Just stopped ds camping out all night

[ZenNudist]

Not AIBU because I feel justified but guilty. Also not really looking to get slagged off.

Ds (nearly 11 going into year 6) begged at 8.30 to sleep in neighbours garden in a tent. Ndn dc are years 8 and 9 nearly, so preteen and young teen. They are little. Ds is as big/ bigger despite being 10.

It was last minute. I was on the phone and said ask your dad. Dh agreed it with NDN who is currently sitting up in their shed waiting for them to go to sleep. I was going to bed after midnight could hear them still up talking and made the mistake of googling camping abduction stories. There's one really awful case which was enough to freak me out.

We are in a city and there have been thefts from gardens. So it's not that safe. Still, it seems unlikely that someone looking to break in or rob a bike from a shed would turn their hand to kidnap.

I was freaked out by what if. I would never go to bed without locking my door so it didn't make sense to leave my child out there unsecured!

So I demanded he come back in and put him to bed behind lock doors! I feel a bit guilty because he was disappointed and missing out.

I think the older boys will be perfectly safe and they're not mine.

Told ds he could go out again first thing and do camping breakfast but he might oversleep as he's been up late.

I feel bad! But he's in bed asleep already so feel like it's a justified action. He's safe.

Wondering if this is OTT. It's done now.

Only 5% of the population are gay

Good God

I did say thieves aren't same as kidnappers but having disturbed some kids break and entering in my own home when I was the age of NDN dc (I was about 12 or 13) I know it can be traumatic to get caught up in.

Anyway as I said in OP it's done, ds rejoined the camp first thing after coming in to give me a hug. He also called me on his phone from the garden to ask for something and said love you so don't think he's bearing grudges.

@davidsong

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk guidelines.

JFC, gay people are not paedophiles. I have reported this post for homophobia and hope it gets removed. Disgusting - do you think straight men rape 10 year old girls?

My 12 year old was asking if she could sleep in the garden and I said no and the mother of the child whose sleepover it was agreed with me too.

Like others, I'm haunted by what happened to Sophie Hook.

I'm shocked that people as ignorant as @davidsong still exist 🙄

Move to a nicer area, sounds bloody awful if you can’t be in your back garden without risk of something awful happening.

OTT in my opinion. I would be slightly more unhappy if DS was camping alone, but with two others?

And camping abductions are so vanishingly rare that they wouldn't have even registered on my radar.

I would have been very worried about my DC sleeping out like that but then I'd have been sat up all night in my own garden or the room that's got the garden door in it and checking on them every millisecond. I would have got no sleep and been like a wild zombie the next day.
I'd not have pulled the child in, that was not nice

Poor little Sophie. Her family lived fairly locally to where I grew up and it was huge local news. Very distressing.

To be honest while I know you weren’t asking for agreement/disagreement, I do think that you made the right call. We live in a bungalow and when it was very hot it was tempting to leave the french doors at the back open but we didn’t as if someone really wanted to get in the back garden, they could, and for me it isn’t so much a “how likely is this to happen” as “the consequences if it did happen are just horrendous.”

The Sophie Hook murder was an example of an extremely rare event but I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind. For that reason none of my under-13s sleep in the garden alone

My daughter camped in the garden for the first 3 weeks of lockdown last year. She was 13.

My niece stays with us for a week every summer and they spend the week camping in the garden. She's 9 but been doing it since they were 6.

I suppose it depends where you live really.

I think it was unreasonable to say yes then change your mind. But i do agree depends on where you live, however the chance of a child being abducted from a back garden is very slim. So your not unreasonable for not allowing your child to camp but are unreasonable for allowing him then changing your mind when nothing really happened.

Its done, but you need to try to not make changes based on anxiety. Decide in advance your decision and then stick to it and tolerate your anxiety. Otherwise your boys confidence will be affected in the longer term. We are much more aware of the dangers, but its hard to keep them in perspective as rare unusual events.

I don’t think it does depends on where you live at all.

It is luck, pure and simple.

