To the Parents Who Called the Cops After My 80-year-old Dad Chatted with Your Child at the Supermarket

I LOVE the Blue Mountains. I was in Katoomba a few years ago. It is really sad to hear that the increasing pathological nature of this mass mind control has reached small town Oz. Really what it amounts to is that everybody needs cult deprogramming. But I am glad to hear that most voices in response to this situation were from relatively sane people. There is hope.

Does it strike anyone that it’s the paranoid parents who are sexualizing and objectifying their own young children?

When a parent assumes anyone who talks to a child in a public place must want to have sex with them, what does that say about the parent? What does it say about the message they are instilling in their child? “You are a desirable sex object.”

And what does it say about their own bigotry and prejudice when they make all men suspect? What does is tell the child? “Men are bad and dangerous.” Expecting children to grow up and have normal relationships after they’ve been handed that kind of baggage is just sad.

Okay, I’m a mother of young daughters, I have mom-radar too. Sometimes there’s just something about a person that sets your spidey senses to tingling. Probably it’s nothing, but maybe it’s something and you can’t be too sure, I suppose. Worst case scenario, it is at least remotely possible he had bad intentions. I won’t judge this/these parent(s) for being cautious.

But, really, in the middle of a popular grocery store, they couldn’t think of anything better to do than call the authorities? They couldn’t have, as the letter suggests, simply spoken to the man? Or just left? What exactly did they think he was going to do?

My what a frightful world we live in when even adults are afraid to speak to strangers.

Im a dad, kids are teenager now , at this stage I would shoo kids away from me, honestly if I saw a kid waking into traffic not sure what I would do. Never had any problems that I noticed even though I spent a lot of time out and about with my kids. Never minded my kids talking to anybody, what could possibly happen.
Life is too short though to get on the wrong side of some stupid cow . Something has been lost, when I was a kid I could walk into several houses , watch and chat with older “granddad” types who were cutting the lawn, teenagers working on their bikes. all that is gone now.

That’s a really nicely-written retort to freaking-out helicopter parents. She should work that into an essay and publish it.

“Okay, I’m a mother of young daughters, I have mom-radar too. Sometimes there’s just something about a person that sets your spidey senses to tingling. Probably it’s nothing, but maybe it’s something”

Curious how FRKs would act in the following situation: I have a young son, and a next-door neighbor who rubs me the wrong way. He’s never done anything wrong that I’m aware of, but he makes me uncomfortable. I recently had the occasion to talk to my 3yo about how he could go to the neighbors if he ever needed help, was alone, or couldn’t find us (he’d let himself out the back door and couldn’t reach the handle to get back in, and I was in the bathroom and didn’t hear him calling), and I pointed out that he could always ask [neighbors to the right] for help, but just didn’t mention [neighbor to the left] at all. As these conversations come up more often as he gains independence and has less supervision, I wonder how to broach the topic. Do I tell him NOT to go to the neighbor who makes me uncomfortable, when there’s no reason he does? Do I give him a reason? Am I more comfortable with him crossing the street by himself to get to another neighbor’s house than with him staying on our side of the sidewalk but going to the uncomfortable neighbor’s house?

FWIW, I’m aware that the most likely situation here is that this guy is just a little socially awkward and overly friendly.

For everyone who trust their instincts, I highly recommend reading the book “Blink” by Malcom Gladwell. Instincts are the product of one’s experiences and thought processes. In “Blink,” the author recounts incidents of an innocent black man being shot 41 times by NYC police because their instincts caused them to interpret the holding out of his wallet as a weapon. Instincts can be accurate. They also can be wholly inaccurate. Yes, this does create a dilemma.

Having a negative instinct about a person doesn’t mean you have to shoot them 41 times, even if you are a cop. Blaming instincts for that incident is cheap (as is most of Gladwell’s work, incidentally).

I am an 80 plus man and I smile and talk to them all the time. I do not touch them nor give them anything because of over reaction by todays idiots. That’s right, idiots who have nothing better than to medal and create fears in people. It would be better for all concerned if the children were left at home but what would the idiots do then?

