Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond

A mom of five was convicted last week of delinquency of a minor. Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community.

Until very recently, Karyann Parkinson lived in leafy Williamsburg, Virginia. She and her husband, Dallin, moved there from Utah so Parkinson could attend William and Mary Law School.

In June, when Parkinson was preparing for the bar—and also happened to be eight months pregnant with her fifth child—she and her then-youngest, Sam, went for a bike ride, as they often do. They stopped for her son’s favorite activity: collecting goose feathers from the path near their community pond. When they got home, he asked if he could walk back and get some more.

Parkinson said yes. It’s a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she’d seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning, she says. Off he went while she made lunch.

A passerby saw Sam and alerted security. One of the community’s security guards escorted the boy back and gave Parkinson an earful. Pretty soon there were three cop cars, just as many cops, a security vehicle, and two Child Protective Services (CPS) workers at Parkinson’s door.

CPS ended up investigating her for abuse and neglect.

The cops, meanwhile, charged her with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. CPS found the allegations substantiated and placed Parkinson on the state’s child abuse and neglect registry. She will remain there for seven years.

The ordeal reached its nadir last week when a judge convicted Parkinson of the delinquency of a minor charge, a first-degree misdemeanor. This comes with a six-month jail sentence.

While the judge immediately suspended the sentence, pending good behavior and compliance with CPS’ conditions, the conviction remains. Parkinson assumes this means she will not be able to volunteer in her kids’ schools. She fears it could also mean she will not get her law license.

So let’s look at how the events unfolded.

Parkinson is no newbie to parenting. She graduated Brigham Young University in 2012 with a degree in family science. She then became a family life educator and spent three years as a live-in behavioral specialist at a residential treatment center. There, she and her husband, a marriage and family therapist, oversaw the care of 35 girls.

In Virginia, Parkinson spent one summer interning at the Institute for Justice and another working in the law office of former Virginia state Sen. Jill Vogel (R–Winchester). Vogel was actually co-sponsor of the reasonable childhood independence law that passed in Virginia, unanimously, in 2023.

The bill says that neglect is only when you put your child in serious, obvious danger. So what happened?

When the security guard brought Sam back to Parkinson’s house, he told the boy that his mom had done something she wasn’t supposed to, and that bad people would want to take him if he was out alone. “This scared the crap out of him,” Parkinson says now.

She admits she was upset with the guard and asked him where in the homeowners-association rules it says that a child can’t walk by himself. The guard said it was against the law anyway and called the police.

When the first cop arrived, Parkinson told him, “I don’t have any interest in talking to you.” This did not make things go smoother. The cop called for backup and summoned CPS.

At that point, Parkinson asked her husband, who was having lunch with their daughter, to come home. “I told [the authorities] that kids need to be able to take reasonable risks,” he says, “in order to grow up non-anxious.” CPS responded, he recounts, that “a 5-year-old child can never be unsupervised.”

Parkinson admits now that she is embarrassed by her confrontational demeanor. But of course, that was not the primary issue. The issue was whether her son could handle a walk in this community with 24-hour security, a 25-mph speed limit, and three golf courses.

CPS opened an investigation and found Parkinson guilty of a “Level 2 finding” for lack of supervision. That’s what put her on the child abuse and neglect registry. The family immediately appealed.

As for the criminal charges: Parkinson believes the “delinquency of a minor” charge was an attempt to bypass Virginia’s reasonable childhood independence law.

David DeLugas, founder and executive director of ParentsUSA, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal help to parents wrongly accused of neglect, scoffed at the charge. “Delinquency?” he asks. “Is the kid going to rob banks at 14 because he collected feathers at age 5?”

At the trial, the security guard, his boss, and the police testified against Parkinson. The CPS worker testified that Sam seemed happy and healthy when she saw him that day. Parkinson’s friend testified to Sam’s maturity, and that he could be trusted to walk to the pond without going rogue.

The James City County family services specialist assigned to Parkinson’s case declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements. The prosecutor in the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office for James City County said the same.

Parkinson’s attorney, Andrew Gordon, took the case pro bono and argued that the only real “evidence” against the mom was that Sam was 5, and that, hypothetically, a host of horrible things could have happened.

But of course, a host of horrible things can happen at home or in a car or anywhere. We don’t arrest moms for driving their kids to the store, even though they could be hit by someone running a stop sign. Hypothetical dangers are not reason enough to condemn a person. And neither is hypothetical immaturity. No one proved that the boy was incapable of walking a few blocks safely by himself. After all, that would have been difficult to do, seeing as he had already done it without issue.