Kidnappers, pedophiles and teachers… Oh my!!

In the last cou­ple of weeks all sorts hor­ri­ble things have hap­pend to some­ones child. The age doesn’t mat­ter. Some­ones daugh­ter was kid­napped in South Amer­ica while on a raft­ing adven­ture. Some­one else’s daugh­ter ran off with her teacher to France.  Then this week a lit­tle girl was abducted while she played with her friends in her tiny mar­ket town.  All but the lat­ter have come home safe if not sound. For poor lit­tle April and her fam­ily the night­mare is still very real.

As the mother of an out­go­ing 6 yr old I am in a bit of a quandary  I don’t want to be a heli­copter par­ent but I also don’t want my daugh­ter to get in a car with a stranger or even some­one who isn’t a stranger. I want my daugh­ter to trust her teach­ers but not fall in love with them and run off with them. I want her to plan grand adven­tures and canoe down the Ama­zon. So how do I con­tinue to let her be her­self– fun, out­go­ing and trust­ing while keep­ing her safe?

I tried this morn­ing to talk to her about going off with strangers. We’ve never had this con­ver­sa­tion before because I’ve never wanted to scare her. It couldn’t be helped this morn­ing, I was list­ing to Radio 4 and it was all they were talk­ing about. So in my own very clumsy way I talked to her about never going off with some­one she doesn’t know. Then I said actu­ally she shouldn’t go off with any­one other than me or her dad.  She then asked why she was allowed to be picked up from school by her friend Isabella’s mum. Eeeerm.… uuuuh… good ques­tion smarty pants!  I told her that she’s only allowed to go with some­one if we have arranged it before­hand. She’s never to go off with some­one if they say I’m in trou­ble or hurt. She’s to find a teacher/policeman any­one to have them check on me. Well all I ended up doing was scar­ing the day­lights out of her. She started to shake and told me she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Fair enough I didn’t want to talk about it either.

So what do you do? Do you ram home the stranger dan­ger mes­sage? But what hap­pens when it’s not a stranger? What hap­pens when it’s a teacher? An adult that I’ve told her she can trust? How do you keep your chil­dren safe when every­one is a poten­tial baddy? I don’t want my child to grow up afraid to play out­side. I want her to roam the field and brook behind our house. To build dens and play hide and seek for hours and hours.  I want her to be care­free. She’s only 6 and shouldn’t have to deal with these things.  So I think I’m going to pray for the best. I’m going to think that peo­ple are good. That hor­ri­ble things hap­pen very rarely and that we can’t live our lives expect­ing the nightmare.

Am I being foolish?