I am still trying to grasp why my generation and the one before mine has become sooo clingy to their kids. Not that I want anything to happen to my daughter, but she has none of the freedom I had at her age. Granted the situation isn’t 100% the same, but still, in general, kids don’t have nearly the autonomy they used to. It’s so bad when that it’s national news when a mother lets your kid ride the subway alone.
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It’s not 12,000-33,000 out of a pool of hundreds of millions, it is 12,000-33,000 “nonfamily abductions” from a pool of 800,000-1,300,000 “missing” - here’s the relevant part of the article in case you never bothered to read it;
For the love of cheeses, stop misrepresenting my arguments and making me out to be some kind of denier (skeptic not fabric).
You immediately followed it by talking about “whether the hyper-vigilance around stranger abductions” might account for low numbers. Stranger abductions and nonfamily abductions are two entirely different things, and blurring the lines between the two statistics is not a good thing to do.
I have already clearly stated what I admit is true, and the statement you’re quoting didn’t say anything that I’d “admit” is untrue.
But if it will make you feel better: if we are not talking about stranger abductions, but rather are talking about the much larger pool that includes well-known nonfamily members, then we are talking about 2 - 3% of a pool of between a few hundred thousand to slightly over a million, rather than a few thousand. If we are talking about “stranger abductions”, then we are talking about an even smaller pool.
Happy?
This effect always haunts my relief when I read analyses like this as well. I was thinking that to really measure this, though, you’d need some kind of reliable measure of how responsive people actually are, on a large scale, to stranger danger. That would actually be an interesting study in and of itself. As much as we have all these interesting stats on the actual disappearances, we only have anecdotal evidence that people aren’t letting their kids out to play in the street anymore. My hunch is that it has really created a huge cultural shift, but it would be interesting to try to quantify shifts in parental precautions.
To be clear, I don’t believe the risk is much mire, if at all greater than this article concludes, and wouldn’t be convinced it was until years of Law and Order SVU could be wiped from our collective consciousness. As both a data developer and a soon-to-be parent, I found this whole analysis really comforting and interesting.
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You’re right - I fell in to the same linguistic trap that the article is pointing out; nonfamily abductions are not the same as stranger abductions and “stranger danger.” I have edited the comment to correct that.
That said, my point was always that 2-3% of “missing” are nonfamily abductions and that’s a pretty real risk.
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Yes that brings it up to about 1/10,000 among all kids. About the same odds as getting struck by lightning.
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A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met. Or a pedophile, one of the two.
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I believe you’re talking about the same thing @AcerPlatanoides is, just looking at a different perspectives. 12,000-33,000 from the pool of 800,000-1,300,000 is also 12,000-33,000 out of a pool of hundreds of millions if you’re looking at the overall group of children who could be abducted rather than only the group that was reported as abducted.
Remember, that 12,000 - 33,000 number is only after you weed out the portion of the 800,000 - 1,300,000 who either weren’t abducted in the first place or where the abduction was by a member of the family. The whole point of the article is that the 800,000 number is basically meaningless for looking at risk of abduction for children.
While I mostly agree with this sentiment about helicopter parenting and ridiculous instances like the “subway” situation, I think we need to be careful not to apply “builds character” type mentalities to free ranging our kids. I get the impression that there is an assumption by many on the non-helicopter side that it is inherently positive and productive for kids to have unsupervised freedoms. My experience is double edged: I’m an outdoorsy and, I think, pretty adventurous adult because I was allowed to have free reign over the woods, farms and fields in my rural town. Leave the house at 6 am, maybe check it round dinner, back out the door till 9pm or so. But I also on multiple occasions got my ass BEAT by older kids out alone in the woods and was molested and humiliated for the entertainment of others by an older girl once. These things have also greatly impacted the adult I’ve become and not for the better. My parents should have known where I was.
My point: Whether we would consciously say it or not, I think sentiments like “Builds Character” and “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” permeate American culture (and are total bullshit).
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To be fair, my children have had significantly more freedom than I did at their various ages. At least some of the change in parenting style has to do with where you’re born and raised, and by what generation of parents.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think there are a lot of parents living in the suburbs because they believe the hype about how dangerous the city is, and then raising their children AS IF they were living in the very dangers they think they’ve avoided by moving away. Plus, their kids don’t get the incremental freedom and independence that comes from walking and taking public transportation, because there’s nothing within walking distance (and usually no sidewalks) and very little public transport to use. If the only way a kid can go somewhere is in a car driven by an adult, they are literally traveling in a private bubble. That’s no way to develop independence.
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You TOTALLY misunderstood the statistics. The 2-3% that you’re calling non-trivial is 2-3% of kids who ARE REPORTED MISSING each year, who are ACTUALLY kidnapped by a stranger.
