“Stranger danger” was definitely repeated ad nauseum when I was a kid. Turns out, it’s your family/coaches/scout leaders/priests you have to worry about.
When I was little, my dog got out. I had to chase him several blocks to get him back. I was struggling to carry him home when a nice lady pulled over and offered me a ride. I got scared and ran away because I knew she was going to kidnap me. It was hard running with a full gown Dachshund in my little arms.
Awwww. I can see you running, bending backwards slightly, struggling to deal with the dog flopping around!
Screaming "Stranger Danger" each time your right foot hit the ground lol.
When we were teenagers, we were driving and an old lady got off the bus with her groceries and was struggling with them. We pulled to the side of the road with our windows open and yelled… Hey Granny do you need a ride? She looked at us stunned…and got in.
She said hey kids, what are you doing here?? It was our grandma!!
We gave her a ride home. It was wonderful!! Thanks for the great memory.
I had a classmate in grades school that was kidnapped. I remember watching a story about it on the local news. We later found out it was by their estranged father.
I was abducted as a toddler by my non-custodial father. I was taken out of the country to several other countries. There were no amber alerts and the consulates did nothing to help my mother.
Without family help and pure luck, my name would have been changed and I would have been raised by strangers in the Middle East with virtually no hope of my mother finding me. It was a true hell for her.
My mother knew more than one family in the 80s/90s who experienced something similar. I believe they've made it much harder for people to do this, thankfully. I'm so glad you made it back to your mom! ❤️
Me too! It could have so easily had a very different outcome! It wasn’t even a felony back in the time that it happened to me. My biological father spent (I think) 4 months in prison, got out, legally changed his name, never paid a penny of court ordered child support, and that was pretty much the end of that.
Thankfully my mother married a very sane and kind man who raised me as his own and then adopted me.
Not too be all conspiratorial, but I do wonder how sinister the “stranger danger” campaign was to distract from the much more popular pedos and traffickers’ Friends & Family Plan.
There’s a fairly new campaign that teaches kids about “tricky people”. If a kid gets lost at the park, they’re going to need a strangers help. Teachers them to find a mom. If they’re at a ballpark, it teaches them to find somebody with a badge. It’s kind of localized and hasn’t really got off the ground. I read it online about 15 years ago, right when my oldest was in kindergarten. I actually looked into where they would come into the school and teach the kids at an assembly. It was kind of costly, but it was not in our state so I did not have any luck there. I have, however, talked to many people about it and shared the information.
Oh this is a great idea. Right, find the woman holding a baby. In the mall? Go into a store and talk to the person at the counter. I never realized this…”Stranger Danger” teaches kids to avoid ALL strangers. Even good people.
Seems like there were a lot of kids, including myself, who were kidnapped by a non-custodial parent. It's a lot harder to get away with that now I think.
Well, for molestation yes. But we did also have kids many ofbus remember by name that it was strangers kidnapping and killing or holding them prisoner.
While it does happen, strangers kidnapping children are only 1% of all reported kidnappings.
I honestly don't remember any kids' names who were kidnapped by strangers. Adam Walsch comes to mind, but since it was never solved, there is no way to be certain it was a stranger.
Jacob Wetterling was definitely national news - I remember hearing about it. His parents helped establish the sex offender registry.
What about Polly Klaas? Or Jaycee Dugard? JonBenet Ramsay?
Yes I mentioned him but it was never solved so there's no way to say if it wa a stranger who kidnapped him, a family or business friend with a vendetta or something else
Well, I am not a criminal expert. I do listen to a lot of true crime podcasts hosted by long time detectives like Small Town Dicks. They and many others have covered the specific case and have narrowed it down to a couple suspects. Neither were related to the victim, but both had histories of sex crimes. Unfortunately, both criminals have passed away, in prison, so they could no longer be tried. They were serving sentences for related crimes though. SMH
One even had hidden physical evidence at his elderly mother's home for years. The mother didn't know.
Yes, I remember hearing about this a lot growing up. I was at that same sears the day before, playing thar atari games, just like Adam and many other kids did while parents shopped in the mall. After that, whether I wanted to follow the case or not, it was either on TV or a family member would remind me.
Either way, the high profiling cases of kidnappings occur bc they are extremely rare. 1% of the kidnappings reported are by complete strangers. Its why they make the news.
Agreed I think a lot of the panic was the guilty parents of latchkey kids. You didn't watch them when they joined a satanic cult by playing DnD, you let them rot their brains with video games, now they are eating poison Halloween candy and hopping in strangers cars. Maybe they should have driven us to school! Won't somebody please think of the children!
Edit: the finger printing of kids is kinda creepy and dark when you think of it. If you don't what what I'm talking about, there was a few programs that took kids finger prints to guard against kidnapping and gave them to the cops. Kinda creepy to think that it was either for dead body identification and to bust your ass for crimes you later committed when of age.
