Ford’s Colony in Williamsburg is a leafy, gated community in Virginia’s colonial-era historic region with 10 miles of trails and 24-hour security.
On June 5, 2026, Karyann Parkinson, a recent law school graduate pregnant with her fifth child, was on a walk through their neighborhood in Ford’s Colony with her 5-year-old son. On their way home, her son asked if he could collect a few goose feathers at a nearby pond. She said yes, confident in his ability to walk there and back safely.
About 20 minutes later, a security guard from Ford’s Colony knocked on her door, with her son by his side. He explained that a neighbor had seen the child walking by himself, and that he was going to call the police to report her. Within an hour, law enforcement and child protective services were at Parkinson’s door to inform her that they were investigating her for neglect.
After being placed on the child abuse and neglect registry for lack of supervision, Parkinson was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and received a six-month suspended jail sentence. Parkinson has appealed to the Circuit Court and will have a jury trial in 2027.
I stumbled upon Parkinson’s case while researching and writing a law review article about states that are trying to encourage childhood independence by lessening penalties on parents who allow their children to play outdoors while unsupervised.
Virginia, ironically, is one of those states.
Parkinson’s experience is not unique. In my scholarship and in my work as a family lawyer, I’ve seen how overly broad child neglect laws can fail families.
These statutes are being revisited as scholars, psychologists and journalists are increasingly finding fault with “helicopter parenting,” or overprotective parenting that limits children’s independence and autonomy.
Yet cases like Parkinson’s suggest that when the boundaries of neglect are unclear, the law continues to give parents a powerful incentive to err on the side of constant supervision.
Vague language casts a wide net
In 1974, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to promote child safety and improve how child welfare services are provided.
The law provides federal funding to states to improve child protective services systems. It also requires states to have procedures for reporting instances of child abuse and neglect.
To obtain federal funding, states must comply with certain investigative procedures and reporting guidelines.
However, states enact their own laws on child abuse and neglect, each of which includes its own definitions and procedures, such as determining who must report suspected abuse or neglect.
In an effort to ensure instances of true neglect don’t fall through the cracks, state laws typically use vague language. Tennessee, for example, describes a neglected child as “under unlawful or improper care,” while Mississippi law categorizes a child as neglected if they are without “proper care, custody, supervision, or support.”
This is how a child whose mom has determined he’s mature enough to collect goose feathers on his own ends up being drawn into the system: An agency could argue that she wasn’t properly supervising him.
The Parkinson family is not alone
Other investigations of mothers for child neglect under similar circumstances have regularly cropped up over the past 20 years.
In 2013, an Illinois mother named Natasha Felix let her 11-, 9- and 5-year-old children play in the park adjacent to their home. Even though she could see them from the window, the state determined she met the definition of neglect due to inadequate supervision, a finding that was later reversed.
In 2014, a South Carolina mother, Debra Harrell, was working at a McDonald’s while her daughter was on summer vacation. During her shift, she allowed her 9-year-old daughter to play at a park about a mile away, giving her a cellphone in case she needed to get in touch. Harrell was arrested for felony child neglect, spent 17 days in jail and temporarily lost custody of her daughter.
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A Georgia mother, Brittany Patterson, was investigated in 2024 because her 10-year-old son had taken a walk to a scenic mountain hamlet called Mineral Bluff, which was about a mile from his home. A woman saw him walking on the road and called the police. Law enforcement arrested the mother for reckless conduct. The charges were ultimately dismissed in 2025.
Parents put in the middle
Laws may encourage parents to be overprotective, but parenting research is recommending the opposite.
A 2020 study found that kids set free to roam on their own feel more confident navigating new places in adulthood. And other research has found that permissive parenting styles – the kind that can give kids opportunities to take risks, whether it’s climbing a tall structure on the playground or exploring the woods behind their house – help kids learn how to tolerate failure, distress and uncertainty, and ultimately develop into more competent adults.
That may explain why, in 2018, Utah amended its neglect statute to permit children to engage in independent activities like walking to school or playing outside, becoming the first state to do so. Since then, 12 states have amended neglect statutes to recognize childhood independence, including Georgia. After media coverage of Patterson’s case, Georgia lawmakers revised the legal definition of neglect to allow children of sufficient maturity and ability to engage in independent activities, such as playing outdoors or running errands to a convenience store. The definition further added that neglect should involve blatant disregard of parental responsibilities resulting in a real, significant and imminent risk of harm to the child.
Yet despite these efforts, parents continue to be punished for the decisions they’ve made when no harm was inflicted on the child.
A finding of neglect carries serious consequences. It can impact a parent’s future employment and can result in a child’s removal from the home. Concurrent criminal charges can carry penalties of imprisonment, fines and other conditions like attending parenting classes and mandated compliance with child protective services directives. Since mothers are more likely to be the primary caregiver, they face increased exposure and scrutiny under these laws.
Weighing safety against parental rights
The Virginia General Assembly also amended its child neglect definition in 2023 to clarify that children could engage in independent activities without adult supervision, like playing outdoors or traveling to nearby locations on foot or bicycle. It stipulated that activities simply needed to be age-appropriate and the child would not be endangered, but it didn’t define a minimum age for when children could be unsupervised.
In other words, the Legislature left it to parents to determine when their child would be mature enough to participate in unsupervised activities.
So how did Karyann Parkinson, who had no history of abuse or neglect, still get caught up in the system?
In the police report, the officer noted that the 5-year-old was walking unattended about a half-mile from his home, in close proximity to a pond. The officer also added that Parkinson “demonstrated no remorse” and that she believed her son was mature enough to walk there and back for the feathers.
Parkinson has argued that she decided to allow her son to collect feathers on his own to instill confidence in him, not to put him at risk. Her son had been placed in swimming lessons to ensure he would be safe around bodies of water.
Police officers, social workers and prosecutors all share a fear of overlooking abuse or harm. And to be sure, this has also happened: In 2025, a 32-year-old Connecticut man set fire to a home where he was allegedly being held captive for over two decades. Ensuing reporting found that child protection authorities had failed to identify and stop the alleged abuse in the years prior, despite repeated concerns raised by teachers and schoolmates.
When serious cases like this one come to light, the resulting media scrutiny can expose agencies to public criticism and cost state workers their jobs. This scrutiny can create incentives for law enforcement and child welfare agencies to investigate cases thoroughly.
At the same time, it can also foster a culture of overreaction.
A commonsense approach to child protection balances safety with knowledge of the specific child and parents involved. And I don’t think it’s in a state’s interest to have frivolous cases consume limited resources, particularly given the high turnover and heavy workloads in child protective services.
