From the article:
One such mother I spoke with was charged with felony child endangerment when she left her napping 4-year-old daughter in the car for a few minutes with the windows open while she ran into a store. During her arrest, she remembers the officer saying, “Stay-at-home mom’s too busy shopping to take care of her kid? Does your husband know how you take care of your child while he’s out earning the big bucks?”
Not waking a 4 year old for a brief trip into a store seems perfectly reasonable. It can make the whole rest of the day better compared to waking them up and having them be cranky on you for the entire day -- and possibly into the next day. Some kids have a hard time getting enough sleep.
When I was seven, I had chicken pox. I laid in the backseat of the car under a blanket while my mom got groceries. It would have been irresponsible to take me into the store with her. It would have been a hardship on me and it would have been a public health risk.
That’s when Ms. Koehler laughed. “It’s not against the law in Illinois to leave your children unattended. You have to prove that I’m willfully endangering their life by going into Starbucks and getting a cup of coffee where I can see them the whole time. Good luck getting that case approved by a state’s attorney.”
The officer didn’t end up pressing charges, but instead put in a call to the Department of Children and Family Services. As a result Ms. Koehler had to provide references attesting to her parenting, her children had to get physicals from a doctor, and the family was interviewed in their home, all before the case could be dismissed.
Oh, jeez. Seriously? "How dare she stand up for herself when she's done nothing wrong!"
I raised two special needs kids. For the first several years my oldest was in school, I would go at the start of the school year and tell the teacher that my oldest son was not normal and please do not hesitate to talk to me about any issue that comes up.
Most teachers really appreciated that I did that. It made them comfortable talking with me when they needed to about the latest odd thing my kid had done that they didn't quite know how to deal with.
When third grade started, he had his first male teacher and he was no longer obviously, glaringly different from the other kids. This guy called the school social worker to report me as some kind of abusive psycho mom hanging my crazy idea on my kid. Surely, my negative and unfounded attitude towards my child was going to warp him.
So the school social worker calls me and lets me know and she starts with "I know both your kids and they are both great kids. There must be some misunderstanding because bad parents don't produce such great kids." We talked for 45 minutes and she ultimately said "You don't need to make an appointment to come see me."
I was the "room mother" or whatever for that class and I hosted all the parties. There was supposed to be two of us, but the other mom never showed for anything and I handled it completely by myself. After several months, the teacher didn't exactly apologize, but we had a conversation where he talked about, yeah, my kid has some strange metrics for social stuff and doesn't think or behave the same as other kids his age and sometimes that goes weird places.
But this absolutely could have become an incident that derailed my life, got me reported to CPS, etc. Had the social worker been not great or had I been newer at that school where she didn't know both my kids or if I was less of a smooth talker or any number of other things, this could have blown up -- all because I was a proactive and devoted parent doing the same thing I had always done to make sure my kid had a good school experience and his teachers felt comfortable coming to me when they didn't quite know how to deal with my kid.