Knowing Terror

It is early Tuesday afternoon, and I am playing the Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft. I have taken the day off from work under the auspices of caring for my 3 year-old who has a bad cough. I’m still a little foggy-headed from a rough night’s sleep spent listening to and trying to soothe that coughing, but he has rapidly improved throughout the day, and the lure of some game time finally convinces me that my services are no longer needed in the capacity of hapless nurse.

The windows are open. The soft breeze of a perfect Minnesota fall afternoon is flitting through the house, and the temperature is fixed dead on at 72 degrees Fahrenheit. My toddler is finding time between coughing bouts to learn to use the potty. It’s his second day of success, and he is a ball of prideful sunshine, occasionally proclaiming, “I need to use the potty, again,” through a charming grin of small teeth.

I am sipping at a Sonic chocolate shake. My wife is leaning against the door jamb to the bathroom, and my youngest child is boosted on a special toilet seat announcing the general condition of his excretory system. It is 4:00. At this point, my eight-year-old son has been missing for about three minutes, but no one has realized it yet.

It’s a short walk from the bus stop to our house. We live along the back of a cul de sac, and the bus drops kids off at the intersection four houses down. It’s close enough that getting from the front door to the bus can be accomplished in under at a minute at a brisk pace, though the neighborhood kids all seem to get along so a minute can stretch into a few as they dawdle down the street. These are kids between 8 and 12. Distractions are virtually inevitable. My wife and I try to avoid being paranoid parents, never giving our kids an opportunity for some space and independence, so it’s understood that as long as we get a good solid touch base within around five minutes of getting off the bus, just to let us know that all is copasetic, then it’s good.

This doesn’t always happen, of course. Once every couple of weeks 4:05 comes and goes, and we have to jot outside to remind our son to come check in with us. These are stern but not oppressive conversations, so when 4:05 comes around today and the door has not opened, my wife and I exchange a look that says, “time to go issue _another_ reminder,” and she heads out the front door. I stay behind to provide positive reinforcement to the potty training.

A couple of minutes later my wife is back inside, her face quizzical. No son in tow, in fact no kids at all in the cul de sac. While odd, it’s nothing we’re exactly worried about yet. Maybe the bus was late leaving the school. Maybe my son missed the bus and we just haven’t gotten the call from the school yet. At this point, those are really the only possibilities we are entertaining. I still have some attention directed at my toddler now pulling up his pants, and looking for confirmation at his greatness, but my attention is sliding as my wife picks up the phone and calls the school.

It takes another three or four minutes to confirm that the buses all left on time, so we call the bus company, but the response comes back that the bus driver has completed his route and the bus is empty. It is at that moment we realize all of the responsible adults in charge of the care and safety of my son do not know where he is, including us.

That is where a deeper, more insidious fear first ticks alive. My son has now been missing for about twelve minutes, and we’ve just run out of normal, reasonable answers. My wife starts to call back the school to escalate the situation, and I slip on shoes and head out the front door to walk to the bus stop myself. I suppose I’m expecting him to emerge from a friend’s house or walk from the trees where he was diverted to examine some cool object of nature. The neighborhood is quiet. Not many people are home from work yet, and most of the kids are likely enjoying an after school snack and some TV time before cavorting around in yards and streets.

I make my way to the bus stop and back, sort of aimlessly examining things. Perhaps he climbed this tree. Maybe he’s playing hide and seek with us and he’s in the shed. Maybe he’s in our backyard and I just haven’t checked there close enough. In all the scenarios going through my head at this point, he’s fine. Of course he’s fine. That’s how this goes. We get a little scare, and suddenly he’s there apologizing for going inside a friend’s house for a Capri Sun instead of coming home first. I wait for life to resolve the way it’s supposed to resolve, but the plotline of this day has skewed off track and seems determined to draw things out.

I’m back in the garage, and maybe only another two or three minutes have past. Suddenly I’m talking to my wife, and she is saying she is going to drive up to the school. I nod and tell her to call me as soon as they find him, and in fact check in with me every few minutes either way. I hear, almost as if listening from afar, a strange note in my voice. I do not sound like me. My wife, for that matter, does not sound like herself either. There is a breathlessness, a tremolo that isn’t normally there. Then she is gone, and I’m standing there in the garage, almost confused.

