[...] Mom Who Dropped Kids at Mall Lived Criminal ‘Justice’ Hell [...]

[...] As anyone who has been through the parenting wars of the past decade knows, one parent’s idea of safe is another parent’s – or government official’s – idea of neglect. Just ask the Montana mom who spent years in child welfare hell after she let her 12 year-old daughte… [...]

I remember reading the original article as well, and I agree that she comes off very ‘oy, these bumpkins’. That said – I think the error is with the teenagers, not the mother. When I was that age, I regularly took care of my younger siblings (similar age differences) without incident. This whole thing should have resulted in a severe grounding, not a legal case.

I agree with Laure. It drives me bonkers that she claims hostility toward the educated when the people she’s accusing of persecuting her are educated people themselves, and I daresay she’s not the only professor in Bozeman, or even the only parenting one.

I would hope that a parent who dropped off two twelve-year-olds with three young children at a mall would be investigated and have to attend parenting classes. I do think it was an error in judgement, but so are many crimes relating to abuse or neglect of children—the point of the parenting classes is to improve that judgment in the interest of the children’s safety.

Her being rude, bitchy or even talking down to people is not illegal. I agree with the comments that the whole situation would have probably been worse if she had not been educated or poor or disadvantaged in anyway, but again being a bitch isn’t illegal.
Regardless of her attitude everything I’ve read states there was no law saying leaving those children in the mall was illegal. Maybe some parents wouldn’t do it and other might, but honestly that’s for each parent to decide. Our current culture of judging a parents actions is getting out of control when people are being arrested for something that wasn’t even illegal in the first place.

I also read the original story. I feel now, as I did then, that this woman needs to seriously get over herself. This article goes on about her “humiliation,” her “degradation” and how everyone was out to get her and make an example of her. Every bit of her punishment is described as beneath her, making her feel like a criminal. Because she had to make a phone call every Monday and (horrors) be on time to her probation appointments. I guess that was abusive because she was educated, and didn’t everyone know how valuable her time was? I hope she can someday find some peace and the wherewithal to drop it already.

A gross miscarriage of justice this ain’t. All we know of this case has been from her perspective. She got treated like anyone else would have gotten treated, and that seems to be the crux of her outrage.

Nope. It can’t. It manages not to happen to millions of moms every day. Even educated ones. So yeah, not really feeling her pain.

I agree with Mina. I read the article when it came out and found her story to be very compelling. We make judgment calls everyday and if you think you could never possibly make a decision that someone else might think is wrong, well, I hope you don’t have to learn the hard way that it’s not true. I’ve seen it happen twice now just with my own friends.

Maybe the DA emphasized Kevane’s education because SHE first brought it up, in a don’t-you-think-an-educated-person-like-myself-knows-what’s-best, kind of way….of course, since she’s the one writing the story, she can leave that detail out if she chooses.

The mall security and Macy’s employees that called police saw kids they felt were badly unsupervised, and they couldn’t have had any idea who was responsible for them or what she (or he, for all they knew) did for a living. Because, oh yeah, the adult that should’ve been responsible for them wasn’t being responsible. So it clearly wasn’t a case of someone picking on that professor with her goll-durn book learnin’.

For the record, I don’t think she thought her daughter and the daughter’s friend would leave the kids in one part of the store alone. But they did, and the girls are not old enough to be held accountable, so the adult responsible for them is. The girls were not as responsible as Kevane judged them to be. Thus she made an error in judgment and has to be held accountable. Ditto if one of the kids were shoplifting—it comes down to the adult responsible for them.

I didn’t understand the term “judgmental” until I became a parent.