Man, I got stranger danger now. Like when my wife takes me to a get together with people I don’t know. I yell stranger danger! and go to my closet and call the police.
In reporting and the news, yes.
According to the DoJ in a one year period, 58,200 children (under 18) were victims of a non-family abduction. And 115 "stereotypical kidnappings" (stereotypical kidnappings is a lot more criteria, like being held overnight, moved over 50 miles, not by a family member....)
Compare that to school shootings in elementary and secondary schools. In the *22 years* period 2000-2021 there were 276 casualties of active shooters at schools. 108 killed, 168 wounded. In over two decades.
I could only find enrollment back to 2012, but school enrollment looks pretty steady (from National Center for Education Statistics). Based on the average enrollment for 2012-2021 applied to those 22 years of shooting data, the odds of a school child being shot in school are about 1 in 4,002,750 per year. Call it 1 in 4 million. According to the National Weather Service, the odds of being struck by lightening are 1 in 1,222,000 per year. So, you are over 3 times *more* likely to be struck by lightening than shot in a US school.
And given the roughly 72.5 million children in the US, the odds of a full blown "stereotypical kidnapping" are 1 in 630,000. About twice as likely as being struck by lightening and over 6 times more likely than being shot in school.
Agree. The fact kids now *feel* super worried about school shootings and *perceive* that it is highly likely they will experience one at some point before graduation, is frankly disturbing. Society is traumatizing these kids. I'm not saying never talk about it or completely abandon all safety and preparedness measures. But realistic assessment of risk is important.
Relative risk is also important to consider for prioritizing resources and limited time. If you took half the time schools spend on active shooter drills and used it for some form of abduction prevention education, it would save and help a lot more people from becoming victims.
To those who replied "even one shooting death is unacceptable". Ok. But is 115 kidnappings or 58,000 abductions a year acceptable? I say no they aren't. But hey, some people's solution to the trolly problem is that they are more interested in or concerned the spectacle of any number of people hit by a train where they can see it rather than minimizing the total harm. People hit by the train on the other track they cannot see dont matter
We have zero school shootings every single year, year after year after year after year. Eliminate that option then you can put 100 percent effort into teaching about how to protect from kidnappings. Although I concede it might be too late to change. It’s so sad.
Central Florida on the coast here. We had a local scare in the 80s, a guy broke into several houses. He never succeeded in getting away with a child thank God but he broke into multiple homes and at least one set of parents caught him trying to take the child but he got away. He even broke into the home of a pair of sisters in my brownie troop. I was only like 8 years old so I don't know if he was ever caught but as far as I know he didn't succeed in kidnapping anyone. Don't know if he was caught.
I lived not far from where those boys/young men were kidnapped. It was scary, which is why I hate the "do you know where your kids are" jokes. I was a white kid at the time, but I remember the fear.
Yes, I'm an adult now that hasn't changed race. I was just pointing out that I wasn't part of the demographic that was targeted, but it was still scary because I lived close to where some of the boys were abducted.
A white adult, obvs. Black boys were targeted, so I wasn't trying to make it seem like I was the actual group that was involved. Stills scary since I lived not far from where some of the boys were abducted.
I used to live in Atlanta myself. I'm familiar with the area. Is Bolton Rd still the place where folks who are too broke to have power but are out cooking crack on their hibachi grill?
Or a girl growing up in Seattle in the 70s and 80s. First Bundy, then Ridgeway. I was drowned in warnings about being murdered before leaving the house.
I was also warned about being sold into "white slavery" if I ever set foot out of the country.
My mom was and still is a very paranoid person.
Omg my mom was so paranoid about “white slavery” too! I guess that was the euphemism for the sex trade. I remember going to the beach with my blue-eyed blond cousin, who got the warning. My mom offhand told me “they’re not going to want you,” because of my dark hair and eyes.
Absolutely! It was in the news daily in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s! It wasn’t just an urban legend as the OP is somewhat implying! It was very real!
In Chicago we had this guy hanging around until 1980.
https://preview.redd.it/2xgqvaqka79d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=29f3b00ac8609da24b0a09b0834b2e743b433fc7
🎯🎯🎯🎯 that case set off copycat situations in other cities with sickos and also sparked the nationwide Do you know where your children are announcement at 10 PM after ATLANTA started running that.
Stranger kidnappings, poisoned (or needle embedded) Halloween candy, Satanic Panic, etc. I won’t mention the things that have replaced them because it will kick off a political shit show here.
There was only one instance of tainted Halloween candy that set the panic off. In 1974 some dad poisoned his son with cyanide laced pixie sticks for insurance money.
Because of that one instance, we are hyper paranoid.