It wasn’t down to where she lived that made Sarah Everard be kidnapped and murdered. She was walking home and she met across a sadistic and cruel and sick individual.

Sophie was camping with other children in the back garden of a nice home in a nice village in a rural location in north Wales.

Sarah Payne was walking through a field in an affluent area in West Sussex.

Rachel Nickell was walking with her toddler in the middle of the day on Wimbledon common, an affluent area.

It isn’t down to where you live.

There isn’t a law on maniacs only wandering the cruel hard streets.

@lavenderandwisteria I absolutely agree.

@garlictwist

I think YABU. He's 10! Not a baby. Yes, there are horror stories, but there are horror stories about everything if you Google enough and if you wanted to avoid anything bad happening ever you'd just have to never leave the house, sit very still in a chair and not touch anything.

Being 10 is a great age for camping outside with your friends and I think it's perfectly safe with the parents in the house.

sit very still in a chair and not touch anything

I know your post is meant well, but please do NOT do this. A quick Google will show that this is actually very bad for you, and for your children.

edition.cnn.com/2017/09/11/health/sitting-increases-risk-of-death-study/index.html

because his mother is googling ridiculous things

Really?! Ridiculous you say?! Have you read what happened to that poor little girl?

@Anotherlovelybitofsquirrel

because his mother is googling ridiculous things

Really?! Ridiculous you say?! Have you read what happened to that poor little girl?

People know what happened to poor Sophie. And nobody is saying it wasn't absolutely horrific.

But the point is, the chances of that ever happening to your child is vanishingly small. The reason her case made the headlines is because it's so vanishingly rare - in fact, I don't think it's happened since, and that was 15+ years now.

Getting yourself in a panic because of a one-off even that happened 15 years ago isn't helpful to anyone.

It might be vanishingly small. But sleeping children are more vulnerable than awake ones because they're not conscious.

please read

I know my post is probably too late, but if anyone reading this is considering googling Sophie Hook, I urge you not to.

I didn’t grow up in the UK so I was not aware of the story until a few years ago. Like another poster on this thread, having read about it, I cannot get this case out of my head years later. The Wikipedia entry is incredibly graphic and distressing and goes into way too much detail IMO.

I would never normally write a post like this, but honestly it’s something I genuinely wish I had never read.

@GhostCurry I know you mean well but you know for a lot of people that’s going to make them so curious they simply have to

Op I can totally understand where you're coming from. As I said, it's pretty rough where I live. Theft, carjackings, attempted abductions, stabbings are pretty much weekly, even shootings are not uncommon. While I think it's unlikely anyone would have entered the garden with the sole purpose of abducting my dc, I couldn't guarantee that some idiot off his head wouldn't be mooching around the gardens looking for things to steal. I had 6ft fences, didn't make a scrap of difference, they'd run across the back wall. Anything is fair game, i've had bikes stolen that weren't worth more than £10, (and that was in broad daylight), i've had hanging baskets stolen, they even dug up the flowers from my front garden in the middle of the night to sell, I kid you not. Anything for beer or drug money. Unless you live somewhere like this it's probably difficult to imagine. It wasn't always this bad, a bit rough yes when I was a kid but nothing like it is now.

I'd not heard of Sophie Hook so I googled.
I honestly wish I hadn't. That poor child.

You did the right thing OP and for all the people saying you humiliated him, I'd rather my child be temporarily embarrassed so that they can be safe (even if the risk is minimal).

I'm torn on this, as I suffer from anxiety around my kids and always have done. (Doesn't get any easier now they're teens!)
I know how hard it is.
However, I can't help feeling they're next door, with their friends?
Only you know what your neighbourhood is like.
I grew up in a sleepy village, you could, and still could, sleep outside in the garden as a kid and not be disturbed and have a lovely time!
(And yes, I have heard about Sophie Hook's case )
The reason that things like that ever reach the news though is that they're so rare.
Seriously, don't go googling to try and justify your anxieties, you'll drive yourself bonkers.

I said I’d let mine if I left the window open, but we aren’t in a high crime area. I’m with you in that case.