THERE ARE 626,000 CHILDREN UNDER 18 IN DALLAS COUNTY.
This year, statistics say, 34 will die in a car accident, while one will be kidnapped by someone he or she doesn’t know.
Translation? A child is 34 times more likely to die in the car on the way to school than be abducted by a stranger.
Yet most parents these days won’t let their kids out of their sight. The kids don’t walk to their friends’ houses or to school. They don’t ride their bikes around the block or to the nearest creek. They don’t even play in the front yard without our watchful eyes.
Why then, given favorable odds of 1 in 626,000, don’t we allow our children more freedom?
The answer to that question rests in the hearts and minds of neighborhood parents.
As a child growing up in Mansfield, Texas, in the ‘70s, neighborhood resident Gina Waco remembers spending her days running wild and free.
“Gosh, I just remember being gone a majority of the day,” she says. “I remember riding to the convenience stores to get candy or soda or Slurpees. It was a couple of miles on our bikes, and even riding five or six miles was nothing for us. I would ride my bike up to the pool and stay there all day long during the summer.”
Most of us born before a certain date have similar recollections of childhood – a time of relative freedom, when we were free to explore the world outside our homes for hours on end, with little parental involvement. Endless bike rides, fireflies caught in jars and rock collections uncovered in out-of-the-way places are common experiences among those of us who grew up in the 1980s and earlier.
“We could do a lot on our own, and we felt a little bit of ownership with that,” Waco says. “It sounds storybook now, but it was true.”
But Waco says her daughters, Avery, 4 and Cate 3, won’t experience the same fabled upbringing.
“There is no chance ever that our kids would ride down the street to Whole Foods to pick up a juice,” she says. For now, her daughters play in a locked, fenced back yard. And she and husband Marc don’t know if that will ever change.
Waco isn’t alone in her beliefs. A survey conducted in 2002 by Web site Parentcenter.com revealed that only 5 percent of more than 10,000 parents polled let their children play outside unsupervised.
Neighborhood resident Heather Dickie also represents the juxtaposition between how most of us spent our childhoods and how our own kids will grow up. Dickie was a military brat whose family lived in at least nine different states and such far-flung places as Germany, Mexico and Panama.
“It didn’t matter where I lived,” she says. “As soon as I got my first bike and learned how to ride it, I was gone. We just went. I truly don’t remember any boundaries.”
She and her brother, she says, played alone in the jungles of Panama and on the streets of Mexico City.
Asked if she can think of an age when her own son, Jeremy, now 13, will have even a fraction of those same freedoms, she answers “35” and is only partially kidding.
These days, it seems parents have a lot more to worry about. While the biggest fears of our parents didn’t seem to amount to much more than neighborhood bullies or speeding cars, today the overriding fear seems to be that someone will take and harm our children.
“There’s a definite fear that anybody could snag your child while your back is turned at McDonald’s. Even when they’re with you, that fear stays with you all the time,” Waco says.
These fears aren’t surprising, given the media attention heaped on child abduction cases, which repeatedly illustrate the tragedy, worry and grief we could face by turning our heads for a moment.
News stories like these are powerful motivation for not allowing your children to play outside alone.
“We worry a lot about our kids being abducted,” says Farrel Chapman, a mother of two. “No one wants to be that parent who lets their kid play outside, and then something happens to them.”
“Abduction by a total stranger, while the consequences are devastating, in actuality is a rare event compared to other crimes against children.”
So says Lt. Bill Walsh of the Dallas Police Department’s Youth and Family Support Division, which oversees family violence cases and incidents of child abuse, exploitation and abduction. Children are much more likely to be harmed or kidnapped by someone within their family or closely connected, he says.
Stereotypical kidnappings, he says, where “a complete stranger takes your child by force for the purposes of sexual assault and perhaps murder” are relatively uncommon.
But these are the cases we hear about over and over again on the news, cases such as those of Amber Hagerman and Opal Jennings. Cases, Walsh says, which nationwide “probably happen about 150-200 times a year.”
According to a United States Department of Justice study about missing children, the figure may be even lower. That study found that only about 115 cases annually are classified as the most serious type of abduction – where the child is harmed or killed within the first three hours of being taken. By way of comparison, the U.S. population for children under 18 is about 73 million. If those same statistical odds are applied here, only one of the more than 626,000 kids in Dallas County is likely to be abducted this year.
