If it weren’t her, it’d be another one. There are whole swaths of the populace convinced any child out alone is in mortal danger. They’ll post to the neighborhood Facebook group in panic if they see a child walking to the convenience store unattended.
This is a serious worry of mine. I often let my elementary kids walk home from school by themselves because we live close enough and they have good sense around what little traffic there is. But I always worry that someone will throw a fit about it. I worry about that a LOT more than kidnappers.
There's been an irrational fear of child kidnappings in the US for decades now, fueled by sensationalist fearmongering news reports. When I was young, a young girl went missing in the area (still unsolved, 25 years later) and it was huge news for years, and justification in many parents' minds (though not my own) for never letting their children do anything unsupervised.
But...while that was a scary and tragic case, the reason it made so much news is that it was, and remains, very rare. The notion that some kidnapper or pedophile is going to make off with your child, targeted at random on the street, has always been an almost absurdly unlikely one. And yet many places in the US would see a parent arrested for negligence for allowing their child to walk a block or two on their own.
So, yes, something gives parents the idea they need to be overprotective. It's a sensationalist media and a culture of fear spread by people with a poor understanding of risk.
Any homeless person who's not completely bonkers knows that harassing a lone child on public transit is just about the worst possible way of attracting the attention of law enforcement, since other adults might ignore harassment of other adults who seem to be dealing with the situation but will step in to protect a child. In all of my life living in large cities, I have never seen something like this happen, nor came across any news of something like that.
This seems to be in the same category as not letting a child walk alone to school, in a Western country, because of fear of Islamic terrorists -- possible, but so unlikely it is statistically improbable.
> "Stranger kidnappings" (where someone the child doesn't know kidnaps them) are incredibly rare, a child is at much more risk from traffic, guns, cancer, or swimming pools.
Agreed, I am a parent as well. But a word of warning, you'll get mean looks and talk behind your back from playground parents if you take that attitude.
I've seen moms and dads on playground who are way out there in assessing what is threatening and what is not. They'd see a man walking by the playground going by their business and start calling their children closer to them acting all scared. Or make comments about "hmm what are they doing, we haven't seen this person before". Mind you we were not in a crime ridden neighborhood, this is a quiet suburban area. Was going to say "lay of the news people, take it easy" but of course couldn't they'd think I am crazy.
Oh and co-worker's neighbor called CPS (child protective services) on them because they were playing by themselves in the cul-de-sac while the parents watched from inside the house. They of course don't know who did it, and even if they knew there no repercussion they could take against that person. They can always claim "they thought of the children", nobody can argue with that...
"We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression. Statistically speaking, it would take 750,000 years for a child left alone in a public space to be snatched by a stranger. Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked."
In a sensible world she would have been able to call out to some car-park lurker "hey I'm just going to grab something from the store, can you just wave at my kid through this window"; or she could just run in and grab something and people seeing her run in and then out would not call the police; or etc etc.
Society has decided that men wanting to work with children are creepy (try finding pre-schools with male workers and early years schools with male teachers), and this extends to the damaging concept of "stranger danger" where someone waiting by the car to check the child is safe is not going to be seen as a welcome bit of support for a busy harassed mother but will be seen as a creepy threat.
It's all part of the same weird system of protecting children without regard to what actual risk is.
Of all the missing children, less than 1% is non-family abductions. [1]
I live in a safe suburb far from any major city and I let my 6 and 8 year old take themselves on a walk around the neighborhood when they check in with me first. Literally every time they go on a walk one or two adults stops and asks them where their parents are and sometimes the adult even calls us to warn us of the dangers of kidnapping.
When I mention that we let our kids walk themselves to my parents I get lectured like crazy about how people will steal our kids. I am totally confident someone will lecture me in this thread. The stats don't match the fear.
It's unreasonable and unhealthy to deny your children the experience of self-reliance and exploration.
This logic moves right into victim blaming territory real quick though. "Have you taught your child what to do if they get lost?" doesn't fix the fact that you don't know what they'll do till it happens, and then it might be too late.
I'd much rather have a backup system in case they don't do the right thing in case they panic.
I'll also point out that your advice here is statistically unsound: there's the baked in "stranger danger" element - "approach a police officer/approach someone who works at the store". See, no one wants to say "approach literally the first adult you see" because "stranger danger"...but statistically, there aren't a lot of predators around. The longer a child is unattended with no one helping them, the more time an active predator has to spot and isolate them.
But no one can put that extremely small risk that literally the first random adult in a major shopping center is actually going to be one, so we always qualify the advice with "find an authority figure preferentially" (increasing the time they're alone and obviously unattended).
I also remember a few times (both as a young, scared small child, and as an older embarrased teenager) losing track of my parents and having the employees call "Will Mrs. Carrotson please come to the service counter" over the intercom...and I hear similar messages when shopping now as an adult.
That said, I'm a lot more fearful of what could happen if my toddler was found by someone other than me in the center of the clothing rack. To be clear, I have little fear of a criminal harming or absconding with my child, I'm much more afraid of what happens when a well-meaning bystander thinks they need to call CPS to make sure that my kid is taken care of.
There's an element of that, but it exists in combination with the air of hysteria and constant panic influencing the decisions of police and other public officials. It becomes a crime to leave a child unattended for minuscule periods, that kind of thing. It's an odd combination of extreme societal neglect, punctuated with equally extreme hysteria.
i worked really hard as a parent to convince my wife+MIL that it is safe to let our boys roam the neighborhood now that they're old enough to cross intersections safely. However, a 10 year old girl one street over went missing. That has undone 5 years of getting my wife+MIL comfortable. My wife grew up in the neighborhood Amber Hagerman was kidnapped/murdered in so i understand but my kids are completely trapped.
i can only speak from personal experience, but as a parent it is viscerally shocking. i get scared for her safety when my kid walks in a parking lot. for someone to be in a situation like that, with their kid, and for that to happen, it's horrible.
it's easy for us to live our lives and not think about things like this. to think about sports, or work, or binge watch netflix, or scroll through social media feeds.
but when you see something like this, i think it kind of punches you in the face and for those of us in first world countries, takes us out of the bubble. and we feel angry, and sad.
sadly, nothing we can say or do will make a difference for that father and his kid. but i hope i can do my tiny role in making this world a little bit better of a place for the next one, and for my own kid.
Nothing happens to children when they walk down roads alone. Almost all kidnappings are a result of people the child knows, trusts, and is otherwise close to.
You will read the occasional horror story of people getting CPS called on them by some out of touch busybody because they let their kids walk to the park, but honestly that is just as rare as stranger-danger abductions. It's on the order of a case every few years. Basically nothing worth worrying about.
The perceived danger is that a stranger will kidnap your children if you let them walk to and from the park. The real danger is they're more likely to be kidnapped if you leave them at home with friends or relatives.
This seems to be the same paranoia as the fear that some stranger will snatch a child as soon as parents don’t watch it for second. It may have happened but real risks are probably somewhere else.
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