Bad Advice: 'If You Get Lost, Look for a Mommy'

Just checked out the Registerguard website as Duke suggested. I'm likely to go the other way now.

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Kids who are separated from their parents are TERRIFIED. So take the focus off your own offended feelings, and put the focus on the poor, scared kiddo.

I'm an obvious "Mommy," (heavy set, 30s, nice face), and even on the few occasions when I've encountered a frightened, alone child, it hasn't gone the way I've imagined it might. I've said (from 5-10 feet away) "Sweetheart, are you lost?" And the kid, each time, bolted away from me. Each time, the child's parent was very close by, and the issue was immediately resolved without me needing to interact further with the child.

It's a mistake to tell your kids to find a policeman - how often do you see policemen? "Look for someone with a name tag," - again, could be good advice, except that your kid could be too frightened to notice name tags.

Instead, the very best route to take is so tell your child to look for KIDS with their mom or dad. Kids aren't afraid of other kids, and the fact that the adult is with a kid, tells your child that this adult can be trusted enough to help your child find you.

If you're alone and you encounter a lost child - whether you are a man or a woman - offer support, tell the child your name and that you'll go with him/her to find the cashier/information desk. Under no circumstances should you touch the child - meaning, don't offer a hug or try to take the child's hand. Tell the child exactly where you're going "There's a cashier with a microphone up front. Will you walk with me to the cashier?" Or, if the store is small enough, you can just say loudly "I have a lost child over here!" But don't expect that, just because YOU are 100% safe and kind and wouldn't hurt a fly, that the lost child will feel safe with you. At best, stay close by (not too close), and make sure that the kid finds his way back to mom.

I was in Walmart one time and, as I was looking for jammies in my kids' size, I saw as every woman in the boys department (it was all women in the store at the time, on a school day) suddenly abandoned their carts and ran toward something. Nosey me, I wandered over, and there was 1 crying child, just reunited with his mother, and about 10 women ready to help. Probably let your child know that if he ever gets lost, he should expect and army of mommies to come to his aid. :)

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Interesting article, but being a male today isn't a whole lot like being black in the pre-Civil Rights South. Being accused of committing a crime might turn public opinion against you, but it isn't likely to get you strung up from a tree, burned alive or brutally physically tortured in any way. Lenore might do well to open a history book before making such inaccurate analogies.

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Anyone can walk in to the store or a mall wearing a name tag or uniform. How easy would it be for a predator, wearing a name tag, to find a lost child and say "let me help you, I work here". I tell my child to find a mom with kids or go to a register and ask for help.

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Quick idea for you: spend two hours reading "Protecting the Gift" by Gavin de Becker. The reason to direct your kids to a mommy isn't because of fear of men, but because moms are most likely to invest in getting your kid safely home to you. A guy will say, "try the lost and found counter" and point the way; a mom will say, "let me show you to building security and wait with you while they call your mom on the PA system." Is that 100% true? No, of course not--some moms are murderers or drug addicts or criminals in their own right. But generally speaking, it's not about whether any individual man is a good guy but what your kid's best bet is for getting safely back to you--and a mom with kids of her own present gives you and your kid the best possible odds. Personally, I never taught my kid anything about "stranger danger"--I considered the whole concept worse than stupid, having seen more than one kid at Disneyworld so panicked by being separated from their parents that they couldn't think straight much less find a safe adult. Kids aren't capable of being responsible for their own safety--that's kind of what makes them kids. Putting that weight on them isn't going to benefit them 99% of the time. But that said, giving them the best tools you can for situations that you can't control is the only tool we have for them--and find a mommy is the very best possible advice that you can give them.

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I'm not sure which statistics you used in determining that "when you're lost, you should look for a mommy" is bad advice, but I found some statistics to suggest otherwise:

-- While almost half of the abductions are committed by family members, the FBI & US Dept. of Justice say 80% of acquaintance and stranger kidnappings are sexually motivated.

-- 90% of stranger abductions are committed by males between the ages of 20 and 40-years old.

-- In these cases, the child is found alive less than 60% of the time

So, given these statistics, and most statistics about crimes committed against children by strangers, it is clear that statistically-speaking (not with regard to political correctness), your cild IS safer with a female stranger, especially one with her own kids present!

Personally, I intend to teach my son to tell a mommy with her kids if he's lost!

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"When that blonde-haired, blue-eyed 6-year-old disappeared on his way to school, Fass says his parents believed 'for a long time' that he'd probably been taken by a lovelorn woman who wanted a child to raise as her own. The public thought so, too. It was only months later that the pedophile theory bubbled to the surface, aided by a lurid novel about the topic. And when it did -- it exploded."

