Kid Slipped Away From You? Share Your Story!

I lost track of my nearly-two-year-old once…and didn’t even know he was missing!

I had put him down for a nap in our bed and gone into the kitchen to do some dishes. About 20 minutes later, a police officer is knocking on my door, asking me if I’m missing a child.

Of course, I said “No, my child is taking a nap.”

To which the officer said, “You might want to double-check that.” I did, and to my horror, the bed was empty. My son had gotten up and made an escape while I was 15 feet away with my head buried in the dishwasher!

He’d gotten about half a block before the lunchers at the pub across the street spotted him, brought him in, gave him a cookie and called the police.

When I collected him, he was happy, safe and chocolate-smeared in the back of the police car!

I’m lucky that I was spared the horror of knowing my child was missing for a few minutes, but it was a totally bizarre (and slightly humiliating) experience that worked out just fine.

He’s nearly 6 now and luckily I haven’t lost track of him since!

Ok, story time!

My husband and I were going for an evening walk last fall, planning to do a 1.5 mile lap around the large neighbourhood park. My son (14) decided to come with us on his bike, and our daughter (10) was going to stay and play with her neighbour friends, but at the last minute grabbed her bike and came along. It was about 8pm, and we hadn’t realised how quickly the darkness would fall, as we were still used to summer, when it was light until 9:30pm.

Our son rode around pretty independently, but our daughter stayed close to us on her bike. Once we got to the park, she started riding ahead of us to enjoy the hills, and would wait for us at the bottom of the hills.

At the bottom of one hill, she just kept riding. We expected she’d stop and wait for us up ahead, but as we continued to walk, we never came upon her. At about the half-way mark through the park, we were starting to get worried, and the twilight was getting very dim. At the three-quarter mark, our son zipped past us on his bike, and we asked him if he’d seen his sister. He hadn’t, but rode off to look at her. That’s when we were really worried. We started running to the entrance of the park, where we hoped she’d wait for us. By now it was 8:30 and fully dark, and she wasn’t waiting at the entrance of the park.

I wanted to call her name, but this worried me. Nothing tells mysterious frightening strangers “there’s a lost, vulnerable and frightened girl in the park and oh yes, here’s her name so you can lure her in and pretend to be taking her to parents” better than frantic parents running around calling her name. I know stranger danger is overrated, but in the dark in a large urban park, it’s scary.

I stayed at the entrance of the park. My husband started running around the park again. I used my cell phone to call neighbours to ask them if my daughter had returned home, but no one was answering their phone. I was wondering if I should call the police to get some help searching the dark park. I was also about to call a coworker who lived a few blocks away, wondering if she or her husband would be willing to come in a car to help search the park, since it would take me way too long to walk home and get the car.

At about 8:45, my son rode up with my daughter, who was crying and really upset. He’d found her at the half way mark, the farthest away she could be, stopped on her bike and bawling because she couldn’t find us. She remained with me, and we cuddled together there in the park entrance, while he rode off to find his dad.

My daughter explained that she had kept riding, expecting to find us. It never occurred to her that since we were on foot, we were much slower than her. Once she had made a complete lap of the park, I would have expected her to have waited for us, knowing that she was ahead of us. But she just kept riding, but not far enough or fast enough to have caught up with us.

Her big brother really saved the day, being on a bike so he was able to travel around the large park much faster than we were able to, on foot. I had expected him to make 2 laps around the park and then ride home, so it was fortunate he’d made 3 laps around the park and was still there when we were realising she was “missing.”

We have resolved to a) pay closer attention to when it gets dark and b) be clearer with her about our expectations. If you’re going to ride ahead, wait for us where we can see you. In a few years, she’ll be independent like her brother and be able to do her own few laps around the park and ride home alone. But if she’s at a stage in her life where she’ll get worried and stop and cry instead of proactively find us, then we’ll give her guidelines that will save everybody’s sanity while she works to gain that confidence she needs.

I’m a fan of free-range parenting, and I don’t want my ten year old to feel like she needs to stay in visible range of her parents at all times. But having her lost and crying in the dark demonstrates that she’s still working towards independence. We will provide guidelines to allow her to feel safe, and willingly adjust those guidelines as she’s ready to expand. She sees her brother’s freedom, and knows it’s available to her as she’s ready to handle it.

It is interesting that the two children had very different reactions to the exact same experience. My 14 year old: 2 laps around the park–whee, let’s go for another! My 10 year old: 2 laps around the park–waaaah, where’s Mommy? I do think she’s old enough to have handled the situation better, and we will continue to work with her to help her get there.

We went on a cruise two years ago, I don’t want to give anyone free advertising, but let us say that there was a large mouse involved. One of the things my then 5 year old son, Max, enjoyed was running around the track on the deck. The track was covered at both the bow and the stern and he thought the resulting tunnels were very cool to go through. I had to agree because you could see a lot of the workings of the ship – lots of pipes and hull plates, that sort of thing. We’d done this several times and me being the brilliant and fun dad that I am thought it would be really fun to start at opposite ends of the tunnel and meet in the middle. (Can you see where this is going yet?)

