I mean, 5 years old is a little young to let a kid go about alone to a body of water. Kids are stupid and actively try to off themselves. This is why I needed to be tied up with a rope.
But then my parents would let me and my 4 siblings walk 7 miles to jump off a bridge into fast moving water.
Except you're wrong. His route had a pond on it. He wasn't walking to the pond at all.
“I didn’t send him to play at the pond,” she said, according to Fox News. “I sent him down the path that happens to go past the pond to collect goose feathers... I know that a lot of people have seen the headlines and seen ‘5-year-old alone at a pond.’ And I think if I saw that in isolation, I’d probably be alarmed, too.”
“But what this was, was a 5-year-old on a pathway that he’s very familiar with in his neighborhood that he loves, the only place that he can remember ever living. And it just got turned into this whole situation where a lot of people were suddenly intervening and feeling like this was a really drastic parenting choice,” she said.
“Collecting goose feathers BY the path AT their local pond.”
You can mince it up however you like, but there was five year old unsupervised by a body of water. I let my nine year old do a lot of stuff that people give the side-eye for, I think people need to mind their own business when it comes to how others parent more often than not. If that kid drowned in that pond all these comments would be shouting about “where was his mom?!”
Oh my God so glad there are sane people here. I had one lady arguing with me about this exact same story saying children needed to be supervised outdoors until at least 10 years old, and when I said that my 6 year old was currently running up and down the block with two other neighborhood 6 year olds and zero adults? It was "you let your child play next to a STREET?!"
It was half a mile too, which is quite far away for a 5yo, even if it’s in a gated community . My son was still in pre-k at 5. That’s not a choice I would have made (and I think I give my son more freedom than many parents), but I don’t think she should have gone to jail, yeesh.
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u/Secondhand-Drunk Sep 11 '26
I mean, 5 years old is a little young to let a kid go about alone to a body of water. Kids are stupid and actively try to off themselves. This is why I needed to be tied up with a rope.
But then my parents would let me and my 4 siblings walk 7 miles to jump off a bridge into fast moving water.