But, the fear is prominent now, and dark worries are stirring up from corners of my mind best left undisturbed. I’m not permitting myself to think the things that dark tendrils of thought are hinting at yet, but it’s there. It’s only been 15 minutes.

I am inside and my youngest son is complaining because I’m not in the mood for playing with him right now. In that same way that pets seem to sense that you’re about to go on vacation or take them to the vet, his demeanor is changed in concert with mine. He wants attention without seeming to know why. I set him in front of a television show, give him a hug and then settle in next to him, knowing on a deep level what it will sound like when my son walks in the front door. I am brusquely rubbing my finger against my cell phone.

When it rings five minutes later, I’m in a darker place. I can’t press the answer button fast enough. I say hello, but it’s not me. I don’t sound like that. My wife asks on the other end, “Is he home yet?” My heart drops.

“No.” I answer.

“He’s not here!” She says. It’s just a fact, nothing I can do with that. The principal is with her, and I can hear him talking occasionally in the background, but can’t make out what he’s saying. The impulse at that moment to transition from passive waiting to active searching is as strong as the impulse to breathe after holding your breath for so long that your chest spasms and your muscles twist. I tell her I am going to pack our toddler into the van and look around the neighborhood.

Neither of us want to say the next thing -- the thing that needs to be said. It’s the statement that changes the way you think about what is happening. The thing that will make this all too real, that says your child has gone missing.

“You need to call the police,” I say. She agrees.

There is no analogue to the feeling of having to call the police because your child is missing. I can’t say I was as scared as X or it was worse than that time that Y happened. It exists on its own plane — a separate, horrible place that seems to tear at your insides. My hands are shaking now. I realize actually that they have been for a little while. The gathering storm of fears in my head coalesces, takes shape. I see my eight-year-old-sobbing in fear in the back or trunk of a car. I see him being struck by a balled and angry fist bursting skin apart, never having known the evil that humans can manifest until now. I see him being hurt, killed.

Thirty minutes. That’s how long it takes for panic to arrive, at least for me.

I pack my youngest son into the van and the way that he is acting like things are normal is almost offensive to me. He starts asking if we can go to McDonalds or if he can get a toy. I explain that we need to find his brother, and he and I are going to look around, and the first one to find him wins. This is a game he agrees to, and we are off roving aimlessly through the neighborhood.

I know what I’m looking for, but don’t know how to look for it. The harder I look, the more I realize that I can’t see everything. And even if I could, I can’t see around or, better yet, into all the houses. Suddenly my neighborhood looks like a land of a million corners around which a small boy could disappear. I have to force myself to watch the road, to not run into oncoming traffic, to not accidentally hit some guy on his mountain bike. I resent every second I have to spend looking away from the surroundings.

He should be there. Right there. It doesn’t make sense that this is happening. I am angry, not at my son but at the very fact that this is occurring. There’s a frustration that mingles with the fear, and it almost feels as though the fact that my son is missing is some kind of horrible practical joke or payback. This is what you get for not dying in surgery last year. This is what you get for having almost fallen down the stairs but catching yourself. This is what you get for thinking that thing about the guy in front of you in traffic. This is what you get for having lived forty years of a charmed life to date. This is life calling in the debt I owe, and I’m only just understanding how big the balance is.

The phone rings. Weird-voice me answers. She asks if I’ve found anything, and the bottom falls out. Nothing. The police are arriving now. Some teachers are also searching the neighborhood. I ask for the exact bus route, and she gives it to me. Tells me to go home first. Just check.

I do, still on the phone. She is whimpering occasionally. It feels like it’s been an hour, more that this has been happening. I walk in, and his shoes are on the floor. As I shout his name, I realize his backpack isn’t there. And those aren’t the shoes he usually wears to school. The shout echoes through the house. No answer. He’s not here. Still. It’s been almost an hour. I tell my wife I’m going to run the bus route a couple of times; don’t really hear her response before I hang up.

