Mom who left 6-year-old daughter alone in car for 10 minutes fights neglect finding
At a time when some feel that parents and government officials are excessively zealous about safeguarding children from perceived risks, a suburban Chicago nurse is fighting a neglect finding over parental conduct that was relatively commonplace decades ago.
Lisa Graham admittedly left her 6-year-old daughter alone in her car for 10 minutes in September 2013, while she purchased a few things for dinner at a local market.
The result was her arrest by Naperville police on a misdemeanor child-endangerment charge that was later dropped, reports the Chicago Tribune (reg. req.). Plus a separate administrative finding of child neglect was made by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, based on “inadequate supervision.”
The neglect finding was overturned by an administrative judge after Graham appealed. However, the acting DCFS director reinstated it and refused to expunge Graham’s name from a five-year state registry. She is now petitioning a DuPage County court for relief, the newspaper says.
The problem is that the high temperature was in the nineties on the day when Graham left her daughter in the car at the girl’s request, and children can quickly die in hot cars. Although the girl was fine, not even flushed according to her mom, acting DCFS director George Sheldon said in a September 2015 letter that the temperature “would have become lethal to the minor within a short period.”
Although Graham says her daughter knew how to open the door, becoming overheated and disoriented could have left the girl “without the requisite experience to understand what was happening and leaving her without the proper judgment to open the car door,” Sheldon wrote.
A state statute defines child neglect as leaving a minor “without supervision for an unreasonable amount of time without regard for the mental or physical health or safety of the minor,” the newspaper reports.
Graham, now 51, says she fears her momentary lapse in judgment could prevent her from volunteering at church and her daughter’s school, due to the neglect finding.
“Every waking minute of every day it’s caused me to question my parenting skills,” she told the Tribune, describing the self-doubt she felt after the incident. “I never wanted to put my daughter in danger. I still don’t understand how this could all be happening over something so ridiculous.”
See also:
ABAJournal.com: “Cleared in second neglect case, ‘free range’ parents plan to sue”