They say it takes a village to raise a child, but sometimes those villagers can take things too far.
Corey Widen, a mom-of-two in Wilmette, Ill., says an overzealous neighbour called the police and child services when she spotted Widen’s eight-year-old daughter, Dorothy, walking Marshmallow, the family dog, by herself. The neighbour reported that a five-year-old was out on her own.
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“She was gone for about five minutes and the next thing I know the police were at the door,” Widen told TODAY.
After the police investigated the situation and determined that there was nothing amiss, Widen says two days later she received a call from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). The same neighbour had called the agency to lodge allegations of mistreatment.
Ultimately, the DCFS deemed the allegations to be “unfounded.”
Widen is using her experience as a platform to call for reform in the child welfare system.
“Even if you’re not 100 per cent on board with your child walking around the block, most people are confident that a North Shore mom who stays at home with their kids, who’s devoted their life to them, has got good enough judgment to decide when her child is ready or not ready to do that,” she said.
The question about when a child is ready to be independent is one that has been raised in recent months in the U.S., especially as states like Utah pass “free-range parenting” bills where parents have the freedom to determine at what age their child can do things like walk to and from school, and stay home alone. In Illinois, the law states that children under the age of 14 cannot be left alone for an “unreasonable” amount of time.
Not all parenting experts agree with these restrictions, however.
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“The main thing that we have to bear in mind is that we are training our kids from early on to be independent adults,” Anne Marie Albano, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, said to TODAY. “Picking out their own clothes by age four, walking the dog by age eight or nine — these are appropriate things for them to do in a safe place around your home or neighbourhood.”
Julie Freedman Smith, a Calgary-based parenting expert and co-founder of Parenting Power, believes that deciding when a child is responsible enough to perform an independent task is less about their calendar age and more about how capable a parent deems them.
“It’s less about an age and it’s more about the individual child, because if a child has never had any responsibility or opportunity to experience doing some of these things on their own and they’re suddenly left to do it, they’re probably not going to have a great ability to do it,” she says.
“On the other hand, if a child has been working at age-appropriate levels all the way along, has learned how to do this and has the skill set to do it, then they may have great success.”
— with files from Dani-Elle Dube
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