“The story is a convergence of helicopter parenting with America’s primitive family policy.”

This is…amazing in a horrible way:

Debra Harrell is currently in jail because she let her 9-year-old daughter play, unsupervised, in a public park. Almost everything about this story (which I noticed courtesy of Lenore Skenazy) is horrifying. Harrell works at McDonald’s. Her daughter used to tag along and stare at a screen at her mother’s workplace during the day. She asked to go to the park instead, was discovered to be without an adult, and her mother was arrested.

If I had grown up in South Carolina (and there was any chance these laws would be applied to white people), I think my parents would be doing life without parole. The idea that there are no circumstances under which a 9-year-old can be in public without supervision is bizarre. And the asusmption that 9-year-olds need constant supervision certainly isn’t reflected by American social policy (and that goes triple for deep red statehouses.)

And as Friedersdorf says, even if you assume that the child was in actual peril there’s no way that the trauma of being separated from her (arrested and now presumably unemployed) mother isn’t a net negative to the welfare of the child.