Jessica Ivey Jenkins cradled her sleeping 6-month-old daughter, Samantha, as she and her husband, Sameule Jenkins, talked softly about their 7-year-old son, Legend.

“He’d come home, get his coloring pencils, crayons, scissors, glue,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Swords, masks; he was very creative.”

“He was the sweetest,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “All the staff members at the school talk about how much of a joy he was.”

In the late afternoon of May 27, Brandon, 10, the oldest of the family’s seven children, and Legend, the second oldest, asked if they could walk to the neighborhood Food Lion supermarket and Subway sandwich shop, less than 10 minutes from the low-rise apartment complex in which the family had lived in Gastonia, N.C., for six years. The couple were reluctant.

“I really thought against it,” said Mr. Jenkins. He added that he and his wife are “very protective of our kids.” But Mr. Jenkins decided the boys could take the walk as long as they stayed on the phone with him so he could guide them.

“They made it there safe,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

On the way home, Legend stepped off a grass median dividing a four-lane road and was hit and killed by an S.U.V. driver. The driver, a 76-year-old woman, said she did not see him until he darted in front of her vehicle, the police report notes. (The driver faced no charges.) Mr. Jenkins, still on the phone with the older boy, rushed over.

“I wish we wouldn’t have never made that decision, but we can’t take it back,” said Mrs. Jenkins. Said Mr. Jenkins, “I feel so much guilt.”

If you thought nothing could be worse than losing a child, two days after Legend was killed, the county district attorney charged the Jenkinses with involuntary manslaughter and persuaded a judge to set bail at $1.5 million for each of them.

While they sat in jail, furloughed by a judge only to attend their boy’s funeral, social services workers placed the five younger siblings with Mr. Jenkins’s parents and Brandon with a relative of Mrs. Jenkins.

The jailing of Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins cruelly answers the question of whether parents still have a right to let their children go for a walk. It is particularly harsh given that America seems to have forgotten that pedestrians, adults and children even exist as it accommodates drivers in the sprawl of cheap growth. But as many parents now control their children’s every move, transgressions by parents who take a freer approach — one that used to be normal — can result in criminal charges.

Gaston County District Attorney Travis Page has not explained why he brought such high charges, and his office did not respond to several email and telephone messages I left to request comment.

The prosecutor’s office showed more leniency in April, when a 10-year-old Gaston County girl was shot by another child with a gun the girl’s father allegedly left unsecured. Intentionally bringing a potential harm into your home seems worse than letting your children take a walk, but the father in this case is free on $50,000 bond to face felony child abuse charges.

In one respect, though, Mr. Page was right to consider it aberrant to let children take a walk. The city of Gastonia, where Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins grew up and where they have been raising their children, is a reasonable stand-in for America. It’s a small, middle-class city — population: 85,000 — that used to be a mill town and is now a suburb of white-collar Charlotte. Gaston County has grown roughly 27 percent since the turn of the millennium, gaining in part from migration from higher-cost northeastern cities. But when I rode around Gastonia, despite lush lawns in subdivisions as well as tame-looking side streets fronting small apartment complexes, not a child was in sight.

Parents have withdrawn their children from the public realm because they perceive the public realm as dangerous — and they aren’t wrong. North Carolina is about average for national pedestrian deaths. But in the United States, average is bleak, three times worse than in the rest of the developed world. The death toll of Americans on foot rose by 58 percent in the decade leading up to 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, from 4,911 souls annually to 7,768.

West Hudson Boulevard, the road where Legend was struck, illustrates how America, as it has suburbanized, has made its roads hostile to people on foot.

“These roads are designed to kill pedestrians should one try to cross them,” said Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner, via email, after reviewing images of the crash site.

The boulevard features two narrow lanes on either side of a flat grassy median, which hosts stands of trees. Pedestrians standing on the narrow sidewalk might think they can see traffic coming from one direction, cross to the median for refuge and look for traffic coming from the other direction.

But the trees restrict visibility. A speed limit of 45 miles per hour means the average driver may be going over 50 miles per hour, Mr. Schwartz said. Combine speed with the fact that there are no shoulders, and there is no room for a child — or an adult — to move an inch in error. Ever larger American vehicles, too, are more deadly for walkers. The woman whom police say hit Legend was driving a Jeep Cherokee.