Max started running into the tunnel and I quickly cut over to the other side and headed in to meet him. I’m not sure what happened, but I got all the way through the tunnel and no Max. I think he got scared and decided to follow me the other way, but I had been running pretty fast so that I wouldn’t leave him alone very long.

I started to really panic. Here I was on this huge boat and my five year old was missing. Of course the first thought that goes through my head was – didn’t I just see large decorative openings in the sides of the tunnel? Openings that an enterprising five year old could crawl through. I immediately ran back the other way around the deck and after criss crossing each other a couple times Max and I finally met up. When he saw me he ran up to me and said something like, ‘Lets not split up again.” His whole time gone from me was probably about 2 minutes, but it felt like forever.

Incidentally, the nieces have had our Subway Rules (which are easily expanded for all situations where one might get lost) drilled into their heads:

1. If you are on the train, and the grown-up(s) are NOT on the train, get off at the next stop and wait. The grown-ups will come to you.

2. If you are off the train, and the grown-ups are ON the train, stand still and wait. DO NOT GET ON THE NEXT TRAIN. The grown-ups will come to you.

3. If you’re just lost, in general, stand still and wait. The grown-ups will come to you.

4. If you’re exceedingly lost and grown-ups haven’t shown up, it’s okay to ask a store employee or a cop or another grown-up to call security to have us paged. (Ana’s learning my cell phone number right now.) Do not hold anybody’s hand or go wandering off – there’s a good chance we’ll still show up exactly where you are.

The point is that if the kid’s looking for the adults, and the adults are looking for the kid, you’ll both pass each other several times and start to cry. So the kid waits and the grown-ups look.

My second son was a hider when he was younger. At age 2 or 3 he was with his mother at the drug store. Suddenly he is not there. She looks up and down all the rows and cannot find him. After telling the manager, the store is locked down. A employee walks the outside perimeter to make sure he is not outside. Still no one can find him.

Suddenly another child of maybe 8 years says he thinks he knows where he might be. This boy had spotted a closet door in a small back corridor. They opened the closet and there was my son. The older boys mother asked how he new where my son was and he said that’s where he would hide.

Kid to the rescue FTW

I have lost each of my boys once. Both were about 2yo at the time.

When my older son was 2, I, my daughter, and my son took a cross-country trip along with my sister and her two kids. We stopped for lunch at a huge truck stop in the middle of nowhere. It was one of those places that had a sit-down restaurant, a gift shop, a convenience store, an arcade, and a shower/TV area for the truckers. After we ordered our food in the restaurant, I took all the kids to the gift shop to look around and stretch our legs. My 9yo nephew offered to escort the 2yo while my daughter and I decided about some state thimbles she was collecting along our journey. A few minutes later, my nephew and son returned, then left again. When my daughter had made her choice, I looked up and realized my nephew was there, and my son was NOT! I took a quick look down the adjoining aisles, then went into panic mode. I sent the kids to all corners of the store, sent one child to go check the table in case he had returned to my sister, and headed for the truckers area myself. I went outside to look around the gas pumps. My heart was beating like crazy- I had visions of someone having stolen him and taking off down the freeway, knowing the odds of finding him in that case would be nil. I was envisioning the phone call I would have to make to my husband explaining how I had lost his son. Within 10 minutes, my son was found in the arcade, not 20 feet from where I had been. He was in one of the driving games that was designed to look like the gamer is IN a car, so we had been unable to see him. I didn’t confess this incident to my husband until MANY years later!

My younger son escaped from the house when he was 2. We lived in a small rural town, in a small neighborhood that consisted of two cul-de-sacs and the street connecting them. My older son, about age 7 at the time, was allowed to ride his bike around the neighborhood alone. On this day, I was in the basement doing laundry, and the 7yo asked for permission to go ride his bike. I let him go. Immediately after he left, the 2yo came down the stairs carrying his shoes- he wanted to go out too. I put his shoe on him, but told him he could not go out until I came upstairs. ( I realized later that telling a non-verbal child no, while putting on his shoes, was sending very mixed signals!) About 5 minutes later, the doorbell rang. I went upstairs to find two neighbor kids who informed me that my 2yo had been sighted walking up the street. I went out to get him. I passed the other kids’ dad, a Deputy Sheriff, and asked him if he has seen which way my older son went, thinking the younger would have followed the older. He directed me up the adjoining street. As I walked up that street, I saw my younger son. The paved bike path (which also crossed our back yard) crossed the street there and dead-ended alongside another neighbor’s yard, and my son was coming up the path away from the dead end. The neighbor in that house (a social worker) was standing in her front yard, with her arms crossed, and just watching me. I retrieved my son and went home.

