A Georgia mother of four who was arrested in front of her children last month after letting her 10-year-old son home alone is not going to quietly disappear, she has made a new discovery. He uses his profile to advocate for free-range parents and their mothers. Children everywhere.
Brittany Patterson, 41, was taken into custody and slapped with child endangerment charges by the Fannin County Sheriff's Department on Oct. 30. Since then, she has fought back relentlessly, refusing to accept a plea deal.
patterson Appeared on “Fox & Friends Weekend” We sat down with her attorney to talk about her harrowing experience and her next steps in the free-range parenting movement.
“It was definitely a little bit traumatic. My kids had never seen anything like that or been exposed to anything like that, so it was their first real encounter with police and law enforcement.” “What I did was I saw them take my mother out of the house in handcuffs, and I think that was pretty traumatic,” Patterson said.
The day before Halloween, Patterson's son Soren, then 10, went to a town less than a mile away. Patterson did not ask for her mother's permission, but said her mother probably would have given it if she had.
Later, sheriff's deputies found Soren wandering in a town near the North Carolina border and called Patterson to inform him of his whereabouts. At the time, Patterson was being held at the clinic along with one of his other sons.
Deputies drove Soren home and returned later that day to arrest Patterson in front of his family.
Law enforcement officials have since indicated they will drop the charges against Patterson if he agrees to put a GPS tracking device on his son's phone so he can be tracked. Patterson said on his talk show that this was not formally proposed in writing or verbally, and was only vaguely hinted at.
“Again, the irony is that the next day was Halloween, and children often went door to door in the dark without their parents, knocking on strangers’ doors. [Soren] During the day, I was just walking down a street less than a tenth of a mile away. [away]'' said her attorney, David DeLugas.
Her arrest sparked a broader debate about government control over child-rearing and what exactly constitutes a free-range family, where authorities don't intervene.
“The reality is that as parents, we have to have autonomy, whether we want to wrap our kids in bubble wrap or give them a little more freedom and autonomy,” Patterson says.
“That should be our decision as parents, not the decision of government officials who don't even know our children or our families.”