150 kids out of a population of 74 million total is a percentage chance of any given child being kidnapped of .0002%
Around 500 Americans, out of a population of 320 million are stuck by lightning each year. Which is a very similar .00016%
How much attention does the media and parents give the chances of kids being struck by lightning by comparison to kidnapping?
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they shouldn’t be strapped into baby seats either.
since they can’t get themselves out and all.
I don’t think it “builds character” per se - just that it seems to me kids aren’t allowed to learn and fail on their own. It is a much more guided experience. Which probably has some merit as well, but the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality and the over whelming insulation I don’t think is helping our kids.
Sorry to hear about your troubles. I never had anything super bad happen, other than getting mildly hurt. (might have been a concussion in hind sight). While perhaps your experiences don’t let you feel this way, I am thinking most of us would think the good parts out weighed when something bad happened.
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Stranger danger “training” is arguably actively DANGEROUS for kids.
How many children have ended up making being separated from their parents WORSE because they’ve been taught to be afraid?
We taught our son to “find a mommy or a daddy” (a parent is more likely to stay with an upset child instead of handing off to police/security guards) if he was ever lost and made sure he knew to give our names and phone number. The one time we managed to lose him, at 5, he walked up to a black man (we’re white), who was having ice cream with his 2 young daughters, asked if he could borrow the phone to call his parents. Less than 2 minutes elapsed from when we realized we’d miscommunicated who was keeping an eye on him. It was a LONG 2 minutes, don’t get me wrong. But had he been told to hide from strangers, it could easily have been hours. and when we got there, he was happily talking about ice cream flavors with his new friends.
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But there is the problem that public awareness of child abduction overwhelmingly focuses on a tiny subset. Not only does that have a noticeable impact on daily lives for very questionable benefit, but it also obscures risks that are orders of magnitude more severe, like people abusing positions of trust.
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I’m sure it wasn’t clear in my original post but I’m not saying you are doing the “builds character” thing. Just that some do, and it’s always good to step back and examine why we think the thinks we do.
Also, I just realized this is probably hangover from a conversation with a (childless and flakey) friend this weekend who wanted to take my 4 year old sledding. When i resisted she waxed romantic about her bucolic childhood and maybe insinuated I was helicoptering. I explained that I’ll let her perform my job unsupervised when I can randomly show up and do hers (associate professor at a schmancy fancy university). She called me damaged, I called her Pollyanna, we smoked a doobie and hugged it out.
I do think that all kids should get a trophy. It’s just that most of them should say “Nice try, Loser”
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This is a bit off topic but related. My daughter is fortunately out of the “worries about leaving her in the car alone” stage and up to the “driving with an adult” stage. In my state (NY), there is a graduated license, which is normal in most states now.
This graduated driving licensing has been justified by research that came out about how teens brains develop, as well as statistics based on driving laws in other countries.
As a mom, I really feel like my daughter is missing out on so much freedom and the driver’s license has lost so much of its perceived glamour. When I got my license and a day job, I instantly gained a ton of freedom from my parents - not only could I drive myself wherever I wanted, but I also had a job which provided cover for some of the shenanigans I got up to.
Now, is my worst fear that my daughter might do some of the dumb stuff I did at her age? You bet. Do I want her secretly dating an older man, going out to swimming holes without my even knowing where she really is, and drinking beer in bars where she’s the youngest person there? No. But I also kind of fear her not living her life while she is young. I feel like with these license restrictions, a big right got taken away from teens without their getting a vote on it.
Just wondering if anyone else is feeling the same way.
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My design studio did a series of PSAs on this very topic for San Francisco’s Sex Offender Management Alliance a few years back. The problem was that even though everyone involved was in agreement that it was important to make sure the public had a better understanding of relative risk, nobody really had any good ideas for a “call to action” for what to do with that knowledge.
I’m still not sure if the campaign helped anyone or not but at least I wasn’t one of the guys in my office who had to pose for the camera as a sex offender.
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STEP-DADS. I found out, while still a small slice of the population, there is a population of people who systematically hunt out and prey on women’s kids. It hits home further as I know someone who was abused for nearly a decade by her step father. I know I shouldn’t lose sleep over it, but if my ex ever remarries I will probably casually mention that if he ever laid an inappropriate finger on my daughter there will be repercussions.
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Honestly, it’s a lot easier to tell your kid to avoid the weirdo at the park than it is to teach them how to handle the dad at a slumber party or the jerk who thinks a babysitter is fair game, or a grandfather who accidentally brushes across the wrong spot.
Even as an adult I have never known how to handle the situations where someone has moved from appropriate touch to inappropriate - a hairdresser, a massage therapist, a doctor, and I have had plenty of these encounters. How do I explain to my kid what to do when I can’t even figure it out?
I used to think it was just the territory of being a teenager, but it’s happened to me as an overweight middleaged lady too.
Most of the time, by the time I figure out exactly what is happening it’s already over, and there doesn’t seem to be much justice to seek.
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