The next day I received a call from Child Protection. They had gotten a call accusing me of “inadequate supervision” of my children, because my “2yo was wandering the streets, and I did not know the whereabouts of my 7yo”!! We had to put up with an investigation from CPS, which never came to anything. I was (and still am!) IRATE that neither neighbor bothered to take my son by the hand and walk him home. They both knew who he was and where he lived. Neither of these neighbors would ever have considered encouraging “Free Range” behavior. One had an 8yo and 5yo that were not even allowed out in their own yard without a parent.

Something like this happened with my son was when he was 4. His mother and I were awakened to the sound of knocking at around 6:30 one Sunday morning. Two police officers were at the door.

“Do you know where your child is?” One of them asked.

“Yes, he’s right here behind me, watching cartoons,” I reply, point at my son.

“Let me rephrase that,” the officer said, “do you know where your son has been?”

I felt a lump develop in my throat as the officer described how he spotted my 4 year old walking down the sidewalk, about 3 blocks from our home. That when my son saw the police car, he quickly turned around and walked back home. Then when the officers initially knocked, my son answered and said “everything is fine here” and shut the door.

The officers asked if they could take a look in our apartment to make sure everything was OK – which they quickly realized was the case. After some questioning from the police and his mother and I, my son revealed the clutch of change in his hand and admitted that he just wanted to go to the store to buy some candy.

I’m confident that had the police not scared him into coming home sooner, he would have done just that and we wouldn’t have been the wiser.

We replaced the deadbolt with one that required a key to unlock it from both sides later that same day.

I lost our son once at a Costco when he was about four. Mommy was looking for something somewhere and he went with me. He is a TV addict and, close to the entrance, stood there, head up, mesmerized in front of the wall of TVs, watching.
I looked away for – I promise, no more than – 10 seconds to check a price, looked back to the TVs – and he was gone!
Had he wandered out, did he decide to go to the car? I checked with the guard at the exit, he did not remember anything. What to do? Call security – what is he wearing – – – – I don’t know, I’m a guy. But security is alerted and before checking outside I have to find my wife first to help her search. Going back to where I know she would be, I encounter them both – he had just decided that he had enough TV and went back to Mom – and he knew exactly where she was.
But did he have to decide that during these few seconds I was looking away??

The very nature of the question is worrying to me. We’re supposed to be here on Free Range Kids, and the question implies that people here will have, at most, a single story about when they didn’t know the exact location of their child.

When I was a kid any trip, anywhere, always resulted in one of us kids getting separated from our mum. I don’t see how that can’t happen with three boys and one mum. Happened every time.

And like someone’s subway rules in a comment above, we had rules – 1) don’t leave the store/mall/park 2) mum is tall with bright red hair – it can’t be hard to find her 3) if that doesn’t work, find the information desk or someone in a uniform, and tell them.

Guess what? Not a single one of us ever got abducted or anything. What’s more, loads of other people my age remember similar childhoods.

Kids getting brought home by police for trying to buy candy? What the diddly? Back in my day police only got involved if you tried to get candy *without* paying for it.

And now the poor kid is locked in the house 24/7? Let’s hope he works out how to escape to the candy store through a window before he needs to take a similar route in the event of fire.

And what parks are you people taking your kids to? You can’t call out your kid’s name because that alerts the resident evil-doers that there’s kids to be abused? Sheeeeeet.

If these are the parents who want their kids to be free range – what on earth are the over-protective parents up to?

Five years ago, when my oldest was 4 and I had one year old twins, we were in the bathroom at Walmart. On our way out, my 4 year old skipped ahead of me, and I called out to her to wait for me “by the door.” It took me a few minutes to manuver my bulky double stroller out the snaky bathroom entrance, and when I emerged, she was nowhere in sight. My gut feeling was that she misunderstood me and went to the store entrance, but which one? There are two, and they are on opposite ends of the store. Not wanting to waste time, I went to Customer Service (which was right next to the bathroom) and told them I was missing a child, what she was wearing, etc. I was very calm. Then they called a “Code Adam” and I remembered poor little Adam Walsh, and a feeling of panic started to wash over me. I managed to stay outwardly calm, though, and in less than a minute, one of the greeters was bringing my daughter back to me. She had done exactly what I thought, and gone ahead to the store entrance, thinking that was what I meant by “the door.” Lesson learned: Be very specific with small children.
Fast forward 3 years. The twins were now 4 themselves. My entire family, including my mom, arrived at a large Tampa hotel. It was dinner time, and the kids saw a buffet meal in the lobby and wanted to eat. We told them that we would bring our bags up to the suite and then come back down for food. So we went up the elevator to the ninth floor, and found our suite. My husband decided to stay in the suite and unpack, while my mom and I brought the kids back down to the lobby for food. In the lobby, my son decided there was nothing good to eat, and told me he wanted to go back to the room. I said, wait until I get the girls settled with grandma and I will bring you back up stairs. I turned for a minute or two to help the other kids, and when I looked back, my son was gone. I checked around the lobby for a minute or two, but I knew he had got on the elevator to try to go back to the room on his own. My mom was panicking, thinking he couldn’t possibly find his way back, and he could be anywhere in the hotel by then. I told her to wait in the lobby with the girls in case he came back there, and I would go check the room. Sure enough, he was back in the suite with my husband. My husband said he was just sitting there and heard a little knock at the door, and there was the boy. He found his way back to the exact room without any problems at all. When I went back down to relieve my poor worried mother, she was amazed at his sense of direction. Big sister (7 at the time) bragged that SHE could find her way back alone too, so we said, Okay show us the way. We followed her onto the elevator, and she rememebered the correct floor number, but after that she made a bunch of wrong turns, and couldn’t find the room. So that’s how I discovered my son’s amazing sense of direction.
A year later, I lost him at Disney World, and didn’t panic at all, because I knew he would be fine, and he was. He had gone back to the last place he had seen me, and was a bit irked with me when I found him. In his eyes, *I* was the one who was lost, not him.