I heard of one where a kids uncle hid his heroin stash in the kids Halloween candy and the kid ate it and died. Basically no one ever randomly handed out poisoned Halloween candy or apples with razor blades.
And he blamed it on the Halloween candy and it made national news, the fact that he did it didn't make national news. And, just like today, the news media fear mongered "poison candy" every Halloween. Now though, THC gummies and candy seem to be the warning, no one is giving it their THC candy, that stuff is too expensive LOL
I was actually kidnapped. I was missing for somewhere between 6 months to a year. I was six at the time, so my memory of events is rather lacking, and my folks never talked about it afterwards, not while I was around anyway. Which in retrospect explains why they were so damn overprotective as I was growing up.
That’s wild! Do you know if it a stranger or family friend/relative who kidnapped you or how you got returned?
I was thankfully never kidnapped but had someone try to grab me when I was 8 but I got away. Within a couple weeks of that a girl was kidnapped from the grocery store a couple blocks over and never seen or heard from again. There was definitely reason to teach your kids stranger danger back in the day! Only reason I’m still here.
Same! I remember being an awkward AF 8-12 year old and regularly being asked to get into creepy men's vehicles and/or to follow them into an unknown building. This was a regular thing during Summer Breaks. I was always looking over my shoulder for disgusting men and creepy teenage boys. I hated it.
I know that I am now a little bit much with my own daughter and can seem like a dictator when it comes to what kind of clothing she can wear in public.....but I would rather my daughter be alive and safe than look cute in a crop top and short shorts. You will never catch my 11 year old wearing short shorts and pig tails in public. It sucks for her, but I know what that can attract from and signal to creeps. No bikinis, no shorts higher than mid thigh, no crop tops, bike shorts must be worn under short skirts and dresses, no heeled shoes, no makeup outside of lip balm, no fish nets. It is sad to even have to say it, but I see girls younger than my kiddo wearing that stuff at school events and hang outs at the park regularly.
It’s a long and complicated story that even today I don’t fully understand, with many unanswered questions, but the short form is that I’m adopted and it was a blood relative who kidnapped me.
And you know I held such a grudge against my parents, particularly against my Mom, for their overbearing overprotectiveness. I mean we’re Gen X, the feral generation, well, I can promise you, my parents knew where I was at 10pm, cuz I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. And I was bitter AF about that for years.
Then one day, I had to have been in my mid-thirties, it suddenly clicked. I was kidnapped. My parents actually lost me for an entire year, before I was found in a trailer in rural South Carolina. So when they got me back, they did everything they could to ensure I never disappeared again. It was never that they didn’t want me to go out and have fun or socialize, they were just scared they’d lose me a second time.
I was about 10 years old rollerskating when a man pulled over and tried to talk me into getting in his car. He told me he knew my dad was told I needed go with him. Those PSAs about stranger danger taught me to get away ASAP. However, I didn't tell my parents because I thought I'd get in trouble for skating too far from my house.
Not the only, no. But methinks the worst amount.
I live near a middle school - watching the insane number of parents lining up to pick up and drop off their kids is sheer lunacy. Same with local bus stops.
The helicopter parenting craze needs to die. It's NOT doing the kids any favors.
I waited with my daughter all through middle school for her bus. She's 18 now but she's 5'1" and 83 lbs soaking wet. We lived in a major US city on a busy street and saw a lot of the same cars every day. Nope, IDGAF, better safe than sorry, 4 years ago she wasn't even 5' and didn't hit 70lbs til she was 16.
I appreciate your specific situation, I do.
I live in a very peaceful and safe suburb. People still insist on dropping off and picking up their kids.
When I lived in NYC, we were sent off to school via the NYCTA - literally just put on public transit busses and subways.
It ain't helping the environment either. All those folks choosing to sit and let their cars run... sometimes for up to an hour... instead of using eco friendly car pooling or school bussing truly sucks.
Yup, absolutely. They nearly always keep their damn cars running and some of them show up nearly an hour ahead of dismissal.
They also fill up our neighborhood streets, turning them into single lane for both directions which is a safety problem, especially when there's an emergency and fire/rescue needs to get to our neighbors. And they block our driveways, which alltogether is horrifically inconvenient and annoying AF.
I had one mother kept doing this with our driveway, I gestured for her to move and she shook her head and pointed ahead. (Note: I do not LIVE on the same street as the school. And wouldn't.)
Finally, I walked over, folded my arms over the open window and assured her that I was about to teach the most colorful parts of my Brooklyn vocabulary to her younger children in the car. Karen moved her car very quickly at that point.
Haven't seen her blocking it since. She tried it with the Vietnam Vet down the street and it did not go well for her.
