This piece is part of Mashable Spotlight, which presents in-depth looks at the people, concepts and issues shaping our digital world.

In 2011, Lilia Gonzalez* nearly lost her three young children. She considered herself a loving, attentive mother, but one day she made a seemingly harmless mistake that turned into a two-year battle to convince the state of Illinois that she hadn’t — and wouldn’t — maliciously neglect her children.

The ordeal began on a June morning when Gonzalez, then 36, awoke at 7:30 a.m., startled and groggy. Her 16-month-old son had been sick, and Gonzalez slept fitfully; her husband left earlier to start the first of his two jobs. Like most parents, Gonzalez’s mind immediately settled on the day’s many tasks, including taking the children to walk her four-year-old son to the bus stop. And that’s when the panic surged — she had overslept and the bus had already departed.

As her eight-year-old daughter dressed for school, Gonzalez and her son rushed down the stairs from their third-floor apartment in Schaumburg, Illinois, and looked for the bus. Seeing an empty street, Gonzalez quickly decided to drive the two miles to school.

When she returned home after a 20-minute absence, Gonzalez found her toddler son watching television in bed and her daughter ready to attend school. She regretted impulsively leaving them alone, but felt grateful nothing tragic had happened.

The next day, Gonzalez mentioned the incident to her therapist, a clinic student who helped treat her for depression. “I did something probably stupid,” Gonzalez recalls saying. Her therapist remained silent then, but a few hours later, Gonzalez’s phone rang.

“I talked to my supervisor,” her therapist said, “and I explained to her what you just told me, and we have to call [Department of Children and Family Services].” Gonzalez hadn’t heard of the child welfare agency, but was terrified. “She started telling me that they were probably going to come and interview and probably they would take the children away.”

That phone call marked the beginning of Gonzalez’s “nightmare.” With a single offhand comment, she found herself at the mercy of cultural, social and legal forces that increasingly define parenting as a superhuman feat of constant monitoring. Children, according to this perspective, are only ever truly safe from harm when at their parents’ side.

This standard, a few decades in the making, is largely derived from a cocktail of dread: fear that our children might be injured or kidnapped, anxiety that junior might not be academically or socially successful in the absence of constant supervision, and worry that not tending to a child’s every need will somehow lead to irreparable psychological damage.

As a remedy, some parents have embraced intensive parenting styles that are endlessly caricatured, but have nonetheless shifted the collective expectation of what it means to be a responsible, devoted parent.

Image: Mashable, Bob Al-Greene

Long before American children were put on lockdown, they were expected to cultivate independence at an early age. Paula Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California at Berkeley, traces this tradition back to the 1800s in the book Reinventing Childhood After World War II. Young men, in particular, enjoyed a uniquely American brand of independence, embodied by experiences like Ulysses S. Grant's, a man who began plowing his father’s land at age 11 and traveled by horse for dozens of miles as a teenager.

Fass said the obsession over “something lurking around the corner” goes back just three decades. As more mothers left home for full-time jobs, it “burdened them with fear.” Parents were no longer within sprinting distance if a child fell on the playground, and they didn’t always trust caregivers.

As the 1980s and '90s unfolded, parents also looked on in horror as child abductions dominated an increasingly 24-hour, national news cycle: Etan Patz in 1979, Adam Walsh in 1981, Jaycee Dugard in 1991 and Polly Klaas in 1993. It seemed as if predators regularly prowled the streets, waiting to snatch the nearest unattended child.

In fact, the violent crime rate has steadily decreased since the 1990s, and there’s no evidence to show children are more frequently abducted than in years past. Every day countless children survive being on their own.

Yet the possibility of kidnapping was a major concern among respondents who completed a recent Mashable and SurveyMonkey poll. Of a representative sample of 533 Americans, 19% said they thought an unsupervised child in a public place might be abducted. The largest group — 28% of participants — worried an unattended child could be lost or abandoned.

Image: Mashable, Christopher Mineses

But the respondents' answers also reflected resentment: A quarter said an unmonitored child might indicate a parent neglecting his or her responsibilities.

That might sound familiar to Debra Harrell, a South Carolina mother arrested this summer when a bystander noticed her nine-year-old daughter playing alone at a park. In a video of Harrell’s police interview, she explained that her daughter was supposed to meet a friend.

“So you leave her at the park unsupervised?” an official asked.

"Yeah, but I thought, you know, everybody's there," Harrell replied. "You know, I didn't feel like that I needed to be up there, sitting up there with her..."

“You’re her mother, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You understand you’re in charge of that child’s well-being?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s not other people’s job to do so.”

