DailyDirt: Bad Parental Judgment

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Parents have a lot of decisions to make that they may be encountering for the first time -- choosing between formula or breastmilk, letting a kid have more than 2 hours of screen time per day, determining when a kid is mature enough to be left alone, and the list goes on. Decades ago, some of these decisions didn't even exist, but recently, it seems debatable parental choices can be criminal offenses under exactly the wrong circumstances. Here are just some examples of the increasing societal judgment of bad parenting.

• A 46yo mother left her 9yo daughter alone in a park with a cell phone, resulting in the mother losing custody of her child. And she would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids parents and authorities in South Carolina. [url]
• The case of Justin Ross Harris alleges that he murdered his young son by leaving him in a hot car for hours. There have been similar deaths that were purely accidental (around 30-40 deaths each year), but maybe the publicity of this case will raise awareness and put an end to this particular kind of tragedy. [url]
• Would leaving a 4yo in a car to go shopping for less than ten minutes sound like horrible parenting in the 1970s? Perhaps it's not surprising that it can be a legal gray area in the present day. [url]

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Filed Under: child protective services, cps, crimes, custody, hot car, justin ross harris, kids, murder, parenting