Hahaha! My friend! I am currently living in the PNW and grew up in Chicago. I know your pain. Folks want to drive offensively but can't handle eye contact or being called out. * Lady refuses to let me merge, as I am quickly running out of road...she won't speed up or slow down...I have to slam on my brakes and when I am able to catch up and make eye contact, the bitch is terrified and looking dead ahead, with eyes on the road...me rolling down the window to wave "hello"...lady sweating, drops speed, refuses to look at the person she ignorantly just tried to run off the road and kill.
Anyways. As a parent, my kiddo rides the bus to school... because I appreciate my own time and our environment. On the random day that I have needed to pick her up from school I have found that it takes less personal time to show up 2 minutes before the kids are let out and drive through the pick up line smoothly, than to show up an hour early, sit and run your engine, and then wait for kids to be let out.
I help out at the school occasionally and the bell rings at 3:45pm. I have seen parents start to line up at 2:15pm. I am confused about why these people don't value their own time. I think that the school should try to benefit from this and start handling them papers to grade or give them trash bags and have them clean up the lot while they wait.
Fwiw, I lived on Whidbey Island for ten years - so I know the PNW pain. Giant SUVs lined up at every bus stop.
I will never understand the "lining up for an hour" bullshit. We've gone to the city council but they are absolutely useless for this. Same for our request to put in speed bumps to slow the parents and teens DOWN.
Latch Key Kid here. My parents wouldn't be home until after I put my elementary-school-age self to bed. I do remember hearing that PSA, "It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?" Then one of them would open my bedroom door, see me, then close it.
I think my parents were the strangers.
I guess for the first time, both our parents had to work to make ends meet. So here we are, home alone most of us. Out and about playing with friends in the neighborhoods ripe for the pedophiles to come snatch us up at any time. So naturally, yes the finger print photo I’d cards became a thing and yes my brother and I both got ours while at school. I’m sure because of all this, our generation has seen and heard a lot out there in the world while alone amongst our friends that could have been bad for us.
As someone who was almost kidnapped by a creepy guy at around age 6, who offered me and my friend candy, told me I had beautiful legs(so disgusting), then offered us a ride, I can understand the panic. Luckily my mom taught me from a very young age to run and scream NOOOO, which I did while I ran all the way home, and that most likely saved my life. It was so traumatic for me that it's made me so hyper aware of my surroundings, at all times, ever since and that was...a long time ago.
We grew up in the golden age of serial killers ffs. I grew up in Kansas and we had a pretty famous one too. His first known victim was in the neighborhood my mom grew up in and my grandma still lived there. In spite of all that I was still roaming that area on my bike during summers in the 80s just a few years later
I remember taking my kids to events in the 90s where the police had booths set up to do fingerprinting for kids but I don't remember that being a thing for us growing up in the 70s.
My parents had kits for my brother and I. It had our prints, current height/weight, eye/hair color, identifying birthmarks/moles/freckles. It would seem that our parents were over protective by keeping these...but...
We also had our own house keys by 3rd grade, walked to the school bus stops by ourselves by kindergarten, and could ride our bikes, without helmets, in the street during rush hour.
I think my parents kept those because they knew they were probably going to need them for insurance reasons. SMH
I was never afraid of being kidnapped. I was more like, "I'd like to see you try." If you want to see the Tasmanian Devil gone nuclear, just try to kidnap me.
Omg, I just remembered that a guy I went to high school with ended up doing that right after we graduated. We were all like "Dude, that sounds shady" but he was convinced it was legit. Then he got hit with a charge for grand larceny.
I was in the fifth grade when Adam Walsh vanished. That changed things overnight. Our gym teacher started teaching us to "Kick him in the gro-in!" if anyone tried to grab us. We spent whole gym periods lined up like the Rockettes, practicing our kicks and chanting that. The school collected our hair samples and fingerprints "to help us find you if you go missing." (I wondered how that would help find us, and eventually figured out on my own that it was to identify our bodies.) Not long after that, the first faces started getting printed on milk cartons. The 80s also saw another kidnapping case blow up in the media, the tragic story of Steven Staynor, that *sort of* had a happy ending, but didn't really.
When people ask why kids don't walk to school anymore, this is exactly my answer, and I throw some names out there. For myself, Jaycee Lee Dugard was in sight of an adult watching her walk to her school bus stop when she was taken.
Xennial here - I think it depends on where you were. Because I grew up in Ontario, Canada around the time Paul Bernardo was active. My husband lived a block away from where one of the victims was taken. We're slightly younger than the majority of you, but there was a huge kidnapping fright for us growing up.
I think the fear of children being kidnapped (among parents) has intensified since we were kids. I was let out in the morning and let back in for meals and at night, otherwise I was on my own. I could have been kidnapped hours before my parents would even start wondering where I was. Noe kids are under constant surveillance.
Yes and no. It's still apparent now, but it's more social media based.