There is a cold logical part of my mind now, ticking away unhelpful thoughts. “Every second he’s missing,” it reminds me, “makes it less likely he’ll be found.” “If someone picked him up at his bus stop,” it adds,” they could be forty miles away by now. Well out of town. Hell, if they’d headed east, they could be almost in a different state.” I picture a circle, spreading out in all directions from my house, and every minute, every second its circumference is growing, crossing rivers, crossing towns, crossing state lines. That is the area now where my son might be. It’s far too large. It has been for a long time.

I’m back in the car now, backing out of the driveway, back onto the cul de sac and heading in the direction of the bus route. I come around the corner, only a block from my house, and, impossibly, he is there. There he is, like he’s been there the whole time. Just like it was supposed to be, however long ago when I walked to the bus stop, him just suddenly appearing. He is walking, carrying his backpack, and a friendly looking man in a blue shirt on a bicycle is riding next to him. I just stop in the middle of the street, roll down my window, and blurt out almost angrily, and unfairly, “Where have you been! Get in this van.”

He is impossibly unperturbed, calm — or at least so much calmer than me. The man on the bike says with a smile, “I think this little guy got lost.” Or he says something like that. I barely hear him, don’t register it as a memory at all.

“I was reading a book on the bus. I missed my stop.” My son explains. I have so many questions, so many thoughts, and I should be feeling a wash of relief, but what I’m feeling is more like a bomb exploding in the pent up tightness of my body, as though I’d been wound up like a spring and suddenly unleashed. I can’t say thank you to the man right. I can’t tell my boy in equal measures how glad I am to see him and how scared I was and how I need him to get into the van now — this place that I possess, hold dominion over. I need him back in my fixed domain.

He obliges, beginning to sense how worried I am. The man on the bike is already heading the other way, and I feel like I should stop him and say a better thank you, but all I want to do is call my wife as quickly as possible, because it’s not until the moment I say that I’ve found him that this is actually over.

I’m on the phone, and she answers, small and scared.

“I have him.” I say and it’s my voice talking. And suddenly it’s over.

What happened was this: He was on the bus, got wrapped up in a book and missed his stop by two or three stops, roughly a mile. But, rather than bug the bus driver, he just got off. We’ve talked to him about this kind of scenario before, and he explains that he forgot to call us, explains that he just started off in what seemed like the right direction, and that eventually someone helped him. He was thinking of it as a cool adventure on a beautiful day.

I’ve taken him up to the school, and now he is sitting on the bench as a young but understanding and calm police officer talks to him about the situation, suggesting some things he probably should have done and thought about.

Then my wife is there, and she hugs him for several minutes. The principal of his school shakes my hand, and I can see he’s every bit as shaken as me. Irrationally, I like him more because of that, because I see in his eyes that he’s done everything he can to hold it together and be an authority figure, but that he was deeply worried about my little boy. Some pleasantries are exchanged and some heartfelt thank yous. I get back in the van with my youngest son, who still doesn’t seem to have gripped the magnitude of the situation, and look at the clock.

Impossibly it reads 4:55. After all that, he had only been missing for fifty minutes. But, for the way I knew terror during that time, it might as well have been a year.

Comments

Glad everything turned out OK. Been there a couple of times over the years and it is horrible. Even when things turn out fine, it shakes you up for a long time. Kids will find new and terrible ways to shake you up, always.

Well written. Even without kids I can empathize. Terror indeed.

I have never been so happy to have read a spoiler on Twitter before seeing an article.

The writing was so good I had to step away for a bit before I could comment.
So glad things are ok and thanks to that helpful stranger.

I'll be hugging my kids a little tighter tonight I'm sure.

I think, at some point in our lives, we have/will all be there with someone we love. I have (although not to the point of calling the police), and this story really resonated with me. Thanks for sharing, Sean.

Nathaniel wrote:

Stories like this and I have to step back and hope the pendulum swings back. When we were all growing up, remember how 'latchkey kids' was the worry of the day? Kids who had too little supervision and would come home to empty houses? Right now, we're seeing the reaction generation: kids so coddled that they come to college actually confused about how to handle day-to-day aspects of their lives without intense supervision.

Is that really applicable for an 8-year-old? I would say no; 8 is still a bit young to be latch-keyed.

