Mother Convicted After Son Walks Alone To Collect Goose Feathers

Karyann Parkinson is fighting a criminal conviction and a seven-year stint on Virginia's Child Abuse and Neglect Central Registry after her five-year-old son, Sam, was escorted home by security while walking alone through their gated community. The incident happened when Sam walked along a familiar neighborhood route past a pond to gather goose feathers, only to meet a guard who brought him back inside. Police and Child Protective Services stepped in immediately. Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant at the time, avoided jail because her six-month sentence got suspended, but the charges stand. She stands convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a first-degree misdemeanor.

Parkinson told Fox & Friends Weekend that she gets why headlines sound alarming when they show a toddler alone near water. "I didn't send him to play at the pond," she said. "I sent him down the path that happens to go past the pond to collect goose feathers... I know that a lot of people have seen the headlines and seen '5-year-old alone at a pond.' And I think if I saw that in isolation, I'd probably be alarmed, too." To her, it was just a kid on a trail he knows well in a neighborhood where he has lived his whole life. That normal scene suddenly turned into what many see as an extreme parenting choice.

The real sting for Parkinson is the registry listing itself. It blocks her from volunteering in Sam's classroom until he reaches sixth grade. "We need to stop parenting from a place of fear and a place, you know, of obsessing over the unknown or some boogeyman who's going to jump out from behind a bush," she argued. Her son felt pretty shaken right after the guard stopped him but has since recovered. She spent time reassuring him that he did nothing wrong. "He would ask me, 'Mom, am I allowed to ride my bike to swim practice? Am I allowed to ride my back to the tennis courts?'" Now, she says it is just a blip on his radar and not part of his life anymore.