Walsh also says child abductions probably aren’t any more common now than they were back in the 1980s and earlier, when many of us spent hours outside, unsupervised.
“It didn’t get the attention it gets today. We didn’t have the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children. The national media didn’t cover it,” he says.
So, if it stands to reason that most of us spent countless hours outside, unsupervised, without being hurt by a stranger – not to mention that the chances of our child being abducted and harmed are actually startlingly low – shouldn’t our kids be allowed the same freedoms?
“I’m afraid to say it, but I don’t think so,” Walsh says. “It only takes a few minutes for someone to grab a child. It is a chance I wouldn’t take with my own children or grandchildren.”
But why?
Because, Walsh insists, there are factors out there beyond our control. He knows the tricks abductors use to lure kids in, claiming they’ve lost pets, have candy, or have come to take the child to his or her parents.
But, he says, explaining to our kids that this kind of behavior is out there isn’t enough.
What can you tell children? You tell them not to talk to strangers, for instance, but Ted Bundy put on a paramedic’s uniform and told his victims their family members had been in an accident and asked them to go off with him. Do you think they went? Of course they did. People can be very, very devious.”
And, he says, even if you teach children all the common sense in the world, even if you explain to them the most commonly used lures and drill “stranger danger” into them, it’s still not enough. There’s nothing to stop a potential abductor from resorting to even more frightening methods.
“No matter how much a child is schooled by his or her parents to not go with a stranger, do you think someone could resist me if I decided to just use brute force?” asks Walsh, himself a father of two.
“No.”
So, if our children can’t have the same freedoms we did, will there be consequences?
The answer, of course, depends on whom you ask. Some people believe that if our kids don’t know what they’re missing, they won’t miss it. Others say it’s “just life,” a natural progression of our children’s lives being different from ours, the way ours were different from our parents.
“I don’t really know what the effect is, but I do think there would be one,” says Phyllis Smith, a neighborhood resident whose son, Trevor, is 13 and is now enjoying a limited amount of freedom.
“Maybe kids these days are kind of stuffy and don’t know how to have fun or make do with what they’ve got. I think there’s probably a lack of creativity and imagination.”
There is little doubt that the freedom to play is an important part of childhood.
The Institute For Play (IFP), a California-based organization that has been studying the effects of play on Americans’ lives, asserts that play time is a “foundational factor in good mental and physical health.” Play teaches kids, among other things, to:
• Learn to share.
• Resolve conflict.
• Use their imagination and develop creativity.
• Hone their ability to enjoy life.
• Develop their foremost personality traits.
Most parents these days try to substitute unsupervised play with other types of amusement, whether it be organized sports, scheduled play dates, trips to the Museum of Natural History, the Science Place or some other family-friendly adventure.
Waco and her husband take their children to nearby farms, petting zoos and dude ranches. Sometimes, she says, they’ll even get on the DART rail and just see where they end up.
“I think back on those days a lot – of the freedom I had and the learning that went on,” she says. “It’s nostalgic to me, and I have a little bit of regret that my kids don’t have the wide open spaces to experience.
“But you have to replace it with a sense of adventure. It may be one that’s kind of more manufactured, but it’s still a sense of adventure.”
But even with efforts such as Waco’s, the fact remains that most parents still feel a certain sense of loss for their children.
“It saddens me,” Farrel Chapman says. “Because back yards are great, but they’re very limiting. There’s nothing new in a back yard. There’s really no exploring to be done.”
Dickie agrees.
“I love the way I grew up,” she says. “And, of course, it saddens me – I want my child to have the best, and the best would be to live without fear or to live with a minimal amount of fear. But when you have a child who is still of an impressionable and vulnerable age, and you’re aware of horrible instances like Columbine, like the World Trade Center, like terrorist attacks, of course you wonder what you can do to put your child into a safer place.
“You could go live on an island someplace,” she says. “But you can’t do that, that’s not reality.”
Walsh wishes time could be easier, but he says there’s no easy solution.
“As time change, we have to change,” he says. “Throughout the whole childhood life cycle, the challenges our children face will change, and your response has to change as a parent.”
But one things remains a constant, he says.
“Protecting them,” he says of our children, “is a lifelong job.”