Also, having things be scheduled makes a difference. If I send my boys (who are 5 and 3) out to play, particularly with the neighbour's kids, I don't worry if I can't see them or hear them for a while, because I know where they probably are, and my neighbourhood lends itself to being a bit easy-going about that. However, if they're supposed to be getting off the bus, or being picked up from school, or at a friend's house, and they're not, then my heart starts to beat a little faster.

I took the boys to a cottage with a bunch of friends and their kids this summer. All the little ones (ranging from 3 to 8) headed off to do whatever is was they were doing, and came back 20 minutes later. Except my oldest. None of the other kids knew where he was; none of the adults had seen him. This cottage was in the woods, near a cliff, by the ocean, with a road relatively close. All of a sudden each of those facts jumped from being benefits to being gaping maws of potential hazard.

I don't know if anyone else knew how close to panic I was (or maybe, more appropriately, how panicked I was) for the next 5 or 6 minutes as I ranged further and further afield from the cottage, yelling his name louder and louder, straining to hear a tiny voice calling back, or crying, or anything really.

Turned out he had wandered away from the group and gone back into the cottage by the front door - we were all at the back - and was busy pooping. I don't think I've ever been so happy to smell my son's crap as I was right then.

I was fine the whole time he was gone, until he wasn't where he was supposed to be. I can't imagine that for an hour. *shudder*

Prozac wrote:

It's amazing how much more affected I am by things now I have a son. Your story had me in tears by the end, So glad everything is okay.

Yeah, having your own kid really changes you. I can't believe how affected I am now by stories like this or news stories about kids, or movies, etc.

Amazing how it affects you life.

Great, but scary (until the end), story Elysium!

Elysium Wrote:

I knew posting this that some percentage of people would see this as an over-reaction.

"Did I over-react?" is one of those questions that all parents ask at some point. I think it's instinctual and beneficial to react the way you did in most cases. It only takes a moment of carelessness at the wrong time to cause a lifetime of pain and anger.

You captured the moment brilliantly Sean. This would have played out the exact same way in my household. I hope it never does.

Hug your kids!

Grim

Elysium wrote:
Man, I went off the radar for hours at a time when I was 8 and I expect my daughter to do so too. It's really weird for me to empathise with the sense of panic in this story in that sense. Maybe if he'd been gone for longer.
Location: Netherlands

Those two items may be connected. I don't know what the rate of child abductions in the Netherlands are, or what the motivation for that is, but I know locally it is rare but not unheard of, and the culture of the US is such that adults are not as free (or in many cases willing) to watch for the welfare of someone else's child.

I knew posting this that some percentage of people would see this as an over-reaction. I asked the principal, and even apologized to the police officer at one point about that. The impression I got back from them was that this was exactly the way we should respond.

I'm sure that's the main thing at work here, cultural/geographical differences. It sucks that this is apparently the expected and normal response for you, but if that's the sensible thing to do given the circumstances I guess that's that. Thanks for the nice reply. Great that it turned out well, and I'm sure the young fella learned a lesson.

I'm really curious what the actual statistics are though, in the sense that I wonder how much is justified fear. Also in light of Rallick's post. Eindhoven is hardly the safest place in the Netherlands, even

Part of this largely depends on the relationship you have with your children; my son, in particular, is very good about letting me know what he's doing. He's really responsible, and, if he were to suddenly not be around for an hour, I'd freak out, because that's just not who he is. My daughter's more prone to wandering off and has gone on a bike ride around the neighborhood without telling me before; I have tried to patiently explain she just needs to tell me first, so I'm much calmer about it.

As for being scared, one of my standard lines is "Parenting is an exercise in barely-restrained terror". No exaggeration, I never really knew what it was like to be afraid until I held my son for the first time. To paraphrase a line from a Rush song, growing up is the process of learning that we're immortal for a limited time; there were times in my life where I was in serious danger, but I always assumed I was going to be fine, because I was young and therefore immortal. Holding my child for the first time I realized he was young and so incredibly not immortal, and the realization of that is still to this day one of the singly most terrifying moments of my entire life.

I won't scare you with my stories. All four of mine were wanderers, but my younger son's troubles made me intimately familiar with who to call and when before he got to school-age. He's 23 now, and still giving me white hair. He lived through both the trouble he got into and what I wanted to do to him once I got him home. He even still speaks to me after some of the stuff I had to do when he was a teenager.

