To have never worried for a second about the possibility of my children being abducted...

[curlew]

......and to have never, as far as I can remember, made any decisions based on the possibility or factored it in to any plans I have made or actions I have taken?

Is this unusual? Do most people worry about this?

And by doing that they make parents feel even more guilty that they didn't do X or Y...
And make everyone scare to ever let their dcs out of sight. Ever.

I am not sure how this is supposed to make us feel safer.

LadyInDisguise by seeing the world as a totally safe place where abductions and nastiness don't happen is the exact opposite of nutting your children and protecting them from harm.

my older ones are grown up and the younger ones teens and are as street wise as I could make them by
by discussing all these issues and arming them with strategies and knowledge.

simply seeing the world through rose tinted glasses is not helpful.

obviously not nutting your children but letting.

I don't think that analogy is relevant lady. As an adult you can weigh up the risks and decide whether or not to proceed for yourself. A child has neither the mental or physical strength to protect themselves from potentially dangerous situations so we have to do it for them. You might as well say well let's not bother teaching them anything then? At 20 years old they are at the very least going to have more physical strength and be less of a target for someone who is after a child that has no hope of protecting itself.

yy sparkly you have to teach them about the world and both the good and the potential bad.

if you as a parent seem to live in happy land it's not very helpful, same as if you as a parent live in such constant fear that you don't let kids do anything.

it's a balance.

My mum grew up having lots of those near-miss stalker / flasher / man with puppies / groping incidents, culminating in an attack on the underground aged 12 that she was lucky to escape from. She said this was pretty common in the 60s, when she grew up; and that adults did not always believe or adequately protect children. She also worked in child protection as a social worker in the 70s and saw a few awful cases of child abduction. As a consequence she was much more vigilant with me, and I was aware of dangers from early on and what to do (and was not allowed to "play out", though from about 9-10 I probably had more freedom than children of the same age now). I had a lovely childhood, and never felt hard done by by not being allowed to play out in the street.

Risk assessment is not just about statistical likelihood, but potential consequences. Child abduction might be rare, but the consequences are potentially catastrophic. This is what worries me: plus different people percieve risk differently. I have what psychologists call a high internal locus of control: if anything bad happened to my DD I would always consider myself to blame in some way. In my assessment of risk, I also take into account how I would feel if something happened. My sister, in contrast, is much more relaxed about risk: she fundamentally believes that nothing bad will happen to her. For example, she was quite happy to take naps on the sofa under a duvet with her baby DCs on the grounds that SIDS was so rare nothing was likely to happen. I could never have done the same, because in the tiny eventuality that something did happen, I would never have been able to forgive myself for taking the risk, however small. BTW I am not ignorant about risk assessment: I'm a researcher with a background in statistical analysis.

I don't see why children can't be adequately equipped to deal with certain risks without this compromising their freedoms? It's rather an illusion to think children have a great deal of freedom in the swallows and amazons sort of way these days anyway; but this doesn't mean they are somehow oppressed by an awareness of potential dangers.

Lady I'm not sure your light changing adult is the same as a situation with a child. Adults have to change lights, or we'd all live in darkness.

But to kind of use your scenario with a child.....if I left my 7 year old DC at home alone and she fell down the stairs and broke her neck, that would be my fault for leaving her home alone at 7 (way too young in my view). If my 13 year old was home alone fell down stairs and broke her neck that wouldn't be my fault because it is appropriate for a 13 year old to be home alone. I would be devastated, not sure how my life would pan out after that, but it wouldn't have been my fault and I couldn't blame myself and nor could anyone else.

I've said it before on here, but I wouldn't let my DC do anything that if something untoward happened to them, i would think back and know I shouldn't have let them do it. It just wasn't worth the risk. If its age appropriate, that's a different thing.

traininthedistance exactly.

op how is your parenting any different then with your stance?

I wish. I lay in bed at night trying to shut out thoughts of poor James Bulger. I feel sick raising in my throat to even think of it. I wish I could take my brain out and scrub out any knowledge of such bad things happening in the world. I really do. I am a person plagued by constant fear. It is a horrible way to be.

Its a very real issue in our locality at the moment- there appears to be a man driving around the local schools in a white car trying to entice girls into his car. We are getting frequent text messages from the school warning us to be vigilant.

Tired so are we, worcestershire area.

Fix agree. my ds2 was the same age as Jamie and it still makes me mad when I see toddlers running around with harassed mums trying to coral them.

I want to shout get bloody reins!!!!!!!

Why do people fear flying when they happily get in a car every day?
People's perceptions of risk are skewed.
People fear abduction by a paedophile because the high profile cases are so horrifying. And most people can't imagine their dad, husband, brother, mum, sister sexually abusing their child.