Ender, I’m confused about what worries you. Free Range doesn’t mean that you aren’t concerned when your very young children whom you DON’T believe capable of being on their own, disappear without your consent or knowledge. Free Range is about understanding when and where your kids ARE capable, not about denying that not all kids are capable of taking caring themselves at very young ages, or in large crowds, or what have you.

The child who got “locked in the house 24/7” (or rather, whose parents put a lock on the door so that they could sleep without worrying about him) was FOUR YEARS OLD. The Free Range ethic, as I understand it, has nothing to do with not worrying about your four year old wandering the neighborhood alone without permission.

My son is a free-range kid by nature and has never been too concerned about staying close by his parents; my daughter was a nervous kid who always followed the rules. Both of them have gone off on their own while our family was on vacation.

The first time, my son was four and we had rented the ground floor suite of a B&B in a fairly busy residential neighbourhood near a beach. There were six adults in the suite, but one morning my son woke up earlier than everyone else, unlocked the front door and went outside. When we all woke up and realized he was nowhere to be found, there was a huge sense of panic, particularly from my mother who tends to imagine all the worst possible outcomes of any crisis situation. Fortunately, we located our little explorer before the fellow next door went out for a drive — my son had decided to climb into the cab of the pickup truck parked in the next driveway over.

Fast forward to the day after an overnight flight to London the following summer. We arrived at our charming hotel on a very busy road near Gatwick airport, checked into our room (which was in a converted garage behind the hotel building) and took a nap. Again, there were a lot of adults in a small suite but my son managed to disappear while we slept. I was woken a couple of hours later by my stepmother, in a huge panic because my son (now five) was nowhere to be found. He could easily have opened the door and wandered the neighbourhood, but eventually we discovered that he had crawled underneath my bed and gone back to sleep.

In both situations I think I’d have panicked less if my son didn’t have Asperger syndrome, which in his case means he has a very low sense of danger and might have walked out into the street if he saw something interesting on the other side.

His older sister, on the other hand, had a very sheltered upbringing for the first ten years or so of her life. I had the usual fears of abduction, etc. She herself helped me to realize how unhelpful this was to her growing independence. When she was 11, she begged to be allowed to go to a local mall after school on Fridays with some (older, very responsible) friends. I realized I was at a crossroads where I could either choose to continue being protective and restricting her independence, or I could find a way to feel comfortable with the idea of her being somewhere on her own. We decided to buy her a cellphone and set some sensible ground rules about where she should go while out on her own. I quickly realized that she was more than ready for this step and she’s continued to show her maturity and ability to look after herself. Last year, when she was 12 I was able to confidently allow her to explore on her own for an hour or two while our family was in Tokyo. She had 2000 yen in her pocket, knew where & when she should meet us and in a pinch she could easily have found her way back to our hotel. I realized that so many other parents wouldn’t have felt comfortable giving their child this type of experience, and that I had come a very long way since the days when I wouldn’t let her out of our sight. She has wonderful memories now of being on her own in Japan, soaking up the sights and sounds of a foreign (but very safe) city.

Well, I have lost my children several times – each. I have three. Multiple times I lost my middle daughter in a store. I learned to just alert the store personnel to watch the front of the store so she couldn’t leave without being seen and then carefully look for her down the aisles. Worked fine, though the employees panicked.

We did lose my then 8-year-old in downtown Atlanta. We were leaving a theater with crowds of people, walking to our cars. We had driven 2 and luckily we figured out before we left the lot that he was in neither car. My husband about came unglued, but I thought back to the last time I had seen him and guessed that he had turned instead of going straight across the street. Sure enough, he was with a family at the corner.

