By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Virginia wrote a law in 2023 to stop exactly this. It didn’t stop this. The mother it happened to had once worked for the state senator who wrote it.
“Virginia wrote a law in 2023 to stop exactly this. It didn’t stop this.”
The Walk
In June, Karyann Parkinson was eight months pregnant with her fifth child and studying for the Virginia bar. She and her five-year-old son, Sam, had biked to the pond in their gated Williamsburg community, as they often did, so he could collect goose feathers — his favorite thing to do. Back home, he asked to walk back for more. It was a short walk on a sidewalk buffered from the road by ten feet of grass, crossing two streets with crosswalks he’d navigated safely hundreds of times that summer — six times that same morning, by Parkinson’s count — inside a community with 24-hour security, a 25 mph limit, and three golf courses. Parkinson said yes and made lunch.
A passerby saw Sam walking alone and alerted the neighborhood’s security guard, who found the boy, drove him home, and told him his mother had done something she wasn’t supposed to and that “bad people” would want to take him if he was out alone. Parkinson says the encounter “scared the crap out of him.” She admits she was upset and asked the guard to point to the homeowners-association rule barring a child from walking alone; the guard said it was against the law regardless and called the police. When the first officer arrived, Parkinson told him she had no interest in talking — a response she now says she regrets, and one that didn’t slow the escalation. The officer called for backup and summoned Child Protective Services. Within minutes, three squad cars, three officers, a security vehicle, and two CPS workers were at Parkinson’s front door.
On June 18, a week before her due date, two officers returned with a warrant for her to sign, committing her to appear for trial. Two days later, a letter arrived notifying her she was under CPS investigation. She gave birth soon after and says she couldn’t shake the fear that someone would try to take the new baby too. CPS classified the case as a “Level 2 finding” for lack of supervision and placed her on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry, where she’ll remain for seven years. Prosecutors, separately, charged her with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a Class 1 misdemeanor.
Her attorney, Andrew Gordon, took the case pro bono, arguing that the only evidence against Parkinson was her son’s age and a list of hypothetical dangers that never materialized. He was confident it would be dismissed. Instead, Judge Brian J. Smalls convicted her last week, sentencing her to six months in jail, suspended, contingent on good behavior and compliance with CPS’s conditions. The conviction itself stands. Parkinson assumes it ends her ability to volunteer at her children’s schools; she fears it may keep her from getting a law license at all. The family has appealed.
Parkinson isn’t an unusual case flagged by an overzealous system stumbling onto a genuine risk. She graduated from Brigham Young University in 2012 with a degree in family science, worked as a family life educator, and spent three years as a live-in behavioral specialist at a residential treatment center, where she and her husband, Dallin — a marriage and family therapist — oversaw the care of 35 girls. In Virginia, she interned at the Institute for Justice and spent a summer working in the law office of former state Sen. Jill Vogel (R–Winchester). None of that mattered to the guard, the responding officers, or the CPS workers, who, her husband says, told him that “a 5-year-old child can never be unsupervised. Never. Not for one minute.”
The Law That Was Supposed to Prevent This
Here is the detail that turns this from an outrageous anecdote into a structural failure: Jill Vogel, the lawyer Parkinson once worked for, is the same legislator who co-sponsored the law that was supposed to make this prosecution impossible.
In 2023, the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 1367, the “Reasonable Childhood Independence” law, patroned by then-Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel and Sen. Jennifer Boysko. It passed both chambers unanimously and was signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The bill amended Va. Code § 16.1-228, the definitions section governing juvenile and domestic relations court proceedings — the same section that defines “abused or neglected child” for CPS purposes statewide.
The operative text is unambiguous: “No child whose parent or other person responsible for his care allows the child to engage in independent activities without adult supervision shall for that reason alone be considered to be an abused or neglected child,” provided the activity is age-appropriate and the lack of supervision isn’t “so grossly negligent as to endanger the health or safety of the child.” The statute goes on to name the exact fact pattern at issue here: “traveling to or from school or nearby locations by bicycle or on foot” and “playing outdoors” are explicitly listed as protected independent activities.
