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> NEVER leave your children unattended even for a moment.

I don't understand this approach. Alternatively, find a place to live, and a lifestyle to live, that lets your children develop without your anxiety weighing them down. You leave them unattended for hours and hours at a time while you sleep. The only difference your mind isn't racing with potential threats, it's asleep.

I don't know. all kids are different, mine too.

> NEVER leave your children unattended even for a moment.

Yeah, I have 4 kids, and this right here, in my opinion is the core of the current trend to overparent. Let your kids play where you played. Let them have their own life outside of your control and influence. There is something very unhealthy about the way we have started viewing children and childhood in the USA.

My understanding, and what I remember from some brief research, is that kidnappings by strangers are incredibly rare. This would mean that the widespread fear we see nowadays is very disproportionate, and likely due to a variety of other social factors and not some actual underlying danger. Can anyone provide a quick corroboration/correction on this?

You are correct—it's around 100 stranger abductions per year in the U.S.

http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/31/kidnapping-stats https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-mis...

Thanks for the data/links. Glad to know it actually isn't a major issue.

This did not actually happen:

http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/23/ye-olde-ikea-sex-traff...

I'm glad to hear that this story was fake! I never looked it up, just heard her retelling of it.

Regardless, the story wasn't the point of my comment. The reaction I have as a dad vs pre-parenthood is the point. Where I live is the sex-trafficking capital of my state, which probably heightens my reactions, too. The problem is real and pervasive, fake news not withstanding.

Well, it's real like getting struck by lightning is real. The odds are extremely low.

Everyone could let their kids walk to school and chances are nothing bad will happen. Though it may lead to those kids being a bit healthier, more independent and more confident. And less likely to die in a car crash - which is far, far more probable than kidnapping.

I agree with your sentiment. It's more common than lightning strikes, though still super remote. But I'm not planning on sending my kids out to play in thunderstorms, and I'm not planning on leaving them unattended in public places until they're of a certain age.

Walking to school is an interesting scenario. I hate the car, so I'd probably walk with them or ride bikes together.

Side story: My dad had a friend who was almost kidnapped while on the way to school. The only reason it didn't succeed is that my dad and another friend grabbed their friend by the ankles while the guy in the car was tugging on their friend's arms. The kids all screamed bloody murder, and the men in the car gave up and drove off.

In most areas of life I like to think that I let statistics drive my thinking (e.g. I don't try to beat the stock market no matter how bad things look, unless I'm gambling for the fun of it). But in the case of kids, man... it's just much harder to overcome emotional biases.

>...It's more common than lightning strikes, though still super remote.

It doesn't look that way:

>...During the study year, there were an estimated 115 stereotypical kidnappings, defined as abductions perpetrated by a stranger or slight acquaintance and involving a child who was transported 50 or more miles, detained overnight, held for ransom or with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed.

http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/MC19.pdf

So, 115 children were abducted by strangers that year.

The national weather service estimates that 300 people are hit by lightning a year.

http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/odds.shtml

Like you said, it's hard for people to overcome emotional biases.

As a comparison, sharing a bed with a baby (which many people think is safe) is implicated in thousands of deaths a year:

>...After analyzing data on 8,207 infant deaths from 24 states that occurred between 2004 and 2012, researchers determined that nearly 74 percent of deaths in babies younger than 4 months occurred in a bed-sharing situation, according to the study published Monday in Pediatrics.

>Among older infants – those aged 4 months to 364 days – the rate was slightly lower at nearly 59 percent.

https://www.today.com/health/co-sleeping-linked-infant-death...

As another comparison, over 1,600 children under 15 years of age die each year in car accidents.

http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...

Right. My back of the envelope math shows about 100 children abducted by strangers per year in the US and about 60 children are struck by lightning per year (hard to tell, but based on % of lightning related deaths that are under 19)-- most of which are probably well over 4 years of age[0].

I mean, either way, it's exceedingly rare, but the odds of a young child being abducted is a good bit higher than the odds that they are struck by lightning.

