Woman arrested for making daughters walk to school while supervising them

[Valin]

Hot Air:

Jazz Shaw

April 4, 2016

 

A strange case out of the suburbs of Chattanooga, Tennessee is making the rounds this month and it seems to take the question of government vs. parents and “free range children” to a whole new level. Fox News picked up the story recently, first reported in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, in which police responded to a report of a mother making her children walk to school as punishment for missing the bus.

 

(Snip It gets A Lot Weider)

 

These aren’t ideal conditions, but I’d like to return to the original question which the arrest brought up. Is it child abuse of some sort to make two school age children walk to class – a distance of between two and three miles – in mild weather with their mother watching them from a vehicle? More to the point, is it sufficiently negligent to call in Child Protective Services and drag them into court? It seems to me that plenty of children around the country make that sort of trip on a daily basis during the school year as a matter of habit, not as punishment. (Or at least they used to. I know I did. Yes, yes… uphill both ways in the snow and I had to fight off a grizzly bear with my loose leaf notebook.)

 

We really don’t need the government raising our kids unless and until it can be shown that the parents are truly negligent and endangering their offspring. Unless there’s a lot more to the story than is being told, this doesn’t seem to have crossed that line.