Yeah, well, this would be a better argument if Etan Patz actually *HAD* been kidnapped by a woman who tried to raise him as her own (in which case, he would have almost certainly been found decades ago. Instead, he was never found, and was legally declared dead years ago.) All evidence points to Jose Antonio Ramos, a convicted child molestor who was friends with Etan's babysitter, as having kidnapped and killed Etan. Jailhouse informants say Ramos confessed to the murder, and in a civil suit, Ramos was found responsible for Etan's death. The Patz case is actually evidence *for* the claim that men are more dangerous to children than women are, not evidence against it.

Most men are not molesters or murderers. But, most molesters and murderers are men. That's just reality. Over the next week, why don't you count how many men shoot someone, compare it to the number of women who shoot someone, and then get back to me.

I think many attempts to protect children from molesters are useless and misguided (like telling children to report "inappropriate" touching -- how does a child know what sort of touching is inappropriate?) However, telling kids "look for a mommy" sounds fine to me. Kids aren't going to infer from this that men might be molesters -- kids don't even understand what molestation is!

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As a former police detective who specialized in sex crimes and crimes against children, I'm no longer interested in political correctness, I want MY child to find a mom with children and ask for help. There's never a cop around when you need one~ha!~and LOTS of businesses hire registered sex offenders (I shudder to think of my blue eyed, blond haired, gorgeous six year old daughter approaching a mall employee who just happens to also be a registered sex offender and saying, "I'm lost; can you help me?") When my daughter's life is at stake, I don't care WHO is offended.

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So where was the part that supported the title of the article? "Bad Advice: 'If You Get Lost Look for a Mommy". The article was interesting but never addressed the bad advice part.

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This analogy is so completely inappropriate

"now we're in an era when being male is a little like being black in the pre-Civil Rights South"

Give me a break.

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I have thought, for years, that parents are doing far more long-term damage than they realize to their kids with the "strangers are dangerous!" meme.

I am quite sure I was raised to be friendly and polite to strangers. It was perfectly OK to talk with one. It was also absolutely the right thing to do to offer help to a stranger in need, or to accept help if it was offered and you needed it.

Pretty much everyone I knew was raised the same way. Shockingly, none of us were kidnapped or murdered.

When I was 13, my best friend and I took a bus from north-central New Jersey into New York City on a Sunday to see a matinee performance of the musical "Hair." My mother had forgotten this until recently when I had occasion to bring it up, during one of those conversations we have about "what the hell is the matter with people these days."

"I let you do that?" she asked?

"Yep."

"They'd put me in jail for that now, wouldn't they?"

"Probably."

By the way, I still pick up hitchhikers.

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My father is an Anglican priest (they are allowed to marry and have families), and when I was in middle school, my friend's mother wouldn't let her come over (even when my mother was home) because in her mind priest=molester. She'd never even MET him. My dad actually had to clear out for a few hours so the mother would let my friend attend my birthday party. She taught the girl to be afraid of her own shadow. Not to mention my father was upset at being judged like that.

I'm all for safety, but we have GOT to get perspective.

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This I've actually read in "Protecting the Gift" by Gavin DeBecker, who is a security expert AND definitely not in favor of kidnapping hysteria. He doesn't even devote a full chapter in the whole book to it. However, he does rest his advice in fact, in that most pedophiles are male and in a public setting will be drawn to children who look distracted or alone, so yes, please, continue this important advice, tell your child to look for a mommy.

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For those who advise your kids to find "someone in uniform", how often can you NOT find an employee of a store? It's more common than not that I might spend 10 minutes looking for an employee and I'm an adult, I know what the employees should look like, and I'm not panicked or scared at the time. My kids can FIND a Mom in Walmart, an employee, not so much.

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Alicia, I realized after posting that my comment, "kids don't even understand what molestation is," could be misinterpreted. What I meant was, kids don't really understand what sex is, since they don't get sexual aroused. This certainly does not mean they are stupid, but it does make it hard for them to tell what is inappropriate and what is not. Consider the rule you propose, "never let a grown up touch you where your bathing suit covers." What if a doctor is treating an injury in that area? What if a child soils himself and a teacher or other adult is trying to help clean him?

"If kids didn't know what a bad touch was, victims of molestation wouldn't suffer a lifetime of trauma afterwards." There are a number molestation could be emotionally traumatic, even for a child too young to understand molestation is sexual -- by scaring and coercing the child, say.

Sometimes, molested children show new symptoms of trauma when they reach puberty and start to really understand what sex is. This wouldn't happen if they fully understood sex all along.

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