June 5. A cool winter’s day in Australia. A typical humid day in Williamsburg, Virginia, where Karyann Parkinson went on her daily walk around the neighbourhood with her five-year-old son, returned home – and then let him go outside for a solo walk to collect goose feathers.
Her parenting decision has sparked debate – and, three months later, left her with a criminal conviction, a six-month suspended jail sentence, and seven years on her state’s child abuse and neglect registry.
“I do love the way that I parent. I love my kids,” Parkinson, 36, said in an interview published by Deseret News this week. “What I do comes from a place of, one: a whole lot of educational expertise, and two: I know my kids.” But should she have made a different call?
What happened to Karyann Parkinson?
According to The Atlantic, Parkinson, about eight months pregnant, was studying for the bar exam. Just before lunch, she left home with her son for a short walk around her gated community. They stopped by a pond and picked up goose feathers. They went home.
Sam wanted to go back to the pond to collect some more feathers. Parkinson, making their afternoon meal, gave him permission to go and return right away.
To get to the pond, Sam had to walk about 800m on a protected path setback about three metres from the road, and navigate two pedestrian crossings by himself.
Parkinson lives in Ford’s Colony, which has three golf courses, a 40km/h speed limit, and nine security-protected entrances. It was a community security guard who returned a distraught Sam home about 20 minutes after he left. The security guard had to walk Sam home after the child explained he wasn’t allowed to get into cars with strangers.
The child, clutching his feathers, had been told he had broken Homeowners Association rules by being out by himself, and “there were bad people in the neighbourhood who would hurt him”.
Parkinson, who studied family science at Brigham Young University before embarking on a juris doctor, had familiarised herself with the association’s bylaws. She pushed back.
Police officers arrived, then child protective services.
Two weeks later, police officers returned to Parkinson’s home with a warrant for her arrest. One week after that, she gave birth to her fifth child. Last week, a judge convicted Parkinson of a first-degree misdemeanour: contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
She now has a criminal record, and will likely not be allowed to volunteer at her children’s school because she is on the child abuse registry. Parkinson is appealing.
What the law has to say
Virginia passed a reasonable childhood independence law in 2023, which amended the state’s definition of child neglect. Under the new definition, a child is not considered abused or neglected if a parent allows appropriate (age- and maturity-wise) independent activities without supervision. There is no specific minimum age established in this law.
In Australia, there is no law that specifies a minimum age for a child to walk outside without adult supervision.
The closest thing we have is section 364A of the Queensland Criminal Code, which makes it a misdemeanour for the responsible adult to leave a child under 12 years by themselves “for an unreasonable time without making reasonable provision for the supervision and care of the child during that time”. The maximum penalty for this would be three years imprisonment.
Section 494 of Victoria’s Children, Youth and Families Act (2005) makes leaving a child unsupervised “for a time which is unreasonable having regard to all the circumstances of the case” illegal. In either state, what “unreasonable” is, exactly, would be up to the magistrate to decide. (There aren’t specific laws in other states and territories that are relevant to this situation).
How should a parent decide?
“The crux of the issue in this case is that difficult balancing act that all parents have got to juggle … ensuring the safety of our kids while at the same time providing them those developmentally appropriate opportunities to learn independence, which is actually also a part of good parenting,” says Professor Leah Bromfield, director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection at Adelaide University.
“We don’t want kids who get to 18 and have had no opportunities to take risks, no opportunity to do things for themselves because we were wrapping them in cotton wool.”
Bromfield, named South Australian of the Year in 2025 for her work in child protection, says while there are general guidelines – most schools, for example, won’t allow children up to five to be “free range” as they “still are not equipped to handle if something goes wrong” – parents need to pay attention to the skills, strengths and limitations of their individual children.
Connected Parenting founder Gen Muir agrees. Though Muir does highlight peripheral vision does not fully develop until age 10, she is hesitant to put a specific age on independence milestones.
Questions parents should ask themselves before independence milestones
Commuting to school, catching public transport, crossing the road, walking alone: Bromfield says to consider your location and how long they’ll be unsupervised. Are you in the middle of the city? Is the school on or near a main road? Muir suggests working up to it. You could do the commute with them first, then get them to walk or ride a bike to a trusted neighbour’s house, who can tell the parent when the child has arrived.
Staying home alone: Generally up to Year 3, Bromfield says children shouldn’t be left home alone. Then, it comes down to parental judgement. “You’ve got to think, not just will they be all right if everything goes as expected, but what if something goes wrong? Are they developmentally mature enough?” Think about what happens if you run to the shops and back in 30 minutes. How would they handle an electrical fire? What if someone was banging on the door? Are they old enough to handle the unexpected?
Sleepovers: Muir says to ask yourself if your child can stand up for themselves. Do they know what’s right or wrong in terms of behaviours from others that might make them feel uncomfortable or in danger? Bromfield says consider the hosts. “How much do I know about this family? Do I have shared parenting values? Who else is in the home? What’s their disciplinary approach?” Also consider if the child has a way to contact the parent if they need an exit.
Getting a mobile phone: Can you offer a “dumb phone” first? Muir suggests evaluating how well they independently get organised for school and out the door in the morning, how they do homework, how they are coping with friends. How do they respond when people say unkind things to them? Bromfield suggests having conversations with your child about being an informed digital citizen. “Do you have really hard and fast rules around friends on your phone that you don’t know in real life?” What’s the purpose for the phone? What are the rules around it? What kind of phone? What kind of apps? What kind of parental controls are on it?
“It is so dependent on the situation, on who it is, on your child and their skills,” says Muir.
Muir encourages risks within reason in certain situations to teach children how to solve problems when things go wrong, and above all, teaching them to trust their instincts when something feels wrong, and to ask for help.
“Parents are navigating a world with more information and less of a village than they’ve ever had,” says Muir.
“If we live completely in fear, the risk is our kids don’t get to navigate risk … not learning to navigate risk is risky because one day our kids are going to be behind the wheel of a car. They’re going to have to navigate risk. They’re going to have a friend saying, go faster. And I want my kid to have fallen at the playground and struggled a bit and had to speak up for themselves because those little moments are how they build it.”
Of her appeal, Parkinson told Deseret News that she wants her children to know that she will facilitate their “right to a good childhood”, and that she is “not going to abridge their happiness and their experiences because I’m afraid.”
“We have to be reasonable about assessing risk, and not living in this place of irrational fear of the boogeyman that is just not there,” Parkinson said.
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Bronte Gossling is a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, WAtoday and Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
