One thing I have noticed about parenting is the balance between teaching my children what I think will make them happiest, with what I think will keep them safest. There is a cost for security, both financially, socially, and mentally. But the benefits are there too.
A subject that comes to mind is the current fear of "Stranger Danger" in the US and perhaps much of the world. It isn't mysterious where it came from. There have been very public cases of children being hurt or taken by a stranger, and all of us grieve for those kids and parents and hate to imagine ourselves in their shoes.
It is also a balance between the rarity of the crime and the severity of them. I can list statistics all day long that the vast majority of abductions is committed by friends and family. Most of those by noncustodial parents. The out of tens of millions of kids in the US, the number abducted by strangers can be counted in the double digits. That isn't the feeling you get when the news has a new story every day and your phone has Amber alerts going off. But even if it is rare, the terror of it happening to your child puts you on guard.
My question is how much is the cost of that security. Back when I lived in Tennessee I remember a local debate over a shooting of an old man. The short story is the old man had Alzheimer's and got lost while walking his dog late at night. He knocked on a door while lost, and the occupant snuck around the back of the house and shot the old man to death. His story was he felt fearful that it was a home invasion and protected himself and his family. Could it have been a home invasion? I don't have any statistics on how many murders were committed by senior citizens with the family dog in tow, but I guess it's a possibility.
What does it cost my kids to live their lives believing everyone they meet is a criminal until further notice? As a parent I want my kids to be safe, but how much am I damaging their lives and damaging their future communities if all of us teach our kids to live that way? I don't believe that security comes for free. We pay in our own way, possibly by alienating people that could have been our friends or depriving my children of social interactions that could have been healthy for them.
On the flip side of the coin, I have had great experiences with strangers stepping forward to take care of my children. When my son snuck out of school to try and walk home from school alone and found out the hard way he has his father's sense of direction, strangers stopped him, comforted him, and contacted the police to get him back to us. When my son used his sister as an outboard motor to pull him on his skate shoes and fell and busted his face, it was the local mothers who we had never met before who stopped and dressed his wounds and took care of him, their immediate action calming down both of my kids and were critical of him healing up just fine and leaving no scars.
What I really want to do is teach them that the vast, vast majority of people are kind people who are dealing with their own lives just like they are. That just about everyone will lend a hand if asked, and just about everyone has knowledge or virtues to pass to them if they are just willing to learn from them. Even the people who are cruel or mean are usually just kind people who have been damaged throughout their life and are responding in ways that aren't healthy for them.
Not that I want them to be open to abuse. There have been times in my life where I have known generally good people who I've had to remove from my life because they were too damaged to help, and either were damaging my own life, or we just did not want to see them continue to damage their own. That doesn't make them evil or criminals.
But then again, I have to balance those wants with the horror of how extreme that me being wrong is. I really don't want to be the one on the news telling people that the reason my kid trusted that person was that I wanted to protect how future communities interacted. Or consoling my wife with how rare these things are, we just got unlucky. This is one of those many times as a parent the answer isn't clear or easy. I think my best shot is teaching my kids honestly about this and letting them make the decisions of how to interact with the world on their own. I just have to have faith in their intelligence over my wants and hopes, and see where it takes me. Maybe not the best solution, but an honest one.