Virginia wasn’t a pioneer. Utah passed the first such law in 2018; by the time Virginia acted, Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado already had similar protections on the books. Since 2023, Illinois, Connecticut, Montana, Georgia, Missouri, and Florida have followed, bringing the total to a dozen before Indiana became the twelfth or thirteenth (accounts vary by month) this year. The premise has drawn support from both ends of the spectrum — Utah’s version passed unanimously in a solidly red legislature, Colorado’s passed unanimously in a solidly blue one.
Where the Carve-Out Breaks
The criminal statute Parkinson was convicted under, Va. Code § 18.2-371 (“Causing or encouraging acts rendering children delinquent, abused, etc.”), doesn’t sit outside the reform — it’s wired directly into it. It makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor for an adult to willfully cause or contribute to a child becoming delinquent, in need of services, in need of supervision, or “abused or neglected as defined in § 16.1-228” — the same section SB1367 amended. That’s one of four outcomes named in a single clause, but it’s the one that maps directly onto what CPS alleged here. In theory, the same sentence that protects a parent from a civil neglect finding should protect that parent from criminal liability under this statute, since the criminal charge borrows its definition wholesale from the civil one. Parkinson herself has said she believes the delinquency charge was prosecutors’ attempt to route around the independence law entirely — charging the act rather than the neglect finding it was designed to prevent.
“The statute lists a sidewalk bike-or-foot trip to a nearby location as a paradigm example of protected independent activity. Sam’s walk matched that example almost exactly.”
In practice, the reform’s protection isn’t a bright line — it’s a two-part test, and the second part, “grossly negligent,” is undefined and left entirely to the discretion of the CPS worker, the prosecutor, and ultimately the judge. The statute lists a sidewalk bike-or-foot trip to a nearby location as a paradigm example of protected independent activity. Sam’s walk matched that example almost exactly. If this fact pattern can still be found “grossly negligent” — or routed around via a different criminal charge entirely — the statutory list of protected activities functions less as a safe harbor and more as a description of the conduct that will still get litigated case by case.
That gap is where the reform’s real-world value collapses. A law that tells parents certain behavior is presumptively fine, while leaving prosecutors and CPS workers free to override that presumption — whether through a subjective negligence finding or a differently-worded charge — doesn’t eliminate the risk the legislature said it was eliminating. It just moves the fight, and in Parkinson’s case, the fight was won by the guard’s phone call.
“A law that tells parents certain behavior is presumptively fine, while leaving prosecutors and CPS workers free to override that presumption, doesn’t eliminate the risk the legislature said it was eliminating.”
“It just moves the fight, and in Parkinson’s case, the fight was won by the guard’s phone call.”
Not an Isolated Gap
Parkinson’s case isn’t a one-off glitch in an otherwise working reform. In Bala Cynwyd, a Philadelphia suburb, a mother named Gordon (who asked Reason to withhold her first name) says police have been called on her four times over roughly eighteen months for letting her sons, then 5, 7, and 9, play and walk in the neighborhood — once because they were playing Pokémon Go a few hundred feet from the house while she gardened in the front yard, once because her youngest stepped outside a gym during his brother’s soccer practice, once because pickleball players in a park across the street noticed a seven-year-old walking home alone. Reason reviewed private messages corroborating her account. Pennsylvania has no independent-activities carve-out yet; its neglect statute requires only “proper” care, undefined, leaving even more room for this kind of escalation than Virginia’s statute did.
The response building at the federal level makes the same diagnosis, if not quite the same fix. In May, Reps. Blake Moore (R-Utah), Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.), and Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) introduced the bipartisan Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act, which amends Title IV-B of the Social Security Act and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to address child welfare involvement triggered by reasonable independence activities — directing an HHS study on how states can better protect parents, requiring states to train child-welfare staff on the issue, and allowing existing federal neglect-prevention grants to fund that training. It’s a narrower instrument than a bright-line federal redefinition of neglect, built more to nudge state practice than to override it. McClellan, recalling her own Gen X childhood, put it plainly: “Our parents would have been in jail.” Reason’s own reporting and multiple outlets credit McClellan — who remained a sitting Virginia state senator until March 7, 2023, weeks after SB1367’s unanimous passage — with having pushed for the state’s 2023 law during her final months in Richmond, even though the bill’s Senate patrons of record, per contemporaneous legislative alerts, were Vogel and Boysko. Thirteen states now have some version of the independent-activities protection on the books, nearly all passed with bipartisan or unanimous support.