Just love him, and do your best. It's all you can do, and he'll know it. He may not want to recognize it at certain key points along the way , but he will know it. And you both will come out the far side the better for it.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

"Parenting is an exercise in barely-restrained terror"

That about sums it up perfectly. Thanks for sharing your story, and I am so glad he is okay. Damn, it's dusty in here. I don't think I've ever read a piece that filled me with such growing dread as I read on, followed by palpaple relief.

My wife and I are always having the conversation about what the hell happened in the last 20-30 years? Both of us were neighborhood roamers as kids. After your homework was done, you went out in the neighborhood with all the other kids and played until it started to get dark and it was time to come home for dinner. Is the world really that much more disturbing since the 80's or are we just that much more aware of it? It'd be different if we were that one overprotective family on the block, but this seems to be the same thing in every neighborhood I go to here in Florida. There seems to be a public understanding that you just cannot let your kids out unsupervised anymore.

Elysium wrote:

Those two items may be connected. I don't know what the rate of child abductions in the Netherlands are, or what the motivation for that is, but I know locally it is rare but not unheard of, and the culture of the US is such that adults are not as free (or in many cases willing) to watch for the welfare of someone else's child.

I knew posting this that some percentage of people would see this as an over-reaction. I asked the principal, and even apologized to the police officer at one point about that. The impression I got back from them was that this was exactly the way we should respond.

The rate of child abductions in the US is ridiculously low compared to the hysteria in the media about it. The most likely culprit for a child abduction in the US by about 4 to 1 is a relative of the child... The rates of abductions and other crimes in the US have never been lower than they are in recent times.

Yet, when I was a kid in kindergarten, I walked home from school every day, I'd go to visit friends that lived blocks away and my parents rarely worried about it.

momgamer wrote:

He's 23 now, and still giving me white hair.

Sure, blame the kid.

wordsmythe wrote:
momgamer wrote:

He's 23 now, and still giving me white hair.

Sure, blame the kid. ;)

I do! He's quite proud of it and calls it his score card.

Whims of the Father and then this? During a pledge drive session? I call shenanigans!

(I didn't know about Whims until it was mentioned in your always awesome podcast, my feed reader missed it. No dinner for the feed reader tonight!)

Seriously though, this a super powerful retelling that will stick with me, the tension so skillfully wound up. Reading it felt real -- the different selves, the reaction to your younger one, the fear in your wife's voice, the descriptions of background voices on the phone, the detail of the principal seeming shaken up too.

And while true that chances of abductions are tiny, unless that chance is zero, you are not an American parent if you look outside and your kid isn't where they are supposed to be, isn't around the corner, isn't figuratively hiding in the shed as you put it, and it doesn't terrify you.

And while personally I am far more afraid of my kids walking in front of a car/not looking both ways in a rush to do something, or taking a wrong turn walking one way or another and ending up clueless where to go next. Again, chance of abduction isn't zero and it's there, a specter in the back of our heads not so much reaching its claws into our mind as offering to extend our sight, granting us the illusory parental superpower we crave of Knowing What Has Happened.

Oh and that payback-guilt over having a great and lucky life was a great inclusion.

Thurgrim wrote:

My wife and I are always having the conversation about what the hell happened in the last 20-30 years?

Media sources became more prevalent. It's not that there are necessarily more incidents, but you hear about more of them, so it feels scarier.

Elysium wrote:

“I was reading a book on the bus. I missed my stop.” My son explains.

Yeah, from my experience, you don't really grow out of this.

Elysium wrote:

I knew posting this that some percentage of people would see this as an over-reaction. I asked the principal, and even apologized to the police officer at one point about that. The impression I got back from them was that this was exactly the way we should respond.

"Overreaction" would be way too strong a description. There is a culture of fear in this country that sees very remote threats as imminent dangers, particularly when it comes to children, and does everything humanly possible to smother that possibility, no matter how stifling that is to life in general.

That's not this. This is a reaction to a situation that happened. You're allowed to be a bit panicky when your kid is actually missing. And even here, you didn't hit that point until you made some sane checks first (checked the school, called about the bus, etc). This all looks like head-screwed-on-properly reaction to me.

