A Georgia mom was arrested for letting 10-year-old walk to town. What does this say about ‘safetyism’?

A Georgia woman was arrested late last month after her 10-year-old walked to their rural town alone, sparking a debate about whether childhood safety fears have gone too far.

According to the warrant, which CBC News has viewed, Brittany Patterson, 41, of Mineral Bluff, Ga., was arrested on Oct. 30 and charged with one misdemeanour count of reckless conduct. 

She “willingly and knowingly did endanger the bodily safety of her juvenile son, 10 years of age, by consciously disregarding a substantial and unjustifiable risk,” it states.

According to a GoFundMe, her son walked less than a mile from their home toward downtown Mineral Bluff — which has a population of 370 — before a concerned citizen reported him. The road he walked down did not have a sidewalk, so he walked on the shoulder.

The GoFundMe adds that Patterson was arrested in front of her children, and that her son feels responsible. The fundraiser was launched by Parents USA, which bills itself as a parental rights’ group and is backing her cause.

In an interview with NBC News posted Wednesday, Patterson explained she was taking her oldest child into town for a medical appointment, and her youngest son Soren didn’t want to come. She told the libertarian Reason magazine that she assumed Soren was outside playing on the 16 acres she shares with her father, or was maybe over at her mother’s house, two minutes away.

“The mentality here is more free range,” she told Reason.

So she left, and later got a call from police that Soren had walked to town. He was on his way back home when a woman called the police, Patterson wrote in Business Insider.

The police drove Soren back home, she told NBC, and then officers came back later that evening to arrest her.

“They asked me to put my hands behind my back and all that stuff and I realized what was going on,” Patterson told NBC.

“This is not right. I did nothing wrong.”

The child safety debate

Patterson’s case has touched a nerve in the parenting news community, where issues of child safety versus independence are hotly debated.

“Let that sink in. A kid walking alone in his own neighbourhood was treated like a crisis,” wrote parenting news website Motherly.

In Georgia, children under age eight should not be left alone, according to the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services’ child supervision guidelines. Children between nine and 12 can be left alone for brief periods of time, “depending on level of maturity.”

In Canada, the issue is a bit of a grey area. Most provinces and territories don’t set a minimum age, but social services typically advise that no child under age 12 be left home unsupervised, according to 2021 research.

Similar cases have made recent headlines. In Canada, for instance, Winnipeg mom Jacqui Kendrick was investigated in 2016 by Child and Family Services due to a complaint about her children playing unsupervised in their own backyard.

In 2020, a single mom in Georgia was arrested after she left her 14-year-old daughter in charge of her younger siblings while daycares and schools were closed due to COVID-19 lockdown. Melissa Shields Henderson had been called into work, and while she was gone, her four-year-old walked next door to play with a friend. The charges were dropped three years later.

And in 2015, a B.C. court ruled a mother in Terrace could no longer leave her nine-year-old son home alone after school. She had argued in court that her son was mature enough to be unsupervised between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., and the decision should be left up to parents.

Charges would be dropped if she signed safety plan: lawyer

In the Georgia case, Patterson told Business Insider that a case manager from the Division of Family and Children Services allegedly asked her to sign a child safety plan on Nov. 5, but she declined.

CBC News has seen a copy of the proposed safety plan, provided via email by her lawyer, David DeLugas, who founded ParentsUSA, the organization backing her fundraiser. 

The plan includes requirements to delegate a “safety person” to be a knowing participant and guardian when she leaves home without the children, and to download a location-tracking app on Soren’s phone.

DeLugas told CBC News via email that the assistant district attorney told him Patterson’s charges would be dropped if she signed the plan, and shared his reaction.

“Are you saying that every time a kid says, ‘Mom, I’m going to play with my friends,’ and they go, ‘OK, be home by dinner!’ that is somehow criminal?

“Is it really protecting children when we lock up their mother?”

Modern anxieties

For those who grew up as latchkey kids — letting themselves in for two hours of unsupervised chocolate milk and cartoons until their parents got home from work — modern anxieties about leaving children alone can seem perplexing.

In parenting literature, the term “safetyism” has been used to describe the modern culture of overprotecting children through methods like softer, lower playgrounds and constant hovering, which has also been called “helicopter parenting.”

Previous generations of children enjoyed more freedom even though crime rates at the time were higher, noted clinical psychologist Simon Sherry in a 2023 Dalhousie University article. But today’s parents grew up in a time of stranger danger and television shows like America’s Most Wanted, Sherry said.

“It’s no wonder parents became increasingly fearful and protective,” he wrote.

And while there have been some horrific cases of child abandonment and neglect — like an Ohio mom who left her toddler home alone for 10 days to go on vacation and is now charged in her death — Brittany Patterson in Georgia says what happened with her son was far from neglect.

“We’re free-range parents who want the same kind of life for our children,” she wrote in a first-person article for Business Insider.

“They’re allowed to go back into the woods and dig and build forts. They ride their dirt bikes or walk over to the neighbour’s house, where there’s a nice flat spot to play basketball.”