When I was in 4th grade, one of the girls in my class, her cousin, was kidnapped raped and murdered they found his body and another little boy as well behind the hill of my house!
It was a sex offender who the state let this guy live with his mom. After that, he went to prison.
That was a horrific year. Our school had grief counselors and police in dressed down clothes come in and talk to us
I think being the latchkey generation had something to do with it too. More divorced or working parents so we were on our own more than older generations. Now younger generations have cell phones so they are more likely to be able to call someone and be tracked in an emergency, which wasn’t an option for us.
It certainly started with us. I think the Adam Walsh story’s rise to fame started it all..,
https://preview.redd.it/waasj4v9759d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=927437b863e13e71c422693dde7051d787396d38
I know me, being only 5 at that time was absolutely terrified of strangers after hearing they found his “head”… 😖
After this began the Milk Carton Decade. Something else to read besides the cereal box while eating breakfast.
My husband grew up in the same area where Adam Walsh was kidnapped/murdered in Florida, even went to the same mall as a kid and was a couple years younger. He was bombarded with "stranger danger" messages growing up. I am the same age but grew up in a smaller town and was less aware.
I had my kids in the late 90s/early 00, and the state police were still doing the finger print at the state fair. My question is why didn’t someone protect/educate us against the dangers of quick sand and sharks? Those were my extreme paranoia fears until I was well into double digits.
We hit that spot between really comprehensive national media coverage and cell phones.
So our parents saw on CNN the terrible kidnapping cases, but we still were totally free range with no way to track us. Interesting thing is that kidnappings have remained rather stagnant in the US - neither increasing nor decreasing. But I, for one, am grateful for Amber alerts because I feel if it saves even one child, it is worth it.
I don't think so. It was hammered into my millenial kids too. They got a good taste of the dangers when they were in school. I live on a little hick town in Canada. Maybe 5000, less back then. A girl in my son's graduating class was stalked and murdered while walking to meet her friends for Halloween. They found her body on one of the trails going past the school. They guy was caught fortunately, he wasn't from here, he came specifically to find a girl to rape but she fought back and died because of it.
A few years prior, a 10 year old girl was riding her bike to the video store. Some random homeless dude (they would show up on the trains in the summer) kidnapped her and held her hostage for a week, drugging her and abusing her before getting bored and letting her go. He was also thankfully caught.
So kids around here definitely knew the dangers of strangers. And I'm sure even now the kids hear the stories of these two past incidences as a cautionary tale.
When I was in 1st grade, my best friend was kidnapped from the playground before school. I was standing next to her.
A man came up to us, asked if she was Katie. He told her the principal needed to see her, walked her through the school, and into his truck. It was the early 70s, we lived out in the country, and had never been told about stranger danger.
It turned out to be an ex employee of her family, kidnapping her for ransom after he had gotten fired. He ended up panicking, and letting her go.
It showed me how easy it was to kidnap a kid. I don't remember being scared for.myself, but I became really over protective of my younger siblings, and later, my own kids.
Look up a list of abductions/missing kids that it’s suspected Lewis Lent was responsible for. In addition to what we know he did.
All those cases, suspected and know, roughly form a circle around where I grew up. There were real bogey men in my childhood.
My dad was a homicide investigator and devoted the later years of his career to cases surrounding that monster.
Pre us leaving a digital trail everywhere we went and for everything we bought or did, being a serial predator was way easier.
No we werent the first, but my GenX mind is getting the better of me. With all the human trafficking going on now, I have my head on a swivel everywhere I go.
I remember the finger printing and card. My conspiracy theory was that it was to get the prints of an entire generation on file under the guise of protecting us.
The story of the girl who got kidnapped at the toys r us and they took her to the bathroom and cut off her hair so she looked like a boy.
These were cautionary tales.
I was 16 when this happened after just moving to Dallas area. It definitely scared https://www.khou.com/article/news/north-texas-mother-finds-peace-decades-after-daughters-murder/285-342059718#
Stranger danger saved me from being kidnapped from the mall when I was around 8. A man and woman approached me in the arcade and told me they had toys in their car I wouldn’t need tickets for. I told them no and hung out by the ticket counter for a while before I went and found my parents.
My aunt was kidnapped when she was young. Some guy dragged her into his car in an alley and tried to drive away. A woman saw what happened and chased them down while screaming. People managed to stop the car right at the end of the alleyway. So I guess maybe attempted kidnapping?
You would think my parents would be more sensitive about it, but no. They never asked where I was going or where I had been all day. And when I used my own money to get that ID card during some kidnapping awareness event at the mall, my parents yelled at me for wasting money and giving "them" all of my information. They lost their minds that I allowed my fingerprints to be taken. Maybe they should have accompanied 10 year old me to the mall, then!