K
As a mother of 2 young kids trying to teach them independence one of the biggest things I emphasize is “trust your gut”.
I make a point of giving my kids freedom (in stores, fairs, etc.) to feel independent, letting the talk to people and get that “vibe” and then talk about it later. encouraging them to talk to people that give the good vibes (but never go anywhere without them); and politely retreat from the bad vibes (or less politely if need be). It gives them a confidence in themselves, and me the confidence that they are learning how to navigate the world without me.
Too often we tell kids – these are the good people in the world so do everything they say (teachers, coaches, family, etc.) everybody else is suspect. But too often that interferes with the kids’ own radar, because making strangers bad guys is often wrong, and “trusted adults” shouldn’t always be either.
In your case I would continue to not broach the subject of the neighbor in question until your kids does and if he says he gives a weird feeling, tell him you think so to (or if he just asks, “well what about him?” tell him about your gut feeling)- and that it is probably nothing serious but always best to trust your feelings, so he wouldn’t be your first choice.

I really don’t understand the police’s actions here. Sure, it’s nice they’re reassuring the old man now, but why did they question him in the first place? If someone levels an allegation against someone, alleging an action that wouldn’t be criminal even if every word of the allegation is true, why would they investigate at all?

This exact thing happened to my father-in-law who spoke to a small girl sitting near him on a bench in arcade in plain view of the world – on this occasion the mother furiously berated my kindly 80 year-old father-in-law in front of the small child and to the utter devastation of my elderly, kindly father-in-law. He vowed never to speak to another child in public ever again.

Neil

Agree generally with what you and Meg say. Just want to point out that some people are obsessed with the idea of molestation and sexual assault on children because it happened to them. I’m not saying it’s common, but child molestation happens enough that it affects a decent portion of the population. Since it’s usually family members when it does occur, unfortunately it can trigger a suspicion of your own family. For example if your father molested you and your mother didn’t know perhaps you may have in the back of your mind your husband could be capable of it and you wouldn’t know. Not saying it’s an accurate thought just that I would chalk a lot of it up to bad experiences and not to people just being naturally sick or perverted. However this doesn’t have anything to do with when it comes to strangers because this type of assault IS extremely rare so the amount of people that are always afraid of this happening doesn’t correlate with the amount of people who have had it happen to them.

My children will talk to people in the store sometimes and people talk to them. Good! My kids get to learn how to have small talk with a person they don’t know which to me is an important skill. I teach my kids that most people are nice and friendly but I also teach them that if a person for some reason makes them uncomfortable to keep their distance. My own experience is that if that creepy feeling appears it often does so for a reason. While I do not worry about abductions and such very much I have also told my kids about “bad” people that enjoy hurting children. I am very clear that they are not common but they do exist. I have told them that they should never go away with an adult who says I/their dad have sent them or that they shall follow them away from home or from us parents. Mom and dad will never send a stranger to pick you up so in that case run away and try to find a mom to help you (yes I say mom to steer the kld towards a low risk individual). It is a very small risk but I do think that if they don’t know it CAN happen that is also a risk.

“Does it strike anyone that it’s the paranoid parents who are sexualizing and objectifying their own young children?

When a parent assumes anyone who talks to a child in a public place must want to have sex with them, what does that say about the parent? What does it say about the message they are instilling in their child? “You are a desirable sex object.””

Indeed. I’d say it shows the parents are the real dangerous perverts here, they’re the ones seeing their child as a sex object rather than a child.

If we are to remove people who see children as sex objects from society, let’s start with parents who consider their children sex objects that other people might be interested in…

“Sometimes there’s just something about a person that sets your spidey senses to tingling.”

And the only appropriate reaction to having your spidey senses tingling in the scenario is to distract your child and get away from the source that got your spidey senses tingling as quickly as possible. It is absolutely inappropriate to call the cops when no visible crime occurred and the two parties have now gone their separate ways.

