Schaden-Mama
Mom Lets 12-Year-Old Drive Siblings to Day Care. Why Are We Happy?
A Montana woman stays home and let's her preteen daughter get behind the wheel and drive the siblings to day care -- yeehaw. Why does it feel so good to read about mom's gone bad?By Amy Linn, 10-05-09
Flickr photo by Esparata Palma
As a mom of a 12-year-old, there are lots of things I’ve trusted my daughter to do: clean her room, make lunch for herself, vacuum, draw wonderful cartoons of cats. What I haven’t done is let her drive the car.
Angela Parenteau did that, though. A mother of four from Vaughn, Montana, Parenteau was arrested in March after police say she allowed her 12-year-old daughter to drive her three siblings to day care, about 15 miles away in Great Falls. Parenteau apparently told police that she was too sick to drive and was on medication. She entered a no contest plea to criminal endangerment and allowing an unauthorized minor to operate a motor vehicle, the Associated Press story says. The police dropped three other criminal endangerment charges under a plea agreement because the 12-year-old didn’t want to testify against her mother, the AP says.
The story has circled the globe since the AP broke it last week. It was picked up by papers and websites everywhere from the News Courier in Alabama to the Independent in Ireland.
The Weekly Vice published the tale under the headline “Angela Parenteau was too stoned to drive.”
Police were notified by daycare employees who saw the 12-year-old pull up with her siblings, age 1, 2 and 4, according to the Laughing Stork, which nominated Parenteau as a “mother of the year” contender.
Another website covering the story is I Saw Your Nanny (Report Bad Nannies. Anonymously. Now). The site’s logo inexplicably shows a drawing of an old lady getting stabbed in the back by a dagger. (She’s perhaps supposed to look like grandma, but if grandma is a bad nanny, are we supposed to knife her?)
It was at this point, amid the generalized and bloody glee about the stupidity of this mother—glee I myself was sharing—that I realized there was something fishy going on. Yes, Parenteau made a terrible and incomprehensible decision that risked the lives of her children and everyone else on the road. I have no idea what her problem is—whether she’s an addict, someone ill-equipped to be a parent, or a person suffering from depression, meanness, or just full-blown idiocy. To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that her kids are okay, and that the 12-year-old, thank god, didn’t kill anyone en route.
What does matter is that the justice system asked the 12-year-old to testify against her mother, something that could only wreak more distress. (It’s hard enough for an adult to take the witness stand and testify against a relative, let alone for a kid to testify against a parent who’s responsible for his or her welfare.)
What also matters is that the world loves to hate dumb women in general and bad moms in particular. They’re a hoot, a hot story, a punchline. This particular mother, of course, screwed up to the point of criminality—she might even be an evil person, as far as I know. But it’s the passion behind the condemnation that makes me wonder about myself and everyone else. I can only offer the first thing that occurs to me: bad moms make other people feel superior. Bad moms especially make other moms feel superior. Our judgment is better. Our kids are better. Our lives are better, we can tell ourselves.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t need to.
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Farm kids who were in my grade had been driving tractors, and pickups, and trucks to help their parents for years--by the time they were old enough to be granted a license by the state.
Our population has grown too large--and our politicians have convinced us we are too many to govern by reason; so magic numbers have replaced responsible training.
There is no rational reason that a twelve year old cannot safely drive her siblings to the babysitter's--any more than there is a rational reason she cannot accept the responsibility to care for them as a stand-in parent.
Societal pressures have turned us all into fools whose judgement needs a reality check...
There is no reason why a twelve-year-old cannot drive as well as someone of 25 or older.
Clearly that 12 year old needs to be taught properly and at the end of the day has to have some experience.
The glib argument that a twelve year old hasn’t got the nesseccary co-ordination is hogswash. There is no differerence. There are 12 year-olds that can swim, dive do gymnastics better than most adults.
It may be that a twelve year old is more easily distracted over long concentration periods, but this twelve-year-old wasn’t driving for hours but for perhaps 25 minutes. Moreover, this girl could clearly drive a car and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had turned out that she had often driven the car and driven thousands of miles to boot.
The only glitch was that she was seen driving!
Of course the girl was breaking the law. Her age meant she couldn’t have a driving licence, she couldn’t have insurance. But please her age does not mean she cannot drive as well or better than the majority of people reading these comments.
e.g. Had Mike Tyson not have had a legitimate licence to box – does that fact then mean he is not capable of fighting in the ring and winning? Of course not – All it means in this hypothetical instance is that he would not have won legitimately!