Mother convicted, added to Virginia child abuse registry for allowing 5-year-old to walk to pond in their gated community

A Virginia mother was placed on the state’s child abuse and neglect registry after allowing her five-year-old son to walk alone through their gated community.

Karyann Parkinson is appealing her criminal charge after allowing her son, Sam, to walk along a neighborhood path he was familiar with that passed by a pond. A security guard encountered the child and brought him home, after which police and Child Protective Services became involved.

Parkinson was eight months pregnant at the time and received a six-month jail sentence that was suspended. She was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and put on Virginia's Child Abuse and Neglect Central Registry for seven years.

"I didn't send him to play at the pond," she explained to Fox News. "I sent him down the path that happens to go past the pond to collect goose feathers... I know that a lot of people have seen the headlines and seen '5-year-old alone at a pond.' And I think if I saw that in isolation, I'd probably be alarmed, too."

"But what this was, was a 5-year-old on a pathway that he's very familiar with in his neighborhood that he loves, the only place that he can remember ever living. And it just got turned into this whole situation where a lot of people were suddenly intervening and feeling like this was a really drastic parenting choice," she added.

Parkinson said that being placed on the registry for seven years will prevent her from volunteering at Sam’s school until he reaches sixth grade. She said he was also “pretty shaken up” by the incident.

"We need to stop parenting from a place of fear and a place, you know, of obsessing over the unknown or some boogeyman who's going to jump out from behind a bush," Parkinson said.