The McDonald’s mom story isn’t about free-range parenting at all. It’s about everything else.

The case of Debra Harrell, the South Carolina mom who was arrested for letting her nine-year-old play at the park while she worked at McDonald’s, has been widely discussed as a free-range-children issue. Shouldn’t a nine-year-old be allowed to play in the park, free-range advocates ask. Has our bubble-wrapped society gone too far?

But, guess what? It’s not a free-range issue. This is a class issue. This story is all about class and social welfare and feminism. It’s an example of how society fails to provide basic protections for women and children and then turns around and paints mothers as criminals.

This has nothing to do with whether or not your nine-year-old can go to the park for a couple hours without you being there. Sure she can. Or maybe not. That’s your call. Debra Harrell didn’t get to make that call. She didn’t get to choose how her child would best be cared for during summer holidays. The minimum wage in South Carolina is $7.25 per hour. The cost of a YMCA summer day camp in her town of North Augusta, NC is $110 per week for non-members. (Note the website states financial assistance is available. I don’t know whether Ms. Harrell tried to find any assistance for her daughter this summer.)

What is she supposed to do?

I know some people will suggest she should not have had a child in the first place unless and until she was in a position to properly provide for every eventuality, preferably within the confines supportive embrace of a traditional marriage. In fact, those people might go on, in a society where women stay home with their children, there’s always someone available to pitch in and watch your kids. And in those cases where some unforeseen tragedy befalls a worthy family, leaving the mother and children destitute? Well, there’s always charity.

But I prefer to live in the real world. So I ask what should this individual woman with her already very-much-alive, nine-year-old daughter do when school lets out for the summer and she cannot afford to pay for childcare on her minimum wage salary?

Because I actually don’t think it is okay to let an unsupervised nine-year-old play in the park for 40 hours a week. The difference between a couple hours here and there and all day, every day is huge. It’s the difference between a taste of independence and responsibility and actually being completely responsible for your own well-being all by yourself. It’s the difference between some unstructured, free play and an entire summer left to your own devices. It’s the difference, really, between childhood and adulthood.

Our neighbour has house guests who are recent immigrants from Bombay staying with her for the summer: a mom and two school-aged children. We talked a bit about the cost of childcare in this city. “That’s what’s better about back home,” she said. “You’re allowed to just leave your children at home to go to work.”

And of course that’s what people around the world do when they don’t  have a better option. They leave their older children on their own and they leave their younger children in the care of their older ones. But just because it’s a common solution, doesn’t mean it’s a good enough one.

Insofar as we find rules or guidelines for minimum ages to leave a child alone, I think this is what they are protecting against. The accepted thinking is most kids are able to take care of themselves for a couple hours by age 10 or so and can watch younger sibs by around 12. But it’s not fair to put a 12-year-old in charge of caring for himself and others for an entire work week. You still need a nanny, babysitter or organized camp program to do the heavy lifting.

So it absolutely was a shame that this particular 9-year-old was left to sit in a McDonald’s on a laptop for hours on end, day in and day out. It’s a further shame that then, when the laptop was stolen, she was dropped at the park for workdays on end.

But the real shame is that anybody should have to choose between going to work and their child’s well being. It’s shameful that in the richest country in the world, the poorest families are still left to fend for themselves.

And when the authorities were finally called, they didn’t make finding a spot in a government or charity-run camp a priority for this child. No, they turned a working, single mother into a criminal and potentially tore a family apart. That is the real crime here.