Dad: My Son Was Detained at the Lego Store

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Tadhg Dunlop, 11, carries home a purchase from The Lego Store. This week, he was detained at the store because he was an unaccompanied minor, his father says. (Photo: Doug Dunlop)

A father whose 11-year-old son was detained this week at The Lego Store for being an unaccompanied minor is calling on the store to change its policies.

Canadian fifth grader Tadhg Dunlop is a regular customer at The Lego Store in Calgary, and has been shopping there alone since he was 9. But on Sunday, he was detained due to a store policy that requires any child aged 12 or under to be accompanied by an adult.

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“Tadhg wanted to go to The Lego Store and I wanted to get groceries so our arrangement was to meet at the Lego Store in a few hours for lunch,” Tadhg’s father, Doug, tells Yahoo Parenting. Tadhg biked the nearly three miles to the store alone, as usual. “When I got there a few hours later, he was sitting in a kids section, and was told he was required to stay there.”

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The Lego Store has a policy that no children under 12 are allowed in the store without an adult, says Doug Dunlop. (Photo: Amy Sussman/AP Photo)

Though Tadhg has been to the store many times, on this day an employee asked him his age after he’d been there for an hour. After Tadhg told him, a security guard approached and told him he had to stay in the supervised section.

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The store manager told Dunlop the policy is in the interest of child safety, but Dunlop says Tadhg is a responsible, independent kid and should be treated as such. “The manager and security guard both said he was well-behaved and did nothing wrong,” he says. “They are trying to couch it in a child-safety veil but it’s really all about questioning kids’ competence. I’m not sending him to a construction site without a hard hat. I am aware that there are child predators in the world. But I’m also aware that they aren’t in a crowded mall trying to remove a child who is old enough to scream from a crowded store in a crowded mall on a weekend. It’s obviously a ridiculous scenario.”

Dunlop posted a letter to Lego on his blog, demanding an apology and a change to in-store policy. So far, they have only agreed to post a sign that clearly states the no-child-under-12 policy.

Lego did not respond to Yahoo Parenting’s request for comment.

Dunlop says instances like this are becoming increasingly common, fueling the so-called “free-range parenting” movement. “It’s all about letting kids do things they are totally competent to do, and not acting like things that are perfectly reasonable are unacceptable,” he says. “When you walk into a fancy shopping mall and go into a store there is no danger. People act as though 12 is the same as 3. I don’t leave 3-year-olds unattended, and there are probably some 11-year-olds who shouldn’t be unattended. But Tadhg isn’t one of them.”

The policy also runs counter to what Lego stands for, Dunlop says. “This is from a toy brand that fosters creativity and logical and independent thinking and development,” he says. “They talk on their website about child development and how they want to foster it, and that’s contrary to their retail policy.”

Not to mention, he says, that his son would have been a paying customer. “He was there with money — if I was a store manager and there was a well-behaved person with money in my store, why am I going to look for a reason to detain them?”

Dunlop says he doesn’t believe the store policy has anything to do with safety. “Maybe they find it inconvenient to have kids in their store,” he says. “They probably do get parents who drop their kids off and think it’s free babysitting, but Tadhg doesn’t need that. He doesn’t need a chaperone.”

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), posted on her blog about the Lego incident. “I recognize that just because this one manager and one security guard got it into their heads that an 11 year old is the equivalent of a toddler, that does not mean that all malls, or Lego stores, or Lego store managers, are this uptight. And the fact that the boy shopped there many other times unbothered by the staff indicates that this time was an anomaly,” she writes. “But of course the big point is to make sure that kids — like the elderly, the disabled, and everyone of every stripe and color — are always allowed to be part of society without being discriminated against on the false pretense of ‘safety.’”

Her advice? “Apologize and give the boy a Bionicle,” she writes. “Quit while you’re behind, but have not yet outraged every kid in America with an allowance.”

For now, Dunlop says Tadhg will be buying his Legos elsewhere. “I’m not saying let’s all force our kids to do things they aren’t capable of doing,” he says. “But the level of competency required to do a basic activity like buying Legos is not high.”

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