers.

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Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six. She podcasts at the Mom Wars and writes for its Substack.

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