My middle daughter – then 2 – wandered out while I was putting the baby down for a nap. By the time I woke up and realized she had left, there was a cop car driving down my street with her. She had been trying to stop traffic on busy street near our house. We installed an alarm system with voice announcements of open doors to keep track of her.

There was also the time we looked everywhere for her, had half the neighborhood looking and called the police. She had fallen asleep in a box in the back of the van under the lid. We had looked once and not seen her there.

Back in the mid-60’s I delivered the LA Times in Duarte, Calif. (probably best known for the City of Hope medical center). One of my subscribers was at the end of a long dead-end street. One morning I drove down the street and noticed a small child on the porch of a house in the middle of the block. This was around 6 AM. When I drove back from tossing the paper, I saw the child walking down the street, heading for the “live” end. Fortunately, I remembered which house the kid came from, and led him (or her) back there and knocked on the door, delivering the “stray” to a rather groggy parent. It’s rather amazing how much ground a toddler can cover!

My 2 year old ran away from my dad’s house, once, taking 3 dogs with him. He went outside, but I was busy taking care of my ailing father, so I was watching my son from the window. I lost sight of him, but was too busy to go out. First chance I got, which was just a few minutes later, I ran outside, and my son was gone. This is out in the country, no neighbors, just fields and woods and swamp. After a few minutes of frantically calling his name, one of the dogs appeared and literally led me to my son. He, and the two other dogs, were the equivalent of maybe 2-3 blocks away from the house. They walked (ran?) down a hill, through a small field, through a washed out, muddy road, over a bridge, and into another field. He must have been running the entire time I was calling his name, to be able to get so far away. Thank God for the dogs. It was like an episode of Lassie, or something. Needless to say, the kid spent a lot more time indoors after that incident. No free range for him. He’s lucky he didn’t fall into the ditch and drown.

Are you kidding me? It happens almost everyday when I let my kids play in our yard. I give my 3 and 5 year old “free range” of a small perimeter of our house (on our cul-de-sac street) and an empty lot next door and usually I can see what they are doing from the porch while I’m inside washing dishes (aka, enjoying the silence). But about once a day one of them will be hiding in a corner getting into trouble (like secretly filling his boots up with hose water or digging a deep hole in my herb pot) and he will be so intent on not getting caught that he won’t answer my calls. I run around the house like a maniac shouting his name, sure that I was a negligent horrible parent whose child had been abducted by pirates because I allowed my kids play by themselves in our own yard while I did the dishes. But alas, they are always there, just doing what kids do.

I don’t remember my parents EVER playing outside with me. We live in the country and we were given a pretty wide range of wilderness to explore. There were certain places we weren’t supposed to go by ourselves and we obeyed that rule, but mostly I don’t think my parents knew what we were doing most of the time and I don’t think it would have been fun to have them hovering all the time. I used to love to spend hours just spacing out in our yard, building shelters with sticks and pretending I was lost in the wilderness, standing on top of a gravel pile surrounded by mud puddles and pretending I was queen of the island. I can’t even imagine how much fun it would NOT have been if I had my mom sitting there staring at me the whole time saying “don’t slip on the rocks” “quit touching that its dirty”.

I’m trying to let my kids learn how to play imaginatively by themselves like my parents did, but the only way to do that is leave them alone sometimes both in and outside the house and let them have a little freedom.

Late one morning at home, I was going about my business with something in the house and realized it was too quiet. I called out and there was no reply from my son, who I think was about 3 yo at the time and never prone to wandering off or getting too far away from me. I looked in all the rooms upstairs and down, the garage, then back upstairs under the beds, then out in the back garden, then out in the front garden, in the car in the drive, on the street in front of the house (very quiet suburban street on what is similar to a cul-de-sac but half circle shaped instead of a dead-end). I couldn’t find him anywhere, and he didn’t answer (and I was calling *much* louder by then).

I checked with a few adjacent neighbors (he wasn’t in the habit of going to their houses). At that point, I was pretty frantic that he had wandered off (I did not consider that he had been snatched for even one moment) and I started considering calling the police, but knew that would also mean a sheriff’s helicopter would be quickly be circling overhead the quiet neighborhood broadcasting a missing child alert with a description, etc., as well as a visit from the sheriffs, and my house was a topsy-turvy unkept mess that day (yes, I was also thinking about how my house would look to the police that day).

I decided to have one last look in the house, this time in the places I hadn’t looked, in the closets. I found him fast asleep in my walk-in closet , on the carpet deep under the bottom row of hanging clothes. Phew!

Usually the panic of being separated was the other way around. I remember one time at the county fair when my son was about 5 or 6 yo and we were making our way slowing through the building with all the aisles of booths of vendors selling wares. While I had my son in my peripheral vision I moved about 10 feet away to look at something, but I guess my son hadn’t seen me move. When I looked back at him a moment later, he was dissolved in tears and clearly panicked that he had “lost” me. He was never a kid I had to run after and catch, that’s for sure. Whether I liked it or not, he always stayed pretty close to me :-). That’s just his nature, though it’s changing now that he’s 10 yo.

