As a small child, I spent a fair amount of time unsupervised.

As a 20 year old, I took a year off while I changed schools and majors, and saw the (IMHO Ronald Reagan inspired) height of the missing child hysteria in 1981-82.^*

So, I am disgusted, but not surprised, that a mom was jailed for sending her 9 year old to play in the park alone, despite the fact that she was sent with a cell phone, and the mother was at work nearby:

Just in case you thought you could parent whatever way you see fit in 2014 America:

A North Augusta mother is in jail after witnesses say she left her nine-year-old daughter at a nearby park, for hours at a time.

Hours at a time? At a park? In the summer? Gosh! That certainly sounds normal and fun like a reason to throw a mom in jail—and place the child in state custody.

Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.

Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.

The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.

Watch the news: It sounds like Debra Harrell committed a serious, unconscionable crime. The reporter looks ready to burst with contempt. But what are the facts? She let her daughter play at the park for several hours at a time—like we did as kids. She gave her a daughter a phone if she needed to call. Any “danger” was not only theoretical, it was exceedingly unlikely.

The danger is vanishingly small.

We are a nation who lives in terror of vanishingly small threats, child abduction, shark attacks, plane crashes, and non existent things, like vaccine related autism, while blithely ignoring greater threats, like driving, guns in the home, crossing the street, and anything that begins with the phrase, “Watch this.”

Have I mentioned that we as a society are both paranoid and insane?

^*The people whipping up the hysteria claimed that there were something like 85,000 child abductions a year^†. They did this by counting every time a kid was delivered late from visitation, got lost in the mall for 5 minutes, etc.
^†Stranger child abduction number significantly less than 100 per year.