Opinion> Lenore Skenazy> Call The Cops Mom Took A Nap

	24 May 2012 The New Nanny Norm? Our beloved nanny who worked for us for five years — Joan — called to say she's on the job market again.… Read More.
	17 May 2012 Examining Jewish Doctors The middle-aged lady is running frantically down the beach, waving her arms at the lifeguard: "Help, help!… Read More.
	10 May 2012 The Slippery Slope of Parental Advice At the risk of reading a lot — and I mean a LOT — into one cautionary little tale, today we … Read More.

Call the Cops! Mom Took a Nap!

How can you tell if a mother is doing a good enough job?

She never lets anything bad happen, ever. No accidents, no missteps, no whoopsies. No, she is watching her children every single second of every single day, including during those moments when a mere mortal would be sleeping or taking a shower or going to the bathroom. If she slips up, even once, she is apparently negligent. Criminally so.

Consider these two recent cases: In Delaware last week, a woman named Erika Wilson put her 3-year-old down for a nap and went to take a little snooze herself. Unbeknownst to her, her daughter then got up and managed to get out of the house. When police found the little girl later, they went looking for Wilson and returned the girl to her, chuckling "What a little Houdini!" or something like that, right?

Not quite. The police went looking for the mom and charged her with child endangerment.

According to The News Journal, the mom then was "cautioned not to endanger her daughter in the future." Because, I guess, it is "endangerment" to take a nap.

Meantime, up near Niagara Falls, something extremely similar was happening to a woman named Samantha Boyd. In the middle of the night, while Boyd was sleeping, her 3-year-old son slipped out of the house and started wandering around. The man who spotted him called the police, as did Boyd as soon as she realized her boy wasn't home. When the police contacted Boyd, did they say "Kids will be kids! Maybe install a childproof lock on the door"?

No, they arrested her. "What's nice about that," the police chief told WGRZ, is that now she'll be put "into the system." In other words, now that her son surprised her once, Boyd's parenting will be monitored indefinitely, presumably by people whose own kids never ran away or sneaked out of the crib or got lost at the mall.

That only happens to criminally negligent moms.

These are harsh times we are living in, folks. Times when those "crazy kid moments" that used to make for fun family stories now turn mommies into America's Most Wanted. Why? Because even the folks in law enforcement and child protective services have a very inflated idea of what makes for a good parent.

It's called perfection. And they think that anything less than that puts a child in immediate danger. They have developed this outlook by living in a country where predators are prime-time TV fodder and stores sell infrared video baby monitors, which allow parents to watch their kids in the crib even when it's dark. The message they get: A good parent watches her kid all day AND all night.

But it wasn't always thus. As one gal wrote to my blog after I posted about the mom whose toddler wandered out while she napped: "That EXACT thing happened to my mom in 1975 when I was 2 (minus the neglect charges). I woke up first and opened the door and took a walk on my own while Mom slept on. I walked through some woods near my house and up to a neighboring street, where a neighbor noticed me and asked me my name, which, happily, I was able to tell her. The neighbor knew my great-grandmother, after whom I am named, and called an aunt, who called my mom and sent me home. The neighborhood, in other words, handled it. And no one blamed my mom, who is of course an awesome mom and entitled to her sleep."

The mom WAS entitled to her sleep — back then. Now she's entitled to a criminal record and an open file on her parenting.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)" and "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Comments

4 Comments | Post Comment

It's really sad that all of the "experts" are focused on punishing and blaming parents instead of helping them when they feel short of perfection. I'd be willing to bet that this type of thing (child getting out) happens all of the time. Most ofetn they are returned by a neighbor or parent. Actually I've known and worked with some very good parents that it has happened to. These parents that got "caught" seem to be the victim of really bad luck and a really punative system that demands perfection from parents, and blames them when they fall short.

Comment: #1
Posted by: Erin
Sun Jul 3, 2011 3:16 AM

Report this post

I have never posted or responded to columns in any way before but when I read this I had no choice. How you can minimize the severity of a Mother not installing a simple locking device so her 2 year old is unable to leave her home is beyond understanding. You may have survived your escape but it could have ended quite differently. Certainly a Mother is entitled to a nap but even when a Mother is sleeping her responsibility for her children does not end. The risks to a 2 year old on their own outdoors is not limited to human predators; dogs, vehicles, holes in the ground, even concrete steps or other areas difficult for a 2 year old's ability to traverse, could end in tragedy. There are enough difficulties for a Mother to face with a 2 year old without neglecting the simplest steps to minimize the everyday dangers. Certainly the gal's, who wrote on your blog, experience has become a part of her family's personal history which can be smiled at because of the happy ending and I know most of us have those family tales. Please don't let it blind you to the harrowing world we now live in and what might have happened to her. It is a far different world than 1975. It was not a "crazy kid moment"; it was neglect.

Comment: #2
Posted by: Pat
Fri Jul 8, 2011 9:54 AM

Report this post

Any locking device can be figured out by a smart 2-year-old who can push a chair over to a door. If the device requires a separate key, kept in a separate location, that poses a fire hazard to everybody in the house. Mothers have told me about children who learn how to open and crawl out of bedroom windows and anything else. Pat, if you are planning to keep your entire house locked up like a prison, you could end up unable to get out of it with your kids if you had a fire.

This business of criminalizing motherhood is horrific. All it does is discourage the mother from calling police if her child does manage to slip off while she isn't looking. Now police are the last people, rather than the first, that she would call.

Comment: #3
Posted by: Madelyn
Sat Jul 16, 2011 1:15 PM

Report this post

Re: Madelyn,

This is so true! My son is barely over a year old, and he can climb absolutely anywhere. And yes, he falls down and hurts himself. The only way to prevent that is to place him in the playpen 24/7, and that is, to say the least, not healthy, if not downright abusive. Because he is not my first child, I also know that it is probably going to be less than a year before he can climb out of his crib or playpen, and the way I will learn that he can is by waking up in the middle of the night to his screaming. He'll have climbed out and fallen off the crib railing.

Here is what I have learned from being a mom (as opposed to from reading books and articles on parenting) and what I have not yet had a chance to forget: No matter what you do, fingers will get pinched and jammed in doors and drawers, small objects will get jammed into noses or swallowed, goose-egg-sized bumps will appear on heads from falling, and even arms and legs will get broken by kids' falling off monkey bars, bikes, scooters, etc. You can never prevent all of it. You can only try your best. Calling every slip-up a case of parental neglect is not going to help. It's only going to make parents fearful of asking for help when they do need it.

Comment: #4
Posted by: Ariana
Tue Jul 19, 2011 9:50 AM

Report this post

Already have an account? Log in.