When I was small, my (conscientious, non-abusive) mother would leave me alone in the back seat of our car for brief spells while she ran into stores to do errands, an experience that’s entirely typical for most people I know from my generation. Nowadays a parent who behaves that way might risk a police record or a serious encounter with child welfare authorities. “In [a New Jersey] appeals court decision last week, three judges ruled that a mother who left her toddler sleeping in his car seat while she went into a store for five to 10 minutes was indeed guilty of abuse or neglect for taking insufficient care to protect him from harm.” The child was unharmed and an investigation of the household found it not otherwise problematic, which apparently still did not suffice to stop the abuse charge from going forward.

When the law behaves this way, is it really protecting children? What about the risks children face when their parent is pulled into the police or Child Protective Services system because of overblown fears about what conceivably might have happened, but never did?

Author Lenore Skenazy, who’s led the charge against the forces of legal and societal overprotectiveness in her book Free-Range Kids and at her popular blog of the same name, explains her doubts about the New Jersey case here and here. Tomorrow, Wed. Feb. 5, she’ll be the guest of the Cato Institute for a lunchtime talk on helicopter parenting and its near relation, helicopter governance; I’ll be moderating and commenting. The event is free and open to the public, but you need to register, which you can do here.