That the pattern keeps recurring in states that already have these laws — Virginia chief among them — is itself evidence for what the federal bill’s sponsors are diagnosing: a state-by-state patchwork of carve-outs, each hedged with an undefined “gross negligence” standard or vulnerable to a differently charged criminal statute, isn’t closing the gap so much as relocating it. Parkinson’s conviction happened in a state held up nationally as a model, prosecuted under a law her own former employer helped write. If the model can still produce this outcome, the fix pending in Congress is aimed at the right target — but it inherits the exact same vulnerability unless the standard, federal or otherwise, gets defined with more precision than any version so far has managed.
“If the model can still produce this outcome, the fix pending in Congress is aimed at the right target — but it inherits the exact same vulnerability.”
What’s Unverified
Reason’s own reporting is the primary source for this piece and is detailed and specific, but several things remain outside what’s been made public. The James City County family services specialist and the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office both declined comment to Reason, citing confidentiality requirements, which means neither CPS’s “never for one minute” statement nor the department’s internal reasoning for the “Level 2 finding” has been independently confirmed beyond the family’s account. The charging document and Judge Smalls’s written findings haven’t been published, so it isn’t confirmed whether the “grossly negligent” language from § 16.1-228 was argued at trial, or whether the defense’s independence-law argument was addressed in the ruling at all. The appeal’s procedural posture and timeline aren’t yet public. Skenazy’s characterization of Jennifer McClellan’s role in the 2023 Virginia law is repeated across her columns and isn’t directly contradicted — McClellan was in fact still a sitting state senator until March 7, 2023 — but it also isn’t corroborated by the contemporaneous 2023 legislative alerts, which name only Vogel and Boysko as patrons; both facts are presented above rather than silently resolved in favor of one. Finally, the exact current count of states with independent-activities laws is reported inconsistently — eleven as of one mid-2025 tally, twelve after Indiana, thirteen per Skenazy’s most recent column — likely reflecting the pace of 2026 passage rather than a factual conflict.
Sources: This piece draws primarily on Lenore Skenazy’s original reporting for Reason: “Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond” (Sept. 2, 2026), “A Pennsylvania Mom Says the Cops Were Called on Her 4 Times—for Letting Her Kids Be Outside” (July 30, 2026), and “A New Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Protect Free-Range Parenting and Redefine Neglect” (May 13, 2026), along with her syndicated Jewish World Review columns recapping the same reporting. Secondary coverage from PEOPLE (via Yahoo), the Daily Caller, RedState, We Got This Covered, and WLT Report was checked against the Reason originals for consistency. Statutory text is drawn from Va. Code §§ 16.1-228 and 18.2-371 via the Virginia General Assembly’s Legislative Information System and Legiscan’s enrolled bill text for SB1367 (2023); state-count and legislative-history claims are cross-referenced against the Let Grow Foundation’s state policy tracker, a contemporaneous February 2023 Parental Rights Foundation legislative alert, Rep. Blake Moore’s official press release and the bill’s own text (H.R., 119th Congress), and Jennifer McClellan’s biographical record confirming her Senate service through March 7, 2023.
Keep Father & Co. Free
Father & Co. exists to support parents navigating separation, custody, and systems that are often confusing, isolating, or overwhelming. This work is grounded in lived experience, careful research, and respect for the real stakes families face.
If this article helped you feel less alone, better informed, or more grounded, reader support helps keep these resources free and available to others who need them.
Need help reviewing or organizing court or formal documents?
Father & Co. offers non-legal document review and organization for people representing themselves. This includes clarity, structure, neutral tone, and timeline organization — not legal advice or representation.
Have a story, experience, or resource to share?
Submissions are reviewed with care and discretion. We respect privacy and handle sensitive information responsibly.
Discover more from Fatherand.Co
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