We’ve did a lot of international travel before my son started school, because my husband’s family lives in two countries overseas, plus his job as a research scientist provides lots of opportunities for meetings in interesting places and invitations from colleagues. I always found a way to keep some ID information on our son from the time he was an infant to this day, such as our local contact info on the back of my husband’s business card attached to his clothing with clear packing tape (on his bck when he was a baby so he wouldn’t remove it), in his stroller, and later, laminated in clear packing tape and threaded through his shoe lacings when he was a toddler/preschooler. I still do that now anytime we are in crowds, or away from home, though he now can be relied upon to keep the info safe in his pocket. And he knows all our phone numbers now and could tell someone.

Last summer we saw a nice development in our son’s independence. We met up with my husband’s family for a farmhouse vacation in Italy after my husband finished a meeting he had organized. Then we spent some days exploring cities with just our family. Our son likes to drink fizzy mineral water or cappuccinos (unsweetened!) when we sit at cafés (often), but it always creates increased his need to pee later, sometimes multiple times. So he was constantly in search of a toilet. This trip, he didn’t want someone to come with him to find one, which was g-r-e-a-t! He figured out the lingo (“toilet”, not “restroom” or “men’s room”) o make himself understood if he had to ask directions or permission, and became very good at navigating the sometimes warren-like paths to the facilities behind, below, or over small restaurants and business in old city centers. Sometimes the door locks or flush mechanisms operated unfamiliarly, or the light switch was in an unexpected or difficult to find location. He nearly always had a tale to tell when he returned, or tips for the next person who needed to use the facility. Going to the restroom by one’s self, a small thing, I know, but in a foreign land by a slightly timid 10 yo singleton kid, it was a big free-range step I was glad to see him taking.

Can I just recommend that you all read Gavin DeBecker’s “Protecting the Gift”? It is not at all contrary to free-range parenting ideals, but it does teach you some practical things. Like, if the kid is lost in a store, the BEST person to turn to for help is a mom with her kids–not necessarily a mall cop, for instance.

I’ve lost my kids for brief amounts of time, although not enough to make a noteworthy comment here. 🙂

20 years ago when my children were under 10 they slipped away on a number of occasions in shopping malls. Usually I found them hiding under rails of clothing laughing their heads off while they watched me run around like a headless chicken. On another occasion one of them went off on his own and when he couldn’t find me he took himself off to the lost property office. He was 6 at the time

Here are a couple of stories.

2 yr Child goes missing. Where is he? look in the horse trough first in case he’s drowned, frantically search for about an hour, when child is found in the cornfield, asleep, with his toy tractor.

Another child a different time goes missing about age 4. same scurrying around. Finally after a couple of hours find child trapped under rose bushes. He is scratched up badly when he is extracted.

THese stories are ones my grandmother told me about my uncles, in the 1930s. So this fear may be pretty primal.

Child #3 has made it to nearly 7 yo without being lost. Hmmm.

When I was 5 my carpool ride dropped me off at the house a few minutes before my dad got home from work. Rural Fort Collins in ’71, it was no big deal. But rather than wait on the porch for my dad, I fretted about missing Mr. Rogers, so I crawled through the milk delivery door (about 1′ square). My dad got home, and didn’t see me outside, so assumed my carpool had taken me to their house. When he got there and they didn’t have me, he raced home. He came racing into the house, frantic, to see me sitting quietly talking to ‘my neighbor’.

I got lost another time with my mother, and all I remember about it is that she didn’t seem nearly as upset as I was.

I lost my own 2 year old for about 2 minutes in a department store a week before Christmas. I knew he wasn’t ‘stolen’ just out of sight, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life.

Hi,

This is a story from Poland 🙂 My sons were then 2 and 4 years old. They were playing in the backyard around their daddy, who was repairing a bike. I decided to go gather some blackberries in the wood (we live on the verge of quite a big wood). I said: “Anyone wanna join me?”. They said “no”, so I went on my own. After a while they dedided they wanted to join me and they hurried after me. Daddy thought I took them with me. I knew nothing about them chasing me. I went straight, they turned right after a while… For something like 40 minutes I was gatering blackberries, my husband was doing something in the backyard, and they were wandering happily around, going in the direction of our friends house, a mile away. Then I decided to come back. When I approached home I saw my horse, standing on the pastures, head high, looking at something very alert, like horses do sometimes. I followed his sight and saw my boys 500 yards away going under the electric wire. I remember I though: Oh, it is not reasonable to let them play so far away from home and near the horses, I have to tell my husband to keep a closer eye on them!”, and then I saw they were accompanied by some stranger. And suddenly I was very alert! Who is that guy?? It was our neighbour. He found them on the paved road, almost a mile from home. Younger one wore only T-shirt, older only shorts (they get rid of their sandals and one T-shirt and one pair of shorts on the way). They were not scared, they were happy, the older one told the neighbour where they are coming from. They neighbour scolded me badly for being a negligent mother …. 🙂 And lived happily ever after 🙂 Dorota

I’ve not yet lost my neice or nephew when out *touch wood* but my sister has a plan for when it happens.

