ArcaMax

A mom and dad who let their kids, 10 and 7, walk to the grocery in a city outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, are grieving today because the 7-year-old, Legend, died after running into the street and being hit by a car.

If you had to decide on a punishment for the parents, would you:

A -- Arrest them for manslaughter, set bail at $1.5 million, and forbid them from attending their son's funeral?

B -- Decide they've been punished enough?

The authorities in Gastonia, North Carolina, chose option A.

Jessica Ivey and Samuele Jenkins are facing felony charges of involuntary manslaughter and child neglect, as well as a misdemeanor child neglect charge, according to The North Carolina Beat.

The tragedy occurred on May 27. Ivey said it was the first time she allowed the kids to walk to the store. A witness said the older boy tried to grab his little brother from running, but he broke away.

The Gastonia Police Department issued a statement that said that while they extended the parents their "deepest sympathies" for their "heartbreaking loss," the investigation revealed that the children were unsupervised on their walk.

As if that's a smoking gun. As if no kids have ever walked unsupervised to the store. As if any parent who lets their kids run an errand is guilty of a crime.

"In such cases, adults must be held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure a safe environment for their children," the police declared.

Must be held accountable for an unpredictable tragedy? Would they be held accountable if the boy had been eating dinner and choked to death on a Brussels sprout? What if the parents had been at home and the boy slipped in the bathtub? How can parents ever guarantee a perfectly "safe environment"?

And, by the way, if the authorities really want to teach the parents a lesson ... do they think the parents haven't learned one? Who is served by this arrest? Do they think the surviving brother is going to do better after all this, knowing "that his failure to save his bother resulted in sending his parents to prison?" asks David Pimentel, a law professor at the University of Idaho. "Does anyone believe that 10-year-old will be better off in foster care while his parents rot in jail?"

The parents were arrested because our country has come to believe two things:

1. Any child who is unsupervised anywhere for almost any amount of time is automatically in danger.

Which means that:

2. Any parent who trusts their kid to do anything on their own just doesn't care if their kid lives or dies.

This modern-day delusion -- that any parent who doesn't hover doesn't really care if their kid is safe -- allows authorities to act as if Legend's parents deliberately did something so evil it warrants felony charges.

But in fact what the parents did was something normal, rational and common. "Ten-year-olds and 7-year-olds have been walking to and from school, unaccompanied by adults, for over 100 years," says Pimentel.

The implications of this prosecution "are very troubling for parents everywhere, who can never provide a guarantee against their kids getting hit by a car, even if they were right there with them," notes Diane Redleaf, author of "They Took the Kids Last Night" and legal consultant to the nonprofit I helm, Let Grow.

The sad truth is that often when something awful happens to a child, it's not the result of bad parenting. It's the result of bad luck. Scapegoating the unluckiest of us is about as cruel as it gets.

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Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a contributing writer at Reason.com, and author of "Has the World Gone Skenazy?" To learn more about Lenore Skenazy (Lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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