I can't stop thinking about Friday afternoon.
In my last post I mentioned a friend whose 6yo was stopped last year while outside alone -- yesterday I went back and read that archived email discussion, where the mom asked for input from a bunch of mothers about supervision for young kids outdoors. I was startled by the number of people who said they would never have allowed the child to ride her bike around the block because of the risk of stranger abduction.
I guess they're in good company, though:
In a recent study of parents' worries by pediatricians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, nearly 3/4 of parents said they feared their children might be abducted. 1/3 of parents said this was a frequent worry-a degree of fear greater than that held for any other concern, including car accidents, sports injuries, or drug addiction. [from that authoritative source, Redbook -- no luck so far tracking down the quoted study]
I am no criminal justice expert, but that seems a mite confused to me. What we think of as kidnapping is a rare event, with an incidence in the range of 100-200 cases per year. It appears, though I am having trouble tracking down precise numbers, that about half of those cases end in fatalities. Less dramatic non-family abductions happen much more frequently (in the range of 50,000-60,000 cases per year), but those abductees are mostly teens, mostly girls, and -- the scary part -- mostly the abductors are known to the child. (When a 15-year-old takes off overnight with her 18-year-old boyfriend, it's classed as a non-family abduction.) The person most likely to molest your child is someone whom you have granted access: the soccer coach, the Scout leader, the babysitter. Not the faceless bad guy cruising the neighborhood while twirling his mustachios.
The most dangerous thing kids do, it seems to me, is ride in cars: approximately 1800 kids die annually in the US in car crashes. And yet I have never heard someone say, "I'm terribly concerned about keeping my kids safe, so I'm going to drive as little as possible because that's the thing most likely to kill them." It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to drive a child to school because you're worried about stranger abduction if he walks -- you'd be increasing his exposure to a greater risk in order to diminish his exposure to a much smaller one.
Approximately 1500 kids drown each year and still the pools and beaches are packed. (This is why I am less than obsessive about bathing my children, you know. It's not laziness; it's safety-mindedness.) I could keep going down the list of most common causes of death, but I won't: my point is that kidnapping doesn't even appear.
It's possible that someone could throw my kid in the trunk and take him away forever, and of course I would never get over it. I check the state sex offender registry every so often, to see if anybody I ought to know about has moved into my neighborhood. I re-read Gavin de Becker every so often, and I keep talking with the kids about his ideas. But at the same time I object vehemently to the idea, expressed repeatedly in that archived email thread I mentioned, that you can't be too careful with your kids. Of course you can be too careful. You might raise a kid who is overly cautious, who is afraid of the only world he will ever live in. You might raise a kid who is frustrated that you are so cautious, and who rebels against your caution in unsafe ways. You're wrong, he figures, and you won't listen to him, so he'll just do what makes sense to him.
We can disagree on the appropriate middle ground; I suspect we'd all draw the too cautious/too careless lines in different spots. (Check out Free Range Kids for an interesting perspective on this question.) I do think it's important to bear in mind the differences in neighborhood norms and kid temperaments. I wouldn't have let my oldest son walk a quarter-mile alone at age 6, because it just wasn't done in the neighborhoods where we lived at the time. When my second son was 6 we had moved to this neighborhood where kids do run around on their own, but he would have been frightened and embarrassed at being instructed to walk home by himself. I would never have imposed that consequence for car misbehavior because it would have upset him all out of proportion to the misdeed.
Joe is my explorer. At age 3 he decided to walk around the corner to visit a neighbor without telling me he was going. He didn't think it would be a problem. (Ai yi yi.) Since then, we have spent a lot of time talking about how to explore safely. Joe exudes a distinctive certainty that's part of my decision-making calculus -- he's not easily cowed. I think it's reductive to argue for age-based cutoffs, when 6-year-olds can span such a wide range.
It still vexes me that this woman called the cops on me, and maybe this post is mostly things I wish I could have said to her. (Though she probably would have kept saying, "Six! He's only six! Six years old!") I support the right of a thoughtful parent to make decisions for his or her own child, even if they're not the decisions that seem best to me. I only hope I don't wind up justifying any more of my own decisions to the cops. :-/
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