When we went to a public outdoor concert she wrote her phone number on their arms. If they get lost, she can be easily contacted.

I lost mine while I was looking right at him. He was a constantly-on-the-move-toddler and we were on the plaza part of a shopping mall, me following a few steps behind him. A group of shoppers crowded between us and when they had passed, he was gone.

That one freaked me out because I thought that someone must have picked him up, he could not possibly have gotten away from me that fast. But he did. We spent maybe five or ten (?) minutes looking for him. They were long minutes, but he was fine. A bit puzzled at my very evident relief when I had him back.

We taught him that if he was lost, he should “find someone who looks like a mom, or a cop” once he was little older. We also role-played potential scenarios. Once he knew my cell phone number and understood that someone might be tricking you if they offer to show you a really cute puppy in the car/the house/the bushes, I worried a lot less. These days I worry about traffic but not strangers.

And I was always very, very vigilant around water.

I lost my daughter at the same water park twice, once when she was four and once when she was six. The first time we were there with my husband’s entire family. About 45 minutes into our visit, nobody could find her. This water park, which is part of a larger amusement park, has huge slides surrounding a central splash park playground and lazy river. The splash park has a big hill in the middle with little caves running through and lots of little alcoves for little kids to hide in. Fun for kids, but a nightmare for a parent trying to find a four-year old! We alerted the staff, but it still took us almost half an hour to find her. One of the staff found her on the other side of the park in the dressing rooms. I actually was fairly calm as we searched for her, although all sorts of terrible scenarios rushed through my head.

Fast forward two years, for our next visit to the park, one which I was understandably reluctant to make, especially since this time I had a two-year-old in addition to my two older kids and I was eight months pregnant. After riding the rides at the amusement park, my husband took my oldest son into the dressing room to change and I took the two younger girls into the women’s dressing room. It was a pretty small room and I was already the size of a boat (don’t worry–I didn’t ride on any of the rides myself), so it took a little manouevering to get everyone changed. When we were finished, I opened the door for my six year old to leave first, then turned back to help the two year old out and grab our clothes and stuff. When I turned back around, my six year old had vanished.

Ooh, was I angry! We looked all over, but couldn’t find her. First I had to find my husband, all while toting around a mountain of clothing, towels, and swimming paraphernelia, and dragging a two-year-old by the hand, and then continue the frantic search in my eight-month- pregnant state while now carrying the two-year-old. Did I mention it was like 95 degrees that day and the park was PACKED? Eventually I found a bridge which overlooked most of the spash area and just stood there, surveying the area. Only a few minutes later, I spotted my daughter frolicking in a waterfall, completely oblivious to the chaos she had caused. Of course, she couldn’t hear me call her name over the noise of the water and the crowds, and by the time I waddled down to where she was, she had disappeared again! But I staked out the slide where I had seen her last and finally managed to catch a few minutes later.

I swear, that park needs an age advisory. It is way too easy to lose little kids there if you are not constantly vigilant!

So at what age should you teach a child your cell phone number? Teach them what to do if they get lost? My daughter just turned four and I feel like she might be scared by the idea that she would get lost (she’s very cautious). I have vivid memories of being told not to talk to strangers at an assembly at school (I think I was 5 or 6). It was like the end of innocence as suddenly the world no longer seemed friendly and welcoming. How do you teach your child to be friendly, but smart and without instilling fear (which is what the school did to us, not my parents)?

Sara,

My personal opinion is that the right time to teach a kid something is when it’s fun. There’s nothing wrong with a 2 year old knowing their own last name (hm, mine doesn’t), and none of it has to be scary. When they can handle sequences of digits, then learning an address and phone number can be a game. My reward for learning how to write my name was my own library card.

Lastly, I’d change “don’t talk to strangers” to “make sure mom and dad know where you are at all times”.

And read Bruce Schneier’s take on “talking to strangers” http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/talking_to_stra.html

We lost our 4yo at the flea market and a “good Samaritan” made it so much worse! We were browsing slowly and somehow we all lost sight of her. When we described her to the vendors they all said they saw her being led away CRYING by a man. We were terrified!

The man was trying to help a “lost” little girl, so he took her to an office on the other side of the large grounds so that we could find her.

Idiot! We would have found her much sooner if he would have allowed her to stand there crying like she naturally knew to do once she realized she was lsot. We had to act grateful but I really wanted to punch him for all the time & worry he caused by whisking her away while we frantically searched for her.