Harrell, who was working at McDonald’s while her daughter played at the park, later explained that burglars recently stole a television from her home. “You know, so, she don't have no TV or nothing to look at no more,” Harrell said. “I thought [the park] would be the safest place for her."

Thirty years ago, a nine-year-old alone at a park probably wouldn’t have led to a mother’s arrest, but expectations have changed. In the same Mashable/SurveyMonkey Audience poll, nearly 40% of respondents said they were permitted to play outside unsupervised while in pre-school or kindergarten. Yet, only 13% said they would allow their own children to play unsupervised at that age. And even though a majority of the respondents were allowed outside alone prior to middle school as children, a third said they would wait until their kids reached that age to let them venture outside on their own to play.

Image: Mashable, Christopher Mineses

As Lilia Gonzalez discovered, the new standards for parental responsibility can be brutally subjective.

When the case for neglect was opened against Gonzalez, her daughter told the investigator she hadn’t been afraid during her mother’s absence; she knew when to open the door if someone knocked and had been previously instructed to call 911 in the event of an emergency. The children’s pediatrician told the investigator that Gonzalez and her husband had been exemplary parents, and that he had no reason to suspect neglect or abuse.

Still, the investigator and his supervisor recommended “indicating” the allegation of neglect — a finding that would put Gonzalez’s name in the state’s central registry for five years, barring her from jobs in child care, teaching or in-home health care, and placing her under a kind of semi-permanent suspicion in the eyes of the agency. Officials argued that Gonzalez’s daughter might have been able to make a decision on her own behalf in a hypothetical emergency during those 20 minutes, but that it was beyond her ability to do the same for her 16-month-old brother. This constituted inadequate supervision, and therefore, neglect.

The administrative law judge who reviewed her case, however, disagreed, and could find no credible evidence that Gonzalez’s daughter lacked the maturity cited by the agency. He recommended expunging the finding against Gonzalez. It would have been a victory, had the agency’s director not rejected the judge’s recommendation.

“The fact that no calamity occurred during the 20 minutes,” the director wrote, “...does not mean that it was proper to leave an eight-year-old child to be the primary caregiver for a 16-month-old.”

The reversal was a devastating blow for Gonzalez. “I was feeling like I was a criminal,” she told Mashable. "I didn’t leave to party or drink. As a mom, I try to do my best. I’m not perfect. There are so many moms, even though they know they’re doing something wrong, they keep doing it — I’m not.”

In Gonzalez’s case, a second investigation for neglect began just months after the first. She called the police to report an incident of domestic violence when her husband threw an aerosol can at her during an argument. Gonzalez told the officers her children were not in the same room during the fight, but they involved the child welfare agency nonetheless. Officials cited her previous case and ultimately accused her of creating an “injurious environment” by exposing her children to domestic violence.

Gonzalez was despondent until finding the Family Defense Center, a Chicago-based nonprofit that advocates for families in the child welfare system.

“They saved my life — and my kids’ lives,” she said.

Diane Redleaf, the center’s executive director, estimates more than 70% of their clients are low-income; between 3% and 5% can afford to pay market-rate for the organization’s legal services. Regardless, they all face the vexing subjectivity about what constitutes inadequate child supervision or neglect.

In one case, a mother allowed her nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter to walk three blocks to a safe park with her 20-month-old sister. In their tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community, this was a common practice, but a bystander saw the girls, escorted them back home, then called the child welfare hotline to report their mother.

Similar to Gonzalez’s case, a judge dismissed the agency’s finding of inadequate supervision, but the director also overruled that decision, citing the looming threat of what didn’t happen: "Any number of issues could have arisen during her unsupervised walk," he wrote.

In another case, a mother taking courses at school lost her childcare at the last moment. She opted to take her 11-year-old son with her to class. When he left the room to retrieve a book from her car, a police officer asked why he was alone and reported his mother to the child welfare agency.

“The agency is free to define neglect specifically,” Redleaf said. “They’ve created factors that investigators are to look at, but it becomes extremely subjective.”

Both findings against Gonzalez would have remained on the state’s registry had the Family Defense Center not helped her appeal the decisions. Her case moved through the courts over two years, and the emotional limbo consumed Gonzalez. She felt authorities might remove her children at any moment; in fact, the agency threatened as much if she did not agree to supervision in her caretaking duties and to remove her husband from their apartment during the second investigation.

“As far as I understand, they are supposed to help people to keep families together,” she said of the agency. “But at the end, I have to protect my children from them.”

