Dear parents, please pay more attention to your kids.

[anissa834]

Some kids are way too comfortable with strangers and some parents pay little to no attention to them.

Yesterday while I was sitting on a bench, there was a mother and a kid sitting on a bench a bit farther. The other bench where the mom was sitting was facing away from me.

And the kid was running around while her mom was on her phone not paying attention to her surrounding. Then the kid started talking to me. At first she said hi and then she started asking me about my favorite color, who is my favorite footballer ECT. We were having a small talk.

Finally after a couple of minutes, the mother firmly told the little girl to come to her.

Luckily for the girl and the mom, I am not a crazy person. I bet if I told to kid to come with me to my car to get some candy, she would've came with me without a second thought.

Parents please pay more attention to your kids !

You know the bowl of smarties analogy, right?

Children have a limited frame of reference.

How do they learn to choose the smarties that are not poisonous?

By keeping them close and watching them when out, by teaching them to play and leave the adults sitting in the park alone.

By explaining why it's safer to steer clear of strangers when they get old enough to have a glimmer of understanding (around age 5) that some people are not as nice as they seem. Up to that age, don't be distracted by your phone when out with your child.

Do you really believe children who are taught not to go up to strangers and chat with them are "fearful"?

OP is describing helicopter parenting at it's worst. The odds of a child being abducted by a stranger are in the same ballpark as dying in a plane crash, and much less likely than dying in a car crash.

@mathanxiety no please explain the bowl of smarties theory to me..... Can you do it in a slightly patronising way , and not use any big words?

Christ.. lets bring up our children to live in fear of everyone...

They were playing in a park, they were interacting with people. Isnt that the point?

@Maddy70 no, not according to @mathanxiety , but luckily for you , they are going to explain it all to me so you too can have a read 😂

It was a snapshot. And the snapshot told me mum had eyes on the back of head (as you do) and in spite of looking on phone was aware of child.
Did you all miss the part where mum called child firmly and child went back to mum?

I speak from actual experience. On internet forums, the vast majority type ect instead of etc.
If you're nonsensing the ectsetra part - did you not see the emoji indicating humour?

@Bakedpotatoes
The play centre where phones are completely banned is a Local Authority play centre ( similar to Sure Start centres). The staff are properly trained but very much encourage parents to play with their children. Anybody using a mobile phone will be asked to leave. Staff will look after very little ones and hold babies but the onus is on parents learning to play with their children using the impressive range of activities set out at each session.
The sessions are really successful and the children love being the focus of their parent's attention.
There are lots of classes on offer but all of them come with a screen ban.
Commercial Soft Play centres are very different and presumably parents who want to sit on their phones and scroll, choose these instead. My point is that the LA centres and Sure start centres ban the use of mobile phones for a reason.

No it isn’t, especially when you weren’t even there and it’s 2nd hand information again from a brief snap shot.

It absolutely is possible to identify and quickly gain the trust of a child who is needy for attention.

The irony of your post is that you have clearly made your own judgement of the situation despite not being there and relying on second hand information.

Most but definitely not all.

And does 'most' mean 51% or 99%?

I think parents here on this thread have been lulled into a dangerously false sense of security by that word 'most'.

You realise that women can and do lure children too, right?

Molesters do not go around advertising their preoccupation with sexual abuse of children. They don't wear special clothing or badges on their jackets. They dont have a secret handshake or a shifty look. You have no way of knowing who that person a bench away really is.

Stranger child abductions are vanishingly rare ( think less than 10 a year in the whole of the UK). How old was this child ? We wrap them in cotton wool far too much these days.

I said I wouldn’t judge someone based on a snapshot but OP herself says it was about 2 minutes and the mother apparently not paying any attention called her back very quickly from the sounds of it.

I refuse to live as if every person on a park bench is a kidnapper in waiting. How miserable.

Good parents consider advice wherever it comes from. And they don’t get prickly about it either.🙂

@TwinklyMintHelper what a load of rubbish, I’m extremely unlikely to consider advice from someone who’s never had children and who’s only experience/observation of my parenting has been a 2 minute interaction in a park!

If that makes me a bad parent then so be it.

That's ridiculous. Good parents have common sense and take decent advice from trusted sources. Someone who has no experience of a situation isn't well placed to give advice.

Everyone knows the saying 'I was a perfect parent until I had DC' because we all look back and laugh about the ideas we had pre DC.

I used to own a gorgeous and very gentle cocker spaniel. Everyone loved him and many strangers said hello (we even had some guy come running across the road to make a fuss of the dog!!) it always concerned me how many children would just come up to us and start chatting. Telling me their name; asking to join in the walk etc. I think it’s so said that we do need to teach children to be wary of strangers but they’re so trusting and open that they need an eye keeping in them to protect them