But don't you think that all of this world wide web connectivity makes magnifies our fears? I had never heard of James Bulger until 2 weeks ago, when someone hear mentioned him and I took the unwise step of wiki-ing him to understand the reference. I cried all night. For something that happened 20 years ago, in another country, that I have absolutely no control over whatsoever. That is not healthy. We all know every dirty detail of everything everywhere though - I think that must mess with out minds, no?

I'm not sure people's perceptions of risk are skewed in those situations exactly: many car accidents are not catastrophic, but pretty much all plane crashes are. We know that driving safely and being vigilant slows at least a perceived control over the risk. Whereas those in a plane really do not have any control over whether it crashes or not. In those situations people's perception of risk is inflected by their perceived level of control. This doesn't change despite everyone knowing it's more likely that you'll be in a car accident than in a plane crash.

Awareness of so-called stranger abduction shouldn't lead to less perception of other dangers: surely a child's awareness that he or she shouldn't be coerced into something they don't want to do helps them protect themselves against non-strangers too? Why are the two things set against each other?

If one wanted to be graphic, along the lines of the car/plane analogy above, a child might have a greater likelihood of being molested by someone known to them than a stranger, but a greater likelihood of also being killed if abducted by a stranger. This doesn't imply that measures taken to guard against the one preclude measures taken to guard against the other. Or that one wouldn't be horrified by the possibility of both.

I like Bowlersarm's description above.

but people do fly don't they? I hate it but I know I have to! it wouldn't stop me as I love going abroad.

same with your children. you know abduction is a rare occurance but you don't shut it out or not arm your children with knowledge or teach them strategies to avoid dangerous situations.

most people I agree can't imagine a close relative abusing their child but most sensible parents teach children not to keep secrets and to know their bodies are private.

I do not worry about things like this...take sensible precautions of course, but I don't worry about my dcs when they are out . They are teens now, but even when they were little I never thought of awful scenarios.
I am very aware of what can happen to children as I work in that field, but don't prey on it.

*gives, not slows !

I was worried about it, yes, but that was due to my daughter's issues with running off and having no danger awareness. One night when she managed to escape the house aged four, she knocked on a random stranger's door and it worried the hell out of me because that was random luck that she knocked on the door of someone who called the police, not someone who may have abducted her and I would have known nothing until morning when her bed was empty.

Fix no it's not healthy to cry all night about a child you didn't know existed 2 weeks ago.

but I disagree with you. personally I think knowledge is power, people listen to children now far far more than they did when I was a child in the 70s.

our school bus driver used to tickle us in iur pants as we stood to get off the bus. I told my dm and she said it was a joke!!!

ffs can you imagine a parent saying that now.

no good. bring in reporting and communicating. look how it's flushing out the old sex pests now aye!

Body and tiredemma. My FB has been full of stories about a man in a white/silver car over the last few days - except some were posted by my friends in my home town, Gloucester and some by friends in my current location, Oxfordshire.

So is there a man in a white car attempting to abduct children in Worcester, Gloucester and Oxford in the last few days - or have the reports been exagerated/made up?

My instant reaction is urban legend so I will dismiss it, someone else's may be panic and that's how these things spread.

Thank you traininthedistance

A stranger tried to entice a friend, my sister and me into his car when we were about 8 and 9.

I certainly don't obsess about this happening to my DC, although I do tell them to be careful. There have been some reported incidents of school girls being followed by men in a van recently (the schools have made us aware of this - its not local rumour) so I have, of course, warned my DDs to be vigilant when walking home from school, especially to make sure they have plenty of charge on their phones.

I guess what I'm driving at (poorly), is that statistically speaking OP is probably right to not worry and obsess about stranger abduction which is statistically speaking rare. Not to dismiss anyone's experiences of course. I do wonder however, if our media orientated world and interconnectivity when it comes to bad news enhances our perception or risk to a new level.

I was molested at age 8 by a stranger whom I had seen around the neighbourhood a couple of times. He told me that my mum had asked him to ask me to come home (I was playing in a neighbour's backyard about five minutes walk away). My parents had not had a serious stranger danger talk with me by that stage. Mine have had the speech and more importantly, I was very specific about where they should not be touched.

LtEveDallas yes these rumours can spread of course, esp on FB. our contact was a school text so took it more seriously as thought police were behind it.

I don't think there are any more or less sex crimes/abductions out there than back in the day but I do think people are more aware of them and more willing to listen to children and take these things seriously.

surely the news tells us that now what was deemed ok in the 70s is definatly not bloody ok now.