Image: Mashable, Christopher Mineses

Redleaf has observed an anecdotal spike in cases like Gonzalez’s in recent years. Child welfare investigators, she said, may lean toward preemptively judging a parent guilty, lest they miss cases of escalating neglect and abuse that ends up on the evening news, perhaps when a child dies. In South Carolina and Massachusetts, for example, state officials are facing scrutiny after receiving reports of neglect regarding parents who allegedly went on to murder their children.

The risk is similar for mandated reporters — professionals like teachers, therapists and police officers — who can lose their license and face criminal charges if they fail to report suspected maltreatment. The guidelines for reporting aren't always clear, either, said Redleaf, so those charged with performing this duty don't want to "guess wrong."

Many of the center’s cases, though, involve the unpredictable gaps between childcare and work that low-income parents often experience. During an investigation, the state child welfare agency, Redleaf said, rarely helps parents who could benefit from assistance with finding and paying for quality childcare. As in Debra Harrell’s case, many of the center’s clients work in low-wage industries like retail and food service where weekly schedules are assigned last-minute.

“We see mostly poor people in these situations because they don’t have the resources to protect their children — richer families can hire people to watch their children," Annette R. Appell, a professor of law and director of the Children and Family Advocacy Clinic at Washington University, told Mashable.

Regardless, it's not clear that reporting “inadequate supervision” benefits anyone in some cases, Appell said. Research has shown that children placed in foster care, for example, can experience physical or sexual abuse in their new homes. Many also leave the system with post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps because of maltreatment and the forced separation from their families. But these scenarios don’t immediately occur to bystanders.

Further, reports can go beyond simple safety concerns. Bystanders may fixate on the idea that only an ever-present parent can raise a child properly.

Appell has sensed this shift as well: “It does seem to me that…there’s more at stake somehow in parenting.”

When parents like Gonzalez are punished harshly for leaving a child unsupervised, it's clear they're being judged by a new standard for time-intensive parenting. In fact, parents have been devoting more energy to their kids since the mid-1990s, according to an analysis of time-use surveys. The contrast between college-educated and less educated mothers, however, is striking: By 2007, the former group spent eight more hours per week on childcare activities than they did in 1975, while the latter spent four more hours per week. Parents spent much of this time coordinating activities for their older children and shuttling them to each commitment.

Some mothers appear to devote themselves wholly to their children’s development earlier in life. In one survey of 275 mostly white, college-educated, married mothers, about 30% said they hadn’t left their infant with anyone during the child’s first year, including the child’s father.

Miriam N. Liss, a professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington who studies parenting and feminism, said women increasingly feel pressure to parent intensively, though it’s not clear why.

In a counter-intuitive study published in 2012, Liss found that women who identify as feminists are more supportive of time-intensive attachment parenting practices.

“It almost feels a little like a backlash to me,” she said. “Just as women are seeking social equality, the romanticizing of intensive parenting ramps up.”

One possible explanation, she said, is that as women entered the workforce a few decades ago and tried to balance career and family, they were forced out by unfriendly policies or felt they had to choose between the two. Either way, they channeled the same drive and motivation they’d applied to their professional lives into childrearing.

That dynamic, Liss said, has set high expectations for mothers of the same class and culture, and exerted downward pressure on parents who have fewer resources to be constantly present.

But helicopter parenting in general has little to do with gender — both mothers and fathers are spending more time with their children, who, for a number of reasons, have less unstructured, unsupervised time.

That overwhelming desire to hover — whether to make sure a task is done perfectly or help them avoid rejection from top universities — can actually make that child unhappier and less confident over the long-term. Larry Nelson, a professor of family life at Brigham Young University, said an over-involved parent might resort to behavioral and psychological means to control a child, stripping him or her of autonomy and independence.

“I would like to think that more and more parents see that you can teach [children] how to fail,” Nelson said. “You can teach them that they might get hurt, but you don’t have to be the one to intentionally leave the scars on the child.”

Lilia Gonzalez became, in her own way, a helicopter parent following the long ordeal with the Illinois child welfare agency. Though she never left her children unattended for longer than a few minutes prior to that June morning in 2011 and hasn’t since, she's become even more dedicated to their needs.

“I’m never home,” she said, describing her children's many scheduled activities. “I’m always driving from here to there — I’m the taxi mom. I like them to be exploring, learning and growing.”

This role has given Gonzalez newfound satisfaction as a mother who was once seen by authorities as a bad parent. But she and her children still live apprehensively. Gonzalez said she’d never call the police again for any reason, and she hasn’t returned to counseling yet.

“I thought it was a good thing to trust somebody,” she said. Her children feel similarly. “They don’t know how to trust adults because of [the investigations]. Even though we won the case, they’re still afraid.”

Editor's note: Gonzalez's name has been changed for this story.