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What does it take for a parent to get arrested? Surprisingly little. Scott and Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texas, encourage their three boys to play outside on their own to build independence. One day, driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So, half a mile from home, Heather stopped the car and told him, "Walk the rest of the way on your own." He'd done it before. But this time, before he got home, someone called the police. "There's a little boy walking down the sidewalk," she told 911. "He's a perfect target for somebody to kidnap!" Police picked Aiden up and drove him home. His parents share their story.

"You weren't worried about (Aiden)?" I ask them.

"Not at all," says Heather.

Scott adds, "It's a safe neighborhood."

It's true. Based on data from the FBI, their town is among the safest in Texas. Nevertheless, the cops arrested Heather! They kept her in jail overnight. "It was terrifying," she tells me. "I was just waiting, crying."

The cop told her, "To have an 8-year-old ... walk by himself, that's a big problem. ... We don't know who's in that white van." That's just dumb, says Lenore Skenazy, author of "Free-Range Kids."

"99.99% of white vans are guys coming to fix your toilet or mow your lawn."

She says ignorant media mislead us about what's really dangerous. News reports cite Justice Department data and claim "460,000 kids are reported missing every year!" But that just means: "460,000 children are late for dinner, stayed at school and forgot to tell their mom. ... The definition of 'missing' is missing for an hour!" Kidnappings by strangers are extremely rare. Just being in a car is 400 times more dangerous.

"You don't see people saying, 'I could put Johnny in the car, but what if we're T-boned?" Skenazy points out. "We've come up with a culture that sees a kid outside and fantasizes not just something bad but the very worst-case scenario."

The officer who picked up Aiden argued the worst-case: "You have a lot of crazy people out here," he told Heather. "I don't trust my child out of range (of) about 20 or 30 feet from me." Twenty or 30 feet?

"It was a lot of his opinion," Heather tells me.

Police officers can act on their opinions. Local prosecutors went even further. They indicted Heather, claiming she placed her son in "imminent danger of death" and acted "against the peace and dignity of the state." Really! When her employer heard that, Heather lost her job. Good thing officials weren't this obsessed with stranger danger when I was a kid. I walked half-a-mile every school day. Crime was much worse then. Even including recent upticks, crime has dropped sharply over the past 30 years.

What's changed is media hysteria. Any dramatic incident, anywhere, appears instantly on our phones. Frightened, gullible, math-illiterate officials say, better safe than sorry. Now Scott and Heather say that, too.

"Will you drop your kids off again?" I ask.

"No!" says Heather. "We're scared."

"It's not that we don't think it was the right decision," says Scott, "But what they decided for us was not very affordable. (Now) we don't even leave them in the car to go into the convenience store,"

"Not because someone's going to take them," Heather adds, "but because someone's going to see and call the police!"

Lenore Skenazy has persuaded eight states to pass "childhood independence" laws. They clarify that letting kids do things on their own isn't abuse.

"You don't want the government telling you when you can let your kids do things," she says. "You know your children better than they do."

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John Stossel is the author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media."

Copyright 2024 Creators Syndicate, Inc.