McChuck wrote:
Elysium wrote:

“I was reading a book on the bus. I missed my stop.” My son explains.

Yeah, from my experience, you don't really grow out of this.

One can only hope.

*Legion* wrote:

This all looks like head-screwed-on-properly reaction to me.

Right. The only reason we know you were so frightened was because you let us into your head.

You didn't call the media or a bounty hunter. Overreaction is too strong a word.

Sean, I'm so glad your son was ok. My stomach was getting in knots just reading your article, I know had I been in your position I would have been freaking out. Our kids are so precious to us, it's hard to think about bad things happening to them.

Sean, I couldn't read the whole thing. Too much to take (I'm a parent of two). The tweet you sent was long enough. I'm glad your son is safe. Now tell him he prematurely aged some guy in California with his escapade.

I need a drink...

Elysium wrote:
Location: Netherlands

Those two items may be connected. I don't know what the rate of child abductions in the Netherlands are, or what the motivation for that is, but I know locally it is rare but not unheard of, and the culture of the US is such that adults are not as free (or in many cases willing) to watch for the welfare of someone else's child.

This is a huge misconception. Child abduction rates in the U.S. are actually very low. Although there are about 58,000 children are abducted by non-family members each year, the number of genuine kidnappings is about 115 per year, according to teh google. Most of the 'abductions' are things like a student being detained for an hour by a non-parent custodian or the like.

These numbers have been dropping steadily for years, and in fact the U.S. is a much safer place than it was when our generation was growing up.

I won't bog this down with the a lot of the details, but I too had a similar experience when my oldest was 5 years old. We had just moved to Cary, NC, and had been in the area for less than a week, when my son decided to go outside on a particularly early weekend morning, while my wife and I were still asleep. He wants to explore the neighborhood, so he walks up the road from our house to a neighbor's home. He walked into the house through an unlocked door when the residents discover him. They brought him back down to our house, since they recognized him as the new neighbors kid, as we were out frantically searching for him for 15-20 minutes.

I empathize.

I know as parents we're entirely built around the safety and well being of our kids, so I empathise.
My 6yo son has just come out of surgery in a hospital at the other end of the country just over an hour ago (a new pacemaker... he's all good) so I know how it feels to be completely powerless when you don't know what's going on.

A spine chilling story. Thanks for sharing it with us Sean.

Buzzrick

Yes, rates of child abductions have been dropping steadily. I'm sure that is in part to the reduced opportunity that exists because of our over-protectiveness. However, even knowing that, and knowing that we generally are terrible about assessing risks, and knowing that if the story had a bad ending it is highly doubtful Sean would be writing about it so soon - I felt like I was going through it as I read it.

Love you Sean, but don't do that to me again...

I don't know about anyone else, but halfway through I had to skip to the end for a second to make sure everything was fine! Glad your boy is safe and sound.

osmosisch wrote:

Man, I went off the radar for hours at a time when I was 8 and I expect my daughter to do so too. It's really weird for me to empathise with the sense of panic in this story in that sense. Maybe if he'd been gone for longer.

Kids need their space. I think you bought into the media hype about life being dangerous too much.

I did too, but then I lived in West Virginia on a sparsely populated mountainside. I think I might feel differently if I were raising my son in that same kind of rural setting, but I'm not. I live in a city where carjackings and other crazy things happen all the time, and not far from my house. If my six year old son didn't step off the bus one day (which drops him at our doorstep) and the school didn't know where he was, my reaction would be very much the same as Sean's.

conejote wrote:
osmosisch wrote:

Man, I went off the radar for hours at a time when I was 8 and I expect my daughter to do so too. It's really weird for me to empathise with the sense of panic in this story in that sense. Maybe if he'd been gone for longer.

Kids need their space. I think you bought into the media hype about life being dangerous too much.

I did too, but then I lived in West Virginia on a sparsely populated mountainside. I think I might feel differently if I were raising my son in that same kind of rural setting, but I'm not. I live in a city where carjackings and other crazy things happen all the time, and not far from my house. If my six year old son didn't step off the bus one day (which drops him at our doorstep) and the school didn't know where he was, my reaction would be very much the same as Sean's.