Both odds are really rare. But my point is that it's just logical to take precautions. Not leaving your kids unattended in public places and not leaving them out in thunderstorms... both strike me as reasonable advice. :)

Edit: throwing in the link that shows ~20% of lightning fatalities are for people between 0-19 years old.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/jeh5_05_45-50.pdf

>...I mean, either way, it's exceedingly rare, but the odds of a young child being abducted is a good bit higher than the odds that they are struck by lightning.

Your link is talking about fatalities. Just as the number of fatalities from lightning is much less than occurrences, the same applies to kidnappings. The probabilities for the two things aren't that different.

>...But my point is that it's just logical to take precautions. Not leaving your kids unattended in public places and not leaving them out in thunderstorms... both strike me as reasonable advice. :)

Yea, the low number for lightning strikes is likely due to the fact that people do avoid going out in lightning. Also while it is reasonable to not leave kids unattended in public places, kidnappings of children have always been very rare and the extra paranoia people have about it today isn't helpful and as posters have pointed out, actually makes the world a more dangerous place.

If it's so pervasive, then why are the top of mind stories fake?

Because it's not pervasive, it's a false panic.

Trafficking is a problem that impacts runaways and immigrants. If you want to help, help them, don't get hysterical over imagined babysnatching.

Apologizing for the source, but sometimes it does happen:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2123200/man-arrested-after-thr...

Or does it?

http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/15255796._I_was_to...

Good find.

Have another one.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2098608/Kidnap-attem...

There are plenty of these examples over the years. It is not that it does not happen, it does happen, but it is pretty rare. My point was that you can not simply dismiss all these cases out of hand as fantasy.

This person is also accused, not found guilty (from the link, and no quick Google turning up a conviction).

It does very rarely happen. But even of the subset of events that aren't totally fabricated, many turn out to be more innocent than they are made out to be.

People getting their worldview from these sources are going to be unnecessarily worrisome about such things, which is really the point of the grandparent.

I dismiss all of these cases out of hand as fantasy, because the chances of this actually happening to me are as close to fantasy as being eaten by a shark while I am struck by lightning.

Agreed, it's rare, but does happen:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/child-s-disap...

Yeah. Here's a similar one:

http://abc7chicago.com/news/possible-child-abduction-at-groc...

The story in my original comment was reported in a local news paper's website, which my wife assumed was reliable... So who knows.

Yep, this happens all the time in some parts of China as well.

>NEVER leave your children unattended even for a moment. In this case, the parent was right beside the cart, moving groceries from the cart to the conveyor belt.

Never? Come on, how far are we going to take this? Not sending them to school so you can stay home and watch for kidnappers? Never sending them to grandpa's house because grandpa might bring the kids to the grocery store and turn around for a second to pick up some carrots?

Perspective! Assuming that its not a fabricated story the risk of this sort of kidnapping is so incredibly low it might as well be zero. This sort of anxiety about it is unhealthy and unproductive. Never bring them outside because a stranger may snatch them out of a stroller? If you go to the grocery store your going to turn away for a quarter of a second to grab something off the shelf, it's a fact of life.

Relax.

One of the biggest risk to children is car crashes. In which case an equally ridiculous but much much better piece of advice is "NEVER allow your children to ride in an automobile."

Agreed. Over here (Finland), parents still put babies to sleep out in a cot in the winter, and leave them in a pram outside the grocery store while they go shopping. Schoolchildren walk or cycle to school starting from grade 1. (Sadly, the municipal day care nowadays doesn't let younger kids to go about on their own; the hysteria spreads here and often sneaks in via the public sector).

Traffic is a far bigger danger than kidnappings, and the biggest danger to a child who walks to school is the parent of another child who insists on driving the kids to school.

It's OK guy, I've had nightmares where I responded that way too. It must come with the testosterone. We're born with a capacity for violence and then it's reinforced by a culture that condones revenge/defense killing as long as you do it in the heat of the moment. It's a terrible natural response on an individual level, but probably goes a long way preventing people from messing with other people's kids on a societal level.