Did you ever wait in the car while your mom ran an errand? New Jersey says you were abused — and your mom was a criminal.
In an appeals court decision last week, three judges ruled that a mother who left her toddler sleeping in his car seat while she went into a store for five to 10 minutes was indeed guilty of abuse or neglect for taking insufficient care to protect him from harm.
Not that the child came to any harm; he seems to have slept through the whole non-incident.
But when the mom emerged from the store, she was confronted by cops, who’d been summoned by a mall guard when he noticed the sleeping child.
She was arrested and placed on the child-abuse registry — even though a Division of Child Protection and Permanency agent visited her home that day and found the kids well cared for.
If this had been the law back when I was a kid, Rahelen Skenazy — the lady who loves me more than the stars — would be on that registry. And since she had me wait in the car more than once, the state might have even placed me in foster care. That’s the threat that looms over anyone found guilty of neglect.
Instead, I got to be raised by my parents, because waiting in the car was just the normal state of childhood. It only got criminalized recently, when we began to arrest parents for tragedies that didn’t happen . . .but perhaps could have, if conditions had been completely different, or fate outlandishly fickle.
”No question that there are circumstances when leaving a child, even for 10 minutes, would create serious risk or danger for the child,” says law professor David Pimentel at Ohio Northern University. The question is: Was this one of those cases?
Was it a boiling hot day? No. Was the neighborhood plagued by kidnappings? No— and, what’s more, the national crime rate is back down to the level of 1963.
Well, was the baby in the driver’s seat with the ignition on, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, Eminem blasting on the stereo? Please.
But the court didn’t care. It ruled that a child could be considered in danger no matter what the circumstances, saying, “We need not describe at any length the parade of horribles that could have attended [the child’s] neglect.”
This is what’s called “Worst-First Thinking” — coming up with the worst-case scenarios first and proceeding as if they were likely to happen.
But if we start using “Worst-First” as the basis for prosecuting parents, shouldn’t we go after any mom who puts her kid in the car, period? After all, what if she careens off the road? What if she’s hit by a drunk driver? These may not be likely, but they certainly are possible, so why let any parent take that kind of risk?
We’re allowed to continue driving our kids because somehow society has managed to keep those risks in perspective, even though dying in a car crash is actually the No. 1 cause of children’s deaths — killing about 1,200 kids under age 14 each year. Meantime, about 38 die from being left in cars, the vast majority of them forgotten there for hours, not waiting out an ordinary errand.
Prosecuting parents who let their kids wait while they pick up a pizza isn’t going to save those tots forgotten there all day.
Quick story: Three years ago in Auckland, New Zealand, a mom decided not to take her three kids into the store with her, because it was raining. Minutes after she ducked inside, a tornado struck — flinging the car into the sky and landing it upside down, 50 meters away.
All three kids, strapped into their car seats, were fine. But if their mom had been unbuckling them at the time, or dragging them across the parking lot . . . well, I need not describe at any length the parade of horribles that could have attended.
Let’s just say that when a loving parent decides it makes sense, given the real-world circumstances that day, in that place, to let her kids wait in the car, she’s not being negligent. She’s just being like my wonderful mom.
And probably yours.
Lenore Skenazy is author of the book and blog “FreeRange Kids” (www.freerangekids.com).