Dienne,
There is little question in my mind that if everyone follows your advice, at least in the US, the negative consequences (at every level of severity) will fall disproportionately on people of color. Furthermore, I will go so far as to suggest that those instincts that “set your spidey senses tingling” are next to worthless at determining the actual danger.

K –

I have a creepy neighbor who lives up the street. It is a well-established rule in our house that my daughter is not to go to his house or seek to engage him in public. She has been told that from the time she started roaming the neighborhood without me. I think she has asked why once, but I can’t remember what I told her.

It’s interesting (obviously also sad) that this would happen in Australia, where a lot of aggravating factors (esp race and ethnicity) are absent or relatively minor. As it stands, I would defend how the police responded, up to a point. At least they didn’t feel the need to go to the media just to explain why they weren’t chasing after a trafficking/ kidnapping ring.

AmyP – had to respond. My mom was molested by a family member. I didn’t know till later in life as an adult. She never put her emotional baggage on me and I was allowed a happy, free range childhood. I am eternally grateful.

“And I’ll say it again, since people seem to be willfully overlooking what I’ve said: none of this is to be taken as grounds to call the authorities absent overt and identifiable threat. The error in this situation was not necessarily reacting to this man, the error was involving the police when the man was already away from them and whatever potential threat he may have posed (most likely, none) had passed.”

But involving the police is what happened here, and I didn’t see anyone saying the error was anything else until you brought it up. This isn’t an article *about* taking your child by the hand and leading him away from someone who made you uncomfortable. It was *about* a situation where the cops were called because of a public conversation between a man and a child.

@Dienne:

“none of this is to be taken as grounds to call the authorities absent overt and identifiable threat. The error in this situation was not necessarily reacting to this man, the error was involving the police when the man was already away from them and whatever potential threat he may have posed (most likely, none) had passed.”

Well said, Dienne.

Seems very counter-productive though, to side with the old man on this issue and not condemn the parents of the kid for allowing him to be alone in a store and talking to a stranger. You know, like how you condemned me for letting my son walk home by himself.

Had my son been walking home talking to a nice old man you would say “ohh, just an innocent conversation, no harm, no foul, no need to involve the police.” But since he was walking home alone and as a disciplinary measure, and there was no nice old man to talk to, you get your panties all bunched up and say “ohh, you shouldn’t have done that, that’s emotional abuse, the police were right to intervene, blah blah blah”

Sounds like a double standard to me.

–Mike Tang

Oh FFS., Mike, no one here – least of all me – condemned you for *letting* your son walk home alone. If he’d been at a friend’s house or scout meeting and wanted to walk home, I’d be completely on your side. But that’s not what happened. You have been condemned because you threatened him with homelessness and then showed him where the homeless sleep, kicked him out of the car and *made* him walk home to prove it (all for not reading the right damn book). It’s exactly that attitude and failure to recognize your own responsibility that got you arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted and your conviction upheld. Enjoy your “hard labor”.

Incidentally, Mike, nowhere in this post does it say anything about the boy in this situation being alone.

If mom didn’t want the kid being talked to then why didn’t she just take him away without causing a big fuss?
It would have been a lot simpler than creating a great big fuss with the cops.

@K, we’ve had some neighbor situations like that too. In one case, I talked to another neighbor who knows everyone and she thought the one in question was fine, which let me set my creeped-out daughter’s mind (and mine too) at ease about immanent danger, but still say that trusting daughter’s instincts was the right thing to do and she should avoid him while also not being afraid to ride her bike around the neighborhood.
In the other case, I had some reasons to think the neighbor was fine and other reasons to wonder… so I just talked to my kids about the general principle that if a neighbor walks over and asks the kids in for any reason, the kids should *always* say they’re going to let me know first. A good person will say “yes, of course” and a bad person will give some excuse of “I already asked” or “it’s only for a minute, she won’t mind” or something.