NOTE: If you come across a lost child, do NOT remove the child to a different location unless she is in real danger (middle of the road, hailstorm, etc.) Otherwise, you can be a real help by just calmly hanging around (without harassing the child) to make sure the parents find her.

As I mentioned in a comment on another page, I am Deaf. Deaf as CAN NOT HEAR A THING. This means, without a doubt I have ‘lost’ my kids, ages 14 and 4, MANY times. LOL

The most frequent thing that happens is when they run out the door of the house to go ‘to their friends’ house.” I can’t hear the door open or shut, so of course I often have no idea I’m even missing one until they come back out of breath. Because of my Deafness, when we go out to a store or a public place, my big rule is for them to stay WHERE THEY CAN SEE ME AND I CAN SEE THEM. If they lost sight of me or I lose sight of them, they are grounded from something they dearly love, so this is a lesson they have learned pretty quickly!

Once when my 14 year old was about 2, his father and I had just moved us into a new apartment, and I was in our bedroom, unpacking, having had sat him down to watch a Barney videotape (Yes, I am guilty. I am NOT sorry. it was the only way I could get anything unpacked!) I should also mention that because of my Deafness, I am asbolutely fastidious about keeping our doors locked. Well, apparently I had one helluva smart 2 year old! I suddenly felt a big gust of wind in the room I was in, and at first I thought the door was opened but I thought “Nah, he’s not old enough to unlock the slide glass door” so I kept unpacking. As it happened I had a funny feeling persisting, so I walked out to the other room toward the slide glass door, and a woman was walking a little boy who looked remarkedly like my son toward my apartment. She said “is this your son?” I said no, my boy is watching Barney, and turned to look at a now empty living room! He had stood on the sidewalk watching the cars go by and traffic was at a total stand still while they waited to make sure he got home with the lady! I was so embarrassed and thanked the woman again and again and again! She laughed and said it happened to her once before! Boy that was SCARY!

So, yeah. I once had CPS called on me because my daughter ran out of the house for the first time when she was about 3, and I frantically ran up and down the street yelling her name, finally found her, shook her by the shoulders to never ever ever do that again, and a neighbor called CPS and said I neglected her and abused her. CPS came, investigated, found out I am DEAF and figured ‘ca-ca happens’ and closed the case. I don’t talk to that neighbor no more, I tell you that! Now the entire block knows I’m Deaf, and if they see my daughter running around, they just bring her back home or let me know she’s at their house playing, etc. God Bless Good Neighbors!

Ciao!

Well I lost my 5yr old daughter for about 5 mins but it was scary!
We were coming from the school-it was an early dismissal day, which meant all the kids were coming home-so there were lots of kids , as I was wlaking home with my daughter I ran into another mom who I needed to talk to to arrange something. My daughter was next to me and then started talking to another friend of hers from school, they were running around and I let her since we were only 2 blocks away from home-in a very safe neighbourhood. I thought she was just running ahead. When Im done talking to my friend I turn around, and Bella was nowhere in sight! I looked around, looked ahead-she wasnt there!! There were lots of kids in the street and it was soo busy!
There’s a park/wooden area nearby with lots of trees and that turns into a trail-I caught a glimpse of a kid running into the woods, I ran all the way there, yelling her name-and there she was following her friend home!! She thought it was an adventure going through the woods-I was scared to death! Because she was out of sight and anyone could be in the woods, lurking-or pretending to go for a walk…
Luckily she was safe and sound, and now she has to stay where I can see her…She’s almost 7 now and knows better than to run away like that.

i allways let my kids play in the woods behind are house but not no more.one day sadie and mathew wonderd off and 30 minuites i hear 2 kids sceaming. my heart pounding as i race thou stickers and poision ivy bare foot once i reached them a hunter had a t-shirt raped around mathews bloody leg.mathew was shot by a hunter who thought he was a deer no charges were pressed aginst the hunter

Seeing as I’m unapologetically child-less (I’m 18), I’ve never list a child. My mother never really gave us enough leeway for us to get lost (we went to school, then home, and stayed there). Unless you count the time I got bored at school and hitchhiked through three cities to the next state over. That was fun, and I believed in the kindness of strangers (particularly the diner waitress who gave me a small meal for free and a businessman who said he’d be heading back to my city later that day if I wanted to go back home)

But the closest I have been to losing a child is when I look after about 12 kids during my dads parties. I stopped to take a breath ( we were playing tag as the adults sang bad karaoke) and I did a quick headcount to find I was missing my former boss’s two year old. We had just taken out our side gate that had been rusted and, I believed, bent on scratching my ankle every time I passed. So naturally I looked there first, after signalling to my younger sister to watch the others for a minute.

I found her standing right outside the now gate-less gap in the wall, playing with rocks. I sighed a relief, called her name, and she came running over me, smiling and asking for “da-da?”