Aspies For Freedom

The mother of an 8-year-old boy was charged with child endangering after the boy was found in the middle of a busy intersection.

Amy Gaudio, 32, of Stanton Avenue, was released on a summons.

Police were called to Market Street and Shields Road about 9 a.m. Tuesday on a report of a child in the road who had narrowly escaped being hit by traffic.

Officers removed the boy, who was wearing a dirty diaper and believed to be autistic, from the road. Shortly after, Gaudio called police to report her son missing.

When they arrived at her house, police found no additional locks on the back door and the door of the attached garage open.

While police were there, Gaudio called her husband to come home from work.

Dominic Gaudio, 29, was charged with misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct, obstructing official business and resisting arrest after police say he was combative and ignored officers' commands.

He was lodged in the Mahoning County Justice Center.
From vindy.com

This kind of thing shouldn't happen, but I think this treatment of the parents could be too harsh, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the mother did call the police, so she wasn't unconcerned.

Secondly, parents of NT kids get away with not supervising their kids all the time, with no consequences. In the suburb where I live it is a common sight to see toddlers in nappies playing in the street with no adult supervision.

Thirdly, it is quite possible that these parents were not aware that autistic kids need closer supervision and confinement than regular kids. When a child is diagnosed as autistic, are the parents given some information package by the doctor or the psychologist explaining all of the special needs of autistic children? I doubt it. When our first child was born no one warned me that our kids might need especially close supervision, but we soon discovered that this was the case. We had to be very careful about locks and gates and toddler barriers and fences and toddler harnesses, but we found this out ourselves by trial and error. No one in our family has ever been diagnosed, so we had no idea why our kids were so active and curious and unconcerned with staying close to others.

In the suburb where I live it is a common sight to see toddlers in nappies playing in the street with no adult supervision.

That may be a cultural difference, if that happened here it would be totally unacceptable, and obviously the same in that area of the USA.

There was a case in the past where a woman left her baby outside a cafe when she went in for a drink, which was the norm in her native scandinavian country. Someone called the police and she was arrested, this was in the USA.

I think most people here think toddlers toddling about the street unsupervised is unacceptable, including myself, but it's a sad fact of life that the child welfare department in the state where I live, and also in some other Australian states, are simply not doing their job. The social workers who work in such places are constantly complaining about the size of their case loads. The police aren't much better either.