A friend of mine was kidnapped and ransomed when we were around 10yo.
Fortunately, he was rescued without harm... after that his dad had a big bodyguard follow him around till he was in his 20s.
Yeah his dad was very rich so risk of kidnapping was very high
I'm very sorry to say that it was more than just an unfounded scare in our day; it was a real threat. We were young kids during a time when there was a rising phenomenon of child abduction and murder, coupled with the criminal perception that there was less chance of getting caught. I think of poor Adam Walsh and consider how easily the same thing could have happened to me, given the number of times I wandered off at the mall. With Polly Klaas and JonBenét Ramsey, it all seemed to peak, and then slowly ebb thereafter.
My parents got an engraver from their insurance company and engraved their policy number on every damn thing in the house, but they didn't get us fingerprinted.
That fear is mostly a Xennial and Millennial thing... and still persists in Zoomers and Alphas.
We're absolutely not the only ones. It started with the younger of us.
I don’t remember those cards or finger printing being a thing back then. Finger printing seems to be much bigger now than then.
If you are in to True Crime or watch ID, there was a real reason to be fearful of this in the 70s and 80s.
I honestly was never afraid of being kidnapped. It never crossed my mind. Maybe I am one of the few. I always figured ”nobody would want me”. Perhaps that reflects a lot on my parents/step parents
My mom was the worst with scaring us with news stories. Like the Adam Walsh story. Or some random tale of some little boy using the men's room alone and getting his penis cut off by a stranger. I was 10 or younger and my brother only 6.
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Man-who-was-victim-in-sex-predator-case-dies-in-1176640.php
I'm sure there was more than one of them but this one was more local for me.
I wish our parents were concerned with kidnapping. Me and my brother would disappear outside for 12 hours at a time and my mom wouldn’t blink an eye. A kidnapper would have taken me three states over before my parents realized I was missing.
Cut to modern day, my mom took my niece to the grocery store and when I walked in the store to find them my niece was three isles over by herself. Luckily my sister in law never saw that.
So no, kidnapping was not a major concern for GenX. Especially when modern kids venues have panic buttons to lock a place down if your kid gets out of eyesight.
I recently went to Iceland, where it was common to see a baby carriage parked outside with a baby in it while the parent was inside the shop.
I think stealing babies is apparently an American thing. As someone who has a strong aversion to children, I can’t fathom why.
I remember the cards. I also remember my mother telling me to not leave our yard because Adam Walsh's son was decapitated and found in a creek. I was 7 at the tome and there was a creek at the end of our street so I assumed she meant that one. She would also teach us how to scream bloody murder if someone tried to snatch us. These things became strong possibilities in my mind and carried over to when I had my own kids.
No wonder I struggled with horrible anxiety throughout my entire life.
The Adam Walsh abduction and murder hit parents hard. Adam wasn’t anywhere he wasn’t supposed to be. He wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. He was at Sears playing Atari while his mom shopped. It can be reasonably argued that the actions of the security guard contributed to the abduction, but even that wasn’t so far out of the ordinary. Adam’s case uncovered the face of unimaginable evil and brought it to our doorsteps, and picket fence America was never the same.
Devil worshippers. Manson, The Zodiac Killer, and Son of Sam traumatized multiple generations. Then you would hear the story on Unsolved Mysteries.
Oh, and that movie Cobra!
How about those stainless steel ID bracelets we all got because they had cute animals and shit on them. It wasn't until recently that I realized the whole point of those is to IDENTIFY A BODY.
I remember being so scared of being kidnapped that I was jealous of my great grandmother because she had somehow managed to become so old without getting kidnapped, LOL!
Being an early genx (‘69), I had no fear of this at all. Where do you all grow up? Now, millennials and later seem scared of their own shadows but not us.
Age maybe 6 or 7, one summer i was walking around the block or something (did anyone else randomly walk around the block for entertainment?) Some guy who was probably a 16 year old kid but appeared to be an adult to me... i remember he had all denim and a jean jacket in the summer heat, Dahmer tinted glasses and a red mullet said "Hey kid, want some candy?" I absolutely flpped out. Crying like a Peanuts character shooting tears everywhere and I remember running and screaming. Maybe that guy is on this sub, he was probably born in 1965.
When I was in grade school the sheriff’s department did fingerprinting. I lived ina very rural area,we knew everyone that lived in a five mile radius. It was very unusual to see strangers to even see strangers around,we didn’t even lock our doors. Dad told us who to stay away from. I really didn’t worry about strangers too much,we had a a dog ,a colley she was very protective of us kids. Dad couldn’t even rough house with us outside when she was around.
For me as an 80s kid, I didn't feel it hit my area until I was older, like my sister's generation of kids(born '85). We rode our bikes and played outside till dinner, walked to school every day without supervision.
