“Baking Helicopter Parenting into the Law”

My story about the mom found GUILTY of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” because she let her 5-year-old walk around collecting feathers went viral last week. Most amazing to me is the way something has…shifted. I really feel that when I began Free-Range Kids almost 20 years ago, the reaction to this mom might easily have been: “FIVE YEARS OLD??? That’s crazy! He could run into the street — throw himself into the pond — or be kidnapped by a guy in a white van!” And there were still some comments like that. Of course there were. But by far the majority of comments that I’ve seen (impossible to keep up — it was shared 51,000 times on Twitter alone) sided with the mom. That strikes me as a shift we have been waiting for for a long time. Google “Karyann Parkinson neglect” and you can noodle around for yourself. But as evidence, here’s how five Fox Newsers chewed on the story for about 10 minutes. They are saying everything we have been saying forever — and sometimes in our…