A common response to the death of a jaywalker — whether an adult or a child — is to blame the victim: Why didn’t the boys cross at a traffic light, less than five minutes away?

But pedestrians navigating a landscape built for cars rightly perceive intersections as unsafe, too. On West Hudson, pedestrians who have pressed the button for a walk signal still must contend with fast-moving cars turning as they cross.

In this car-centered terrain, road planners haven’t accommodated pedestrians’ common patterns. A few weeks ago, around the same time of day that Legend was hit, I saw an older woman cross via the same median. If there had been a mid-block crosswalk, Mr. Schwartz said, “the boy would be alive.”

Gastonia police officers were quick to arrest Legend’s parents, but they declined to visit the crash site with me to discuss safety improvements. Drivers don’t want crosswalks or lower speed limits slowing them down.

The Jenkinses didn’t have the resources to fight the serious charges they faced. The court reduced bail after a week, but even though the parents posed no flight risk or threat to public safety, it remained $150,000 — too much for them. Matt Hawkins, Mrs. Jenkins’s public defender, said he encouraged her to try to get bail reduced further so she could get out of jail and fight the charges. But when prosecutors offered to let the couple plead guilty to felony child abuse with a suspended prison sentence as well as probation, “she didn’t want to take the chance,” Mr. Hawkins said. “They were dangling her freedom in front of her face.” (In Mrs. Jenkins’s case, the plea does not acknowledge guilt, only that prosecutors have evidence to prove guilt.)

The felony pleas will haunt the couple, who are expecting another child in January. Mrs. Jenkins once worked cleaning houses and as a personal care assistant, and aspires to become a medical assistant. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything like that now, with a felony on my record,” she says.

Mr. Jenkins had an additional incentive to make a plea: A previous criminal history, including a felony conviction seven years ago, put him at risk of a long prison sentence. With the previous felony receding into the past, though, he had been looking forward to a wider array of jobs becoming available to him. Instead, he has had his work disrupted by this case. Recently employed as a forklift operator, he has taken a temporary job in nearby Charlotte directing traffic at construction sites.

Finally, the felony pleas will make it harder for the family to find new housing. Mrs. Jenkins says that the property manager at her family’s apartment, to which she has not returned since leaving jail, said that she would be evicted because of the felony conviction. (The property manager disputes this conversation.)

The couple must work to regain custody of the six surviving children, whom they see regularly at relatives’ homes. Being apart from their parents is hard for the children. Legend’s 6-year-old sister, Legacee, “can’t even talk about her brother without her eyes watering,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

Gov. Josh Stein of North Carolina should consider pardoning Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins, not just to reverse an injustice but to move beyond the overpolicing of parenting we’ve seen in the last 10 or 15 years. A Georgia mother who didn’t realize her 10-year-old boy had walked to the center of their small town and a South Carolina woman who let her 9-year-old daughter play in a well-populated park while she worked at a McDonald’s nearby faced criminal charges. (Both women’s charges were dropped.) Not long ago, police in Kentucky got involved when an 8-year-old was seen riding a bike down her own street.

“Just because parents don’t have their eyes on their kids every single second doesn’t mean they are bad parents,” says Lenore Skenazy, who chronicles such cases as president of Let Grow, which advocates for more childhood freedom. “We’re blaming these parents, but they’ve done everything as good as they can for 10 years, and then something terrible happens.”

The Jenkins case also disturbs Bethany Mandel, an author and podcaster who often focuses on parental rights.

“I let my 11-, 10- and 8-year-olds cross a street like that without me,” said Mrs. Mandel, the mother of six young children, but after this case, “I’m afraid to admit that.”

“The very act of raising children as we ourselves were raised,” she warned, “may now be treated as a crime.”

The Gaston County district attorney has callously overreached. But if something that used to be a normal childhood activity is now seen as so dangerous that parents who let their sons walk in the neighborhood are considered felons, the problem is not just with how we enforce our laws but also with how we allow cars to define how we live.

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