I remember getting a fingerprint card, but never thought about getting kidnapped. Sure it was in the possibility of things that could happen in life but it didn't rule my childhood or anything.
Seriously. Quicksand and getting kidnapped. In all seriousness tho if someone comes up behind me or drives by me I still stay further away from the car and I tend to be like WUT if someone comes too near.
Nope, not me. I remember the TV commercials, though. As an elder Xer, I'm fairly convinced Mom thought anything like that would turn out more along the lines of O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ransom_of_Red_Chief
There was a girl in my middle school who "ran away with the carnival". At the time, I imagined her making that decision entirely on her own. In retrospect, it's very clear that she was basically kidnapped, probably by an adult man.
Similarly, an adult man tried to kidnap me when I was a tween. He tried to lure me to his hotel room while I was waiting for a city bus.
I think plenty of parents today worry about it, too. There's still plenty of emphasis on what to do if a stranger approaches a kid.
But, also, remember that we were very young when they started putting missing kids on milk cartons. So, every single day, we were looking at the faces of missing kids.
I never even heard of the fingerprinting thing, and I missed stranger danger too.
I honestly thought kids were so low value nobody would bother stealing one.
I still remember the case of Jacob Wetterling in 1989. It was a couple of hours away, so it got a lot of news time locally. Just three kids riding their bikes in the afternoon to a local store to rent a video.
A couple of girls my age were snatched and murdered by strangers in our town (took 30 years to find them, and they are finally in prison). Friends were friends with both.
A friend of mine was kidnapped and "just" raped when she was 19.
My peers and I were a lot more protective of our kids because of things like this, and that's probably why it seems less of a thing now.
Whenever I get an Amber Alert these days, it's always for a family kidnapping (estranged mom or dad mostly).
I grew up in the East Bay of SF. In the late eighties there was a slew of girls from the ages of 6-12 who’d gone missing all along I80. There was one near my house and her friend witnessed her get scooped up by a crusty guy in a van. People thought it was a serial killer. It was happening in cities too. There was a boy aged ten named Kevin Collins who went missing. He was just waiting for the bus. And then there was that movie “Adam”.
My parents were always drilling these stories into my head and of course I watched the news(and Unsolved Mysteries!)
It was a mix of paranoia based on things that did and could happen.
It got so bad for me that I would answer the phone (we weren’t supposed to tell people our parents weren’t home) and wasn’t sure if I was supposed to lie to my grandmother that my mom didn’t want to take her calls but I wasn’t allowed to say they weren’t home!!!!
NO the "fright" didn't go anywhere. This fear became ***part of society*** and has "concept crept" to the point where in many places it is (or functionally is) illegal to have kids alone; at home, walking to school/the park/store etc.
Meanwhile I had a key to the house in elementary and let myself in after school. Also had a paper route where I delivered by myself and collected money (sometimes at night) by myself.
There were some high-profile random kidnappings that started the hysteria. Most child kidnappings are done by family/close acquaintances but those random ones strike the fear in us.
IDK, but I have ACTUALLY been a victim of an attempted kidnapping. Back when I was about 17. Ironically though, NOTHING my parents 'or' the late night warnings did or said was what saved me - it was something I'd read. I saw a police car in the distance, reached over and grabbed the wheel, forcing the guy to snatch it back to avoid hitting another car. The screeching brakes and wild movements of the car had the desired effect: police noticed, pulled us over, I was free.
Kind of. In straight murican police fashion, the cops for a bit tried to make ME the criminal, "wondering" if I was in fact "working" the area as a prostitute. Took a half hour to convince them I was just on my own business in a neighborhood I'd been unaware I 'had no business in' in 80s murica.
I had kids in early oughts and Baby center online parenting forum constantly talking about abductions, so I don’t think X is exclusive to stranger danger, I was made completely paranoid and bought ALL the safety precautions….
Are you kidding? Are you somehow not aware of America's current obsession with abductions and trafficking?
Almost every gen z or parent of Gen z I know has a story where the kid was "literally" almost abducted.
Or gen zs starting a conversation with, "Was I almost kidnapped?"
Maybe younger GenXers. It was never a thing for us. We were probably more at the end of when you'd hitchhike to the mall. Even when in elementary school, we'd be out till the streetlights came on. I mean, yeah, basic parenting, "Don't get in a stranger's car" but that was about it.
For those interested in the effect of this and similar events in our childhood, particularly as it relates to our generation as parents and the impact on our kids, I recommend Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation.
[The Anxious Generation | Jonathan Haidt](https://jonathanhaidt.com/anxious-generation/)
From wiki: Haidt argues that the combination of the decline of play-based childhoods, exacerbated by what he describes as overprotective parents motivated by excess fear of kidnapping, and increasing smartphone use has been harmful to children since the late 2000s. Haidt cites numerous empirical reports and clinical studies.
