In today’s society, it is getting harder and harder to punish your child without risking a child dependency case and the state taking your child away from you. Such is the case for one woman in Arkansas who is making headlines for the way she recently punished her 10-year-old son.
Her son was suspended from the bus for the 5th time this school year. Fed up, the mother forced her son to walk to school – all 4.5 miles. Well the boy didn’t make it much farther than a few blocks before a concerned security guard at a bank saw the young boy walking alone and called the police. The police picked the boy up, drove him to school and then stopped by his house to give the mother a ticket for endangering the welfare of a minor and a court date.
It takes the average adult about 15 minutes to walk a mile, meaning the 4.5 mile trek would have easily taken the young child over an hour to complete. The question becomes whether or not this was too harsh of a punishment to mete out to a 10-year-old child. If convicted, the woman faces up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Whether or not child protective services decides to step in and take the child is another matter entirely, and one that would require the services of a family law attorney to handle.
For what it’s worth, the young boy seems to have learned his lesson. “She (my mother) should not be going to court,” the young man said. “I learned my lesson. That was me that was getting suspended off the bus.”
What do you think? Did the mother go over the top with her punishment or did police overreact?
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