I see that comments are closed (with 0 comments posted) on Lenore’s post today. I thought maybe this conversation had gone off the rails, but I see that’s not the case. Wonder why; maybe the trolls have won?

On the closed comments, my guess is that Lenore just accidentally hit the wrong button. But she is apparently traveling right now. Time will tell.

Because of the structure of my brain, i develop rigid rules for things. As such, i was always skeptical of “dont talk to strangers” because, in my mind, it violated that “try to make friends” section. My kid brain, given im most likely autistic, couldnt wrap itself around how we cant talk to strangers but we can still make friends. It was especially aggravating because i had an easier time talking to people years older or younger. My parents eventually figured out that i need to be allowed to socialize with people in my own way, so they stopped pushing the strangers thing. We need to teach our kids to trust their instincts. When i was babysitting my cousin, she and i went a building over to visit a friend of hers. Then both wanted to see if their toddler friend could come out. My cousin had to go back to her apartment for something so she and her friend left, leaving me to read to the tot in the hallway. Keep in mind the dad had never met me, and still had no problem with me babysitting, essentially. We should all be a little more trusting.

Dienne:

“There are reasons we react the way we do to people — we’ve been biologically programmed by evolution to recognize threats, even though we don’t consciously recognize what we’re reacting to.”

Maybe to a certain extent. (For reference, here I’m accepting ad argumendum that evolutionary psychology has something useful to say; this is not, however, a stance without legitimate concerns.) However, that extent is pretty limited. We’re hard-wired to detect physical threats (thus the fear of the dark/seeing faces in mirrors in the dark thing that causes so much terror and amusement in children this time of year), and we’re hard-wired to want to obey the rules of the tribe–ie, to be part of Us and not Them. Unfortunately, differentiating between these two is difficult.

We are inundated with commands to never let our kids be alone and never let anyone we don’t know look at, much less talk to or touch, them. This creates a tribal rule: Us keeps our kids “safe” from strangers; it’s only Them that lets their kids run wild, talking to old folks willy-nilly! At a certain point it stops being a conscious thought, and is internalized to the point where we barely realize we’re doing it. Think of reading–you can actually scramble the letters of words and still read them, because we’ve all internalized the rules of reading to the point where we don’t know we’re using them. Similarly, we react negatively to certain people often because we’ve internalized that we’re supposed to do so.

None of that matters, however. In practice, following our instincts is generally a good thing in the moment–when we feel threatened, we should get out of the situation. But then we should stop and think. This old guy was talking to my kid. He patted my kid on the head. I felt threatened. Was my feeling justified? If not, I should be aware of this next time and adjust my expectations–if I get to the point where old guys talking to little boys seems hostile, there’s something wrong with ME, not the old guys! Not all feelings are justified, and not all immediate reactions are correct.

“And that’s not what they’re being judged for. Not the caution, but the form the caution took, which wasn’t even caution as it didn’t make the kids any safer, it just resulted in the official harassment of a family for no good reason. That wasn’t caution, that was paranoia and violence.”

What gets me about going to the police is that it’s a very childish reaction to this sort of situation–they ran to Mommy and Daddy to solve the problem for them, instead of confronting the person. And to be clear, by “confronting” I don’t mean hostility. Something as simple as “Hey son, who’s your new friend?” can insert you into the conversation in a way that is friendly and polite, and opens the possibility of this having a very positive outcome for everyone involved, yet still firmly establishes that you’re the authority figure. I’ve done it with my kids a few times, and they love it–they get to teach me sometime (even something simple like someone’s name), and the adults always are amused by the attempts of small children to introduce someone they just met. It’s a skill, one that needs to be practiced just like any other.

My point is: This isn’t hard. We’re adults; we should be able to talk to someone in public. We shouldn’t run to the police with every little problem that we encounter–especially when it’s very, VERY unlikely that there actually IS a problem. That’s how children behave; we’re supposed to be more mature.

Now if you ask your kid to introduce the person, and said person starts acting panicky or tries to get away in a hurry, that’s a warning sign. Then you can take more serious action.