Should we arrest parents for letting young kids walk home alone?

I often walked to school in second grade. I’d pick up my friend Mike, and the two of us 7-year-olds would amble past the wooden train bridge and down a hill, skirting the public park, before crossing a four-lane road and arriving at school.

When it rained, we wore jackets. Sometimes we ran to make the early bell. I can still hear our moms’ refrains:

The exercise is good for you.

Just stick together; you’ll be fine.

And, of course:

Don’t be late!

We made the 25-minute pilgrimage on our own. Many of our classmates completed their own independent journeys to school.

You may have done something similar. If you didn’t walk to school alone, maybe you rode a bike to the local park or netted tadpoles in the community creek. Perhaps you walked the family dog. Some of you even boarded the big-city subway on your own. You were a kid and you did things without adult supervision.

We called it childhood.

A tragic case from North Carolina got me thinking about adolescent independence, and what should happen when something goes wrong?

On May 27, a mother and her two sons were at a Food Lion grocery store in Gastonia, west of Charlotte. She agreed to let the boys, 7 and 10, walk back to their nearby home, according to reports.

The 7-year-old, named Legend, was trying to cross the four-lane road outside of a crosswalk when a Jeep Cherokee hit and killed him. The driver did not appear to be speeding and stopped at the scene. She does not face any charges.

Witnesses told a local TV station that Legend “stepped into traffic as his older brother tried to hold him back.” The boys’ mother said it was the first time she had let them cross the street on their own.

Gastonia authorities charged the parents with involuntary manslaughter, felony child neglect and misdemeanor child neglect. They were held in jail on $1.5 million bonds, which a judge recently lowered to $150,000 each.

Authorities emphasized that the boys were unsupervised.

“In such cases, adults must be held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure a safe environment for their children,” Gastonia police said.

Safety is essential. But what about ensuring that kids develop resiliency and self-reliance? We can’t — and shouldn’t — encase them in bubble wrap until they turn 18 — or 25. No parent can provide absolute safety. Life has never come with such guarantees. All the criminal charges in the world will never extinguish bad luck.

I can’t help but think that if the boys made it home safely, no one would have fussed. Many observers would have praised the parents for reinforcing valuable lessons about independence and camaraderie. They would lament how kids are too coddled today, and would agree that walking home was better for the boys than staring at iPads.

When a child dies in this manner, it’s common to want to point fingers. It helps us process a horrible situation and rationalize how we’d never make similar decisions. We convince ourselves that this will never happen to us or our children. We aren’t “bad,” so we’ll be fine.

But it’s a false comfort. Bad things happen to good people all the time. And some of those bad things are just accidents. Wrenching, bewildering, tragic — but all the same, just accidents. We should resist the desire to affix blame. After these types of tragedies, punishment shouldn’t be our north star. Our justice system must leave room for grace.

We may desire closure. We may want these cases wrapped up in neat bows with “bad” parents behind bars. But this isn’t a movie of the week, where everything is so black and white. The world is full of nuance and unsatisfying outcomes. We shouldn’t encourage criminal charges to make us feel better, or out of a misguided insistence on so-called “accountability.”

When my son was in a St. Petersburg elementary school, I saw parents walk their second graders partway to school and then let them handle the final four or five blocks on their own. Those kids were “unsupervised” for at least five minutes. That level of independence makes some parents uneasy, which is fine. It’s a choice. But choosing to give a child a modicum of independence shouldn’t turn into a crime just because tragedy strikes.

No one ever thought of my mom and dad as criminals for letting me walk to school when I was 7. They chose to give me some autonomy. Like so many other parents, they thought the decision would help me grow up and prepare me for the next steps in life. Putting them in prison wouldn’t have made the world any better — or any safer.

Even in a world full of risks, parents need room to parent.