Police, Parenting | featured news

Youth advocates and judges say more children are being sent into the criminal justice system for acts like scuffles and truancy that are better handled in the principal’s office.

A 3-year-old boy in Greenville, South Carolina was shot in the head and killed on Friday after he started playing with a pink handgun because he thought it was a toy. Police responding to the shooting at Haywood Plantation Apartments said that Tmorej Smith was found with a gunshot wound to the head, according to The Associated Press.

Police say Escalona was so mad that her daughter soiled her pants that, as punishment, she super glued the girl’s hands to the wall then beat her in front of her other siblings... Escalona’s kids told investigators their mother kicked the girl in the stomach and repeatedly hit her.

A Delaware doctor and his wife were arrested this week after their daughter told authorities that she was punished by "waterboarding," police said. The 11-year-old girl told police that her father, pediatrician Melvin Morse, would hold her face under a running faucet causing the water to shoot up her nose, the Delaware State Police said. The punishments happened at least four times over a two-year period and the girl's mother, Pauline Morse, witnessed some of them and did nothing, police said.

The attempted abduction of a 10-year-old girl in Philadelphia was caught on a security camera and now police are offering a $10000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect.

Police in Georgia handcuffed a kindergartner after the girl threw a tantrum, and the police chief is making no apologies. WMAZ-TV (http://on.wmaz.com/I0ZrNE ) reports the 6-year-old is accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing furniture at school in the central Georgia city of Milledgeville. The police report says the girl knocked over a shelf that injured the principal.

A 3-year-old boy fatally shot himself with a gun he found in a car while his family stopped for gas early Wednesday in Tacoma, police said. It was western Washington's third recent shooting by a child....

A mother of 10 who threw a birthday party for her 5-year-old daughter at a Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant in suburban Houston, Texas, apparently forgot about the girl, went home without her and failed to realize her mistake until the next day, police said Friday.

A babysitter and trusted neighbor has confessed that he bludgeoned a 9-year-old Indiana girl to death with a brick then dismembered her, hiding her head, hands and feet at his home and dumping the rest of her remains nearby, police said Tuesday.

Explicit “sexting” by kids may be far less prevalent than previously thought, and police intervention may also be less common according to two new reports published online today in the journal Pediatrics.