No five year old is mature enough to understand and recognize the dangers involved.

Sheltered much lol?

I've seen a 5 year old competently handle a BB rifle and an actual handgun with proper trigger discipline. The BB rifle was his practical toy he practiced with and the real handgun was his father's which he wasn't allowed to use until he'd proved himself for a couple of years with the BB (only handed under supervision).

He was also gaining fluency in 3 languages and his friends would spend their free time from school climbing up and down actual mountains.

Take a wild guess where it was.

I don't agree with everything the mother did here but I do not agree that she's criminally liable in any way.

Damn, have you interacted with any 5 year olds? They're smarter than you think.

You're making a statistical claim and the statistics don't support you. Although you personally are paranoid, in reality, children have gone around the neighborhood almost entirely safely for almost all of human history.

Of course there is some element of risk. That's true for life, for everyone, forever. But until you have solid data that says the kids shouldn't be able to go a very short distance to a place that they know how to get to safely, then you're speculating about what could possibly go wrong. And that's just a waste of time from a public policy perspective.

The incidence of kidnapping was WAY higher in gen-x days with no cell phones to rat out the pervs. And even when it was way higher, most child abuse happened by someone well-known to the victim. Stranger-danger was unbelievably rare.

My entire school in the 4th grade (so 9yo) lived next to a busy highway used by full 80t logging trucks, dump trucks, semi-trucks with full loads, in an area where snow is common in winter. We'd trudge down the boulevard of the highway, alto sax or trombone cases in hand, lugging it all to school and back. The whole class would. All grades would, from 4-7, hair and clothes flapping in the wind as a semi would roar past.

Then from the 8th grade we'd attend the school in the next town over. We'd get ourselves to the bus stop and disappear for 8 hours, completely out of contact, the eldest child with a house key and no ID, no phone, no tracker watch, no geofencing.

Tell me again how modern life is dangerous.

No five year old is mature enough to understand and recognize the dangers involved.

I think the mother is better qualified to make that call than you.

Children eventually become adults, and they don't magically become autonomous on their 18th birthday. It's something responsible parents teach, and it starts young.

There's a long running Japanese show called "Old Enough" where kids younger than this go off and do errands.

I feel like I am in a Monty Python sketch right now. She "contributed to delinquency" because he could have gotten in trouble that he didn't get into if things had gone entirely differently?