This Mom Was Arrested and Jailed for Making Her Son Walk a Half-Mile Home

One day, driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So, half a mile from home, Heather stopped the car and told him, "Walk the rest of the way on your own."

The cop told her, "To have an 8-year-old…walk by himself, that's a big problem….We don't know who's in that white van."

She says ignorant media mislead us about what's really dangerous. News reports cite Justice Department data and claim "460,000 kids are reported missing every year!"

But that just means: "460,000 children are late for dinner, stayed at school and forgot to tell their mom….The definition of 'missing' is missing for an hour!"

"You don't see people saying, 'I could put Johnny in the car, but what if we're T-boned?" Skenazy points out. "We've come up with a culture that sees a kid outside and fantasizes not just something bad but the very worst-case scenario."

The officer who picked up Aiden argued the worst-case: "You have a lot of crazy people out here," he told Heather. "I don't trust my child out of range [of] about 20 or 30 feet from me."

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