I know your general area. Let me say, you are braver than I. I live up North for a reason!

Am I the only person that assumed there is NO WAY Sean would post it if it didn't turn out all fine? Because if it didn't, I'd imagine we'd be seeing a lot less of Sean on the boards...

In addition, it struck me as odd that you didn't knock on the neighbors' door. That would have been one of my first reactions. Even if the parents weren't home, knock on the door and ask the kids if they had seen my niece. At least, that's what I'd assume I would do, but who the Hell really knows?

I do have my own fears when it comes to my niece, though. Every once in a while we take her to a park which has a nice walking trail, but at some point it leads into trees. Whether she is on bike or foot she likes to go on ahead. My sister and mom are all about trying to give her some level of freedom, but in my mind a lot can happen in those trees and none of us can run very fast. So it always fills me with anxiety, even in the clearing, when we allow my niece to go so far ahead because it would be so easy to take her.

Then there are all the teenagers driving through the neighborhood that don't think about the fact that kids like to play outside. They'll be doing 40 in a neighborhood with curves meant to be taken at 15, not to mention a lot of people park on the side of the road. I dread the thought of hearing a car, a screech and a WHUMP, even if it isn't my niece that is playing outside.

As for your sun, his reaction to the situation sounds like me when I was a kid. I might have missed a stop being engrossed in my GameBoy instead, but not wanting to bug the bus driver and just figuring "that way is probably home" seems like something I'd have done.

kazriko wrote:
Elysium wrote:

Those two items may be connected. I don't know what the rate of child abductions in the Netherlands are, or what the motivation for that is, but I know locally it is rare but not unheard of, and the culture of the US is such that adults are not as free (or in many cases willing) to watch for the welfare of someone else's child.

I knew posting this that some percentage of people would see this as an over-reaction. I asked the principal, and even apologized to the police officer at one point about that. The impression I got back from them was that this was exactly the way we should respond.

The rate of child abductions in the US is ridiculously low compared to the hysteria in the media about it. The most likely culprit for a child abduction in the US by about 4 to 1 is a relative of the child... The rates of abductions and other crimes in the US have never been lower than they are in recent times.

Yet, when I was a kid in kindergarten, I walked home from school every day, I'd go to visit friends that lived blocks away and my parents rarely worried about it.

I don't want to add to the anxiety in all the parents in the thread, but I know I myself worry about more than child abductions with my niece. When I was in middle school and my sister in high school we worked at a Sportsmen's Club that had a man-made lake. I worked the gate to make sure only members came in and if they had guests to pay the fee. My sister was a lifeguard. Only a portion of the lake was cordoned off for swimming, however, and past that swimming line there were trees blocking the view of the edge of the lake near some gazebo things you could rent out.

So one day a member is holding a reunion or something. It's busy, lots of adults. Some woman is there with her daughter, her ex-husband arrives, drama ensues. At some point amidst the fighting they notice the daughter is missing. We have to close down the lake. Searches along the club grounds are organized, far into the camp grounds and firing ranges. We call the authorities. Hours later the girl's body is found at the edge of the lake right where the trees block my sister's view. The child had suffered a bump on her head, so the guess is she conked her head falling, fell unconscious, and drowned. She was about 9 years old. She would have been in her early twenties today.

No one noticed her go missing because everyone was focused on the drama between the divorced parents.

Sometimes it's not always about abduction, it's about the small mistakes a child may make that can lead to large consequences if no one is there to help. So in my mind, yes, Sean and his wife were reacting properly. What if his son did try to climb a tree and hurt himself falling out? I think the current media just has us MOST worried about abductions.

What's worse is my niece often likes to play hide and seek when we're trying to get her to do something. So we'll call for Angelina, get no response, and after a few minutes we start to panic.

Half the time, though, my mom just really doesn't know how to look for a hiding child. But still, it's a bit frustrating when you know you have a girl that loves to be ornery and adventurous, and the idea that she would just run outside because she, say, heard the ice cream truck is not outside the realm of possibility.

In short: Captain Dynamo said he feels that he's not prepared to be a parent. My niece taught me that there is no preparation for being a parent.