The Poor Saga of Debra Harrell, the Nanny Police state, and McDonalds

A news article crossed my Twitter account today.  It appears that a 49 year old mother in South Carolina has been arrested for letting her 9 year old play in a park (with lots of other kids and parents) alone while she was at work in a McDonalds about a mile away.

Until a few days ago, the minimum wage mother was letting her daughter come to the McDonalds and play on a laptop.  But recently, her home was broken into and the laptop stolen.  Being a minimum wage worker, spare cash for a replacement laptop was not exactly just sitting around.

So the mother and daughter agreed she could hang out in the park, play and call her with a cell phone that the mother left with the daughter.

But when a parent asked the girl where her mother was and received a truthful answer, the parent called the police who took the girl away to social services because she had been abandoned and the police arrested the mother for bad parenting.

This is outrageous.  Hanging out in the neighborhood with other kids while parents worked is all kids of my age did every summer.  We didn't check in every hour.  We weren't supervised constantly.  In fact, some of us risked life and limb doing stupid things from which we learned how to assess risk and potential harm.

I suppose I am cynical about all this helicopter parenting because my grandmother, when I was 6, let me ride my bicycle one mile into the nearest town to buy an ice cream.  Then I rode home another way and played in a big creek.  When I got home, I played in a small creek.  All anyone knew, is that if my bicycle was gone, I was out and about, and if it was there, I was down by the creek.

Now this poor mother is in jail, her daughter is who knows where in what type of condition, and the mother has probably lost her job, but maybe her manager will be kind to her.  She is clearly a conscientious person and the people who need their head examined are the police and social services people responsible for this outrage.  Not to mention the nosey parents at the playground who see this as something to call the police about.


7/23 update:  McDonald's did fire the mom.  Now she will collect unemployment and probably end up on welfare.  What a Shame