I was a teenager when 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared from a SoHo street corner 33 years ago today, and that news changed my life. It was clearly not the first time a child had ever disappeared, but it was the first in an era of 24 hour news and cable TV. Some events come to stand for all the others, and the Patz case shaped the generation I was part of, and the generation we would go on to raise.
The Patz disappearance came less than a year after the disappearance of five teenagers in Newark, and just before news broke that someone was killing children (there would be 21 deaths in all) in and around Atlanta. Adam Walsh would be kidnapped and killed in 1981 after his mother lost track of him in a Florida department store. Paperboy Johnny Gosch would disappear while biking his usual delivery route in Iowa in 1982. The creation of the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children codified the alarm, and Adam Walsh's father, John, became haunting soundtrack to parenting when he appeared in living rooms regularly as the host of "America's Most Wanted."
I remember my own fear back then. It was not paralyzing or debilitating or even clear and conscious, but it was ever present and new. Something had changed. My Mom ordered that my favorite necklace, with "LISA" written in gold, be exiled to a drawer. She didn't want a stranger to call me by name and lead me to think they were a friend.
As Lenore Skenazy, the writer who champions against irrational fear in parenting told the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, "When Etan was first missing, the working assumption on the part of the parents was that some forlorn woman had seen this angelic child at a bus stop and had taken him to raise as her own. It wasn't until later, when police said that sometimes it's actually not a woman who captures a child, but a man who intends to ... murder them. When that hit the airwaves, it was a match that sparked a fire that's been raging ever since."
My younger son is now the age I was when Etan disappeared. He has never known a world without children's faces on milk cartons (Etan was the first), nor one where he was allowed to wander the neighborhood unsupervised, expected to show up at dinnertime. The age of all his firsts -- staying home alone, taking the train alone, biking a mile across town -- was far older than mine had been, because I was raised in a world that had not thought of danger, and he was raised in one that thinks about it all the time. He never wanted a name necklace, but if he had I would have said no.
Last month, when detectives swarmed a SoHo basement on what seems to have been an erroneous tip that Etan was buried there, Associated Press reporter Meghan Barr interviewed Cass Collins, whose sons had been in a playgroup with the little boy. They are now grown (after all, that blond imp on the milk carton would be nearing 40) and one, Collins said, was anxious as a kid. News of the new search led mother to apologize to her son. "I said to him, 'If you got a sense from us that the world is a scary place, it came from Etan Patz,'" she told Barr. "That's where it came from. And I'm sorry if we did do that. Because it's not a good thing to imbue in a child."
And yet we have imbued it -- all of us, a whole nation, not just those whose children played with Etan. We keep our children inside, by our sides, teach them of stranger danger, drive them when they should be walking, limit them when they should be free. And we do it based on a magnified -- and false -- view of a dangerous world.
To wit -- of the 800,000 children who disappear each year in the US, only 115 do so as Etan did, at the hands of strangers, rather than the more typical disappearance as part of a custody or family dispute.
Or this fact: British writer Warwick Cairns, author of "How to Live Dangerously," has calculated that if you wanted to guarantee that your child would be snatched off the street, he or she would have to stand outside alone for 750,000 YEARS.
Still, we are certain it could happen any moment. We live as if it WILL happen WITHIN a moment. And the irony -- the tragedy -- as Skenazy points out regularly on her website freerangekids.com, is that we are probably harming them more than protecting our kids with all our metaphorical bubble wrap. We are teaching them that the world is more dangerous than it actually is, that everyone and anyone is out to get them, that they need an adult close to keep them safe. Then we wonder why they are taking anxiety medications in record numbers, and bringing parents with them to job interviews, and extending adolescence into their 30s.
New York City police announced an arrest today, which is also National Missing Children's Day -- one created by Ronald Reagan after Etan disappeared. We could use it to reopen a chapter, and frighten ourselves anew, and hold our kids (too) tight and warn them (too much) about the big bad world.
Or we could use this to open a new chapter. To teach them that sometimes bad things happen, and that reasonable people take rational precautions. But that the world is a place of adventure, and we want them to have oh so many of those.
Follow Lisa Belkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lisabelkin
Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, Ph.D.: Etan Patz and 5 Lessons That Loss Can Teach
That being said, I certainly want her taking anxiety medications and prolonging adolescence into her thirties which are much more likely probabilites, statistically speaking.
2,300 children die of cancer every year.
1,500 children under 14 die in car crashes every year.
A child is 30 times more likely to be killed in a car accident, yet we put our kids in a car thousands of times a year. Why is it so easy to accept the risk of cars but so hard to accept the lesser risk of allowing our kids some age-appropriate freedom?
I learned recently that the boy's younger siblings will be attending the same camp he was in when he drowned. We know changes have been made in camp policies, but I can't imagine the fear that one would have to get over to leave your children in the care of an institution that failed so grievously in the past...yet, it's also one the most highly regarded camps on island, that can provide the best experiences for children. This seems to me to be an example of parents who are most certainly more aware of the odds, deciding that their children's ability to fully experience life is worth a little risk.
http://www.amber-hinds.com
There has to be a happy medium between freedom and tight reins. Kids should be allowed to play outside with friends. In a small group, even, they should be able to travel short distances to other friends' homes. I do think there is power in numbers. No matter what statistics show, parents are going to fear for their children because that's what they do. They will always worry if they are making the right choices and if they are safe.
But I can't agree that we should take comfort in statistics. Stranger abduction may be insignificant statistically but that is of small comfort when it happens.
I fully admit to erring on the side of helicopter parenting, but I can't say that my kids are not allowed to experience life. I believe that the "drop your kids off at the park when they're seven!" or "let them take the subway alone when they're 8" is more beneficial to the parent who can claim to have an independence prodigy than it is to the child who cannot possibly appreciate how to navigate being alone in a park or on the subway. (In my mid-40s, I'm not sure I'm navigating the social dynamics of the NYC subway ride that well myself. Such as last month, when I saw a fellow passenger start chocking himself. What does Miss Manners say to do in that case, other than avert gaze and change cars at the next stop?)
What is the rush? My kids were not allowed to go to the park alone at 7, but my daughter goes around in Manhattan now that she's thirteen. Did she lose five years of independence? Or did I gain time sitting on a park bench and being with her?
The friends got into a car accident while drunk. Two of them died. My friend attended their funerals. He saw the tearful parents of his dead friends. From that time on, his love and respect for his father grew. He was forever grateful that his dad was strict, for the right reasons. My friend is a doctor now. A surgeon, like his dad. He says he'll try to raise his kids the same way.
After that, my mom became overprotective. She did not allow any of us to join field trips, go to the local store by ourselves, etc. Growing up, I resented it. I hated being smothered. As soon as I reached adulthood, I traveled extensively to slake my thirst for adventure.
Now that I'm a parent myself, I understand more fully why my mother restricted us. You can replace a lost cellphone. You can replace a lost purse. You can never replace a lost child. He or she is part of your soul. If you lose your child because of a small decision - letting her swim, letting him walk to the bus stop - no matter how tiny the odds, it can happen, and you will never forgive yourself.
I now live in Singapore where the mentality is very different. I wrote a post on my blog recently about losing my daughter in a store here. My first thought was someone had snatched her. I think the store staff thought I was mad. You can read it here.
http://www.21stcenturymummy.com/2012/05/16/the-time-i-lost-my-child/
It is a very safe place here and although I will never be complacent, I am trying hard to be more relaxed.