A couple weeks back I shared a story on social media about a mother who was jailed for making her son walk one half a mile home.
Heather Wallace's oldest son, 8-year-old Aiden, was driving his two brothers crazy in the car as they all returned from karate one afternoon in October 2021. Wallace asked Aiden to walk the rest of the way home—half a mile in quiet, suburban Waco, Texas—so that he could calm down.
For this she was arrested, handcuffed, and thrown in jail.
She was charged with endangering a child, a felony carrying a mandatory minimum of two years in prison.
"It really brought us into deep trauma," says Wallace.
She is finally able to speak out after completing a six-month pretrial diversion program to get the charges dropped. But her arrest remains on the books—easily searchable by employers—which is disastrous for someone with a Bachelor's degree in education.
It’s an example of police overreach, but a relatively new law meant to curb child protective services power in Texas worked and probably limited the destruction to the family. Here’s more from the article.
Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children's grandmothers—had to visit and trade off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded.
Wallace believes this could be due to the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 with the help of Let Grow, the non-profit I co-founded. It's part of HB567, a larger child welfare reform bill, and clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger.
"I'm encouraged to see CPS follow the law the legislature enacted to protect parents from government interference when they make reasonable parenting decisions," says Andrew Brown, associate vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which worked on the bill.
The story inspired at least one person to reach out.
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