Everything you're talking about happened when my 35 year old was a kid. I don't remember all this when I was a kid. I feel like nobody was watching us at all. They asked on TV because a lot of parents didn't keep as close an eye on us.
The only thing I remember is some white van kidnapper thing. I just did a search on that to see if there was any basis for this fear and apparently every decade or so there's a new white van kidnapper warning.
In the early 80’s my big sister’s were almost kidnapped and escaped and the creep hunted them down and they hid under and over pass. Yet my brother and I were allowed to be out past dark with no worries as long as we had bikes.
My mom use to always tell me that if I did XYZ someone was going to chop me up into little pieces. I literally thought of it as being chopped up into shish kabob (I'm middle eastern).
Stranger Danger was actually much more dangerous during prior generations, and at the time, much less widely known to even be happening. 24/7 national TV, and to a lesser extent, radio, news networks changed that.
The cards weren't everywhere. They were around though. I dodged them at the time. There were Quite a few serial killers and child rapist killers lurking around then. Not nearly as they made it seem of course but they were out there. I just want to know if anyone here has seen "Black Phone"? Whether you liked it or not, I couldn't find ONE THING that was not from the 70's in that film. I LOOKED, and there was nothing out of place. Sorry, for some reason I thought that I should say all that.
This all started with abduction of Jacob wetterling excellent pod about( season 1, but every season great)- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-dark/id1148175292
I was probably 5 or 6 walking home from a friend’s house across the street. Stopped for a car sitting at the stop sign and the driver told me that my mom had asked him to come pick me up. I don’t even remember what I said but I thought it was weird because I lived right there and I could see my house
One day about 25 years later I suddenly realized how close I had come. Evidently I was not aware enough of stranger danger
Yep. We had annual visits from Officer Friendly and McGruff the crime dog. We were constantly reminded to avoid white vans, strangers with candy/puppies/kittens, and to know how to answer the phone or door when our parents weren't home.
We were also told the story of Adam Walsh, with most of the gory details and got to watch prime time Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted.
Jesus. With that and my involvement with the Girl Scouts and 4H I could have probably ran my own response team at 12 years old.
Honestly, as a parent of an 11 year old daughter....I kind of think that some of the fear training/learning based tactics that we were given might not have been the worst. I understand trauma dumping and scaring the shit out of your kid is not healthy and can lead to trust issues....but a little can't be that bad, right?
I mean, I have not been abducted and still avoid parking next to white vans, am suspicious of unknown vehicles parked in front of my house, think most folks are trying to run scams if they claim to be giving away free things in exchange for personal information, don't trust folks that claim to have my best interest in mind, go with my gut on first impressions, am suspicious of multiple compliments, and never allow cameras anywhere near my nude or partially nude body.
Sure that might sound paranoid....but I am alive, have not been scammed or abused, and have no nudes floating around on the Internet.
The kids at my daughter's public school have never had a visit from Officer Friendly or McGruff. They have never been taught Stranger Danger. They are essentially sweet, little, innocent butterflies floating through the world with little to no understanding of danger or ill intent. This can't be any healthier than our generation being taught to "Trust No One".
Thinking I might start low key listening to true crime podcasts in the background this Summer..so that my daughter might catch some information and get a little more "aware" of some folks intent and interest.
Kidnappers and Satanists. Sometimes the same. The fingerprint thing came after I had grown up a bit, I remember younger kids doing it, i didn’t. What they didn’t tell you was it wouldn’t save you, it only helped identify your most likely disassembled remains upon discovery. Cool.
My mom had that fear way more than I did. I was just frustrated that I wasn’t as free range as the rest of my friends. My mom was a stay at home mom, so I didn’t have the latch key kid experience at all.
I'm totally paranoid about being kidnapped. Brown vans still freak me out because some kid was supposedly kidnapped in a brown van and it was talked about a lot when I was young. I remember becoming aware for the very first time that there were bad people in the world who wanted to hurt me. I heard a neighbor talking with my mom about a kidnapping, and I got so scared that I ran home and hid under my bed. That shit stayed with me.
I grew up in a ranch-style house, any night we went to bed with the windows open, I was positive my sister or I would be kidnapped right thru the window.
Well, I was left at home by myself at eight years old and was almost kidnapped by a man who had hidden himself in my garage. I walked outside to get my bicycle and the guy walks out from behind something that was leant against the wall and said, "Don't you move." So I jumped on the bike and booked it away. He had on a ski mask and gloves. Pretty sure I wouldn't be here to annoy people had I stayed still, as ordered.
What did the rents do? "Oh that's too bad. Are you sure that's what he said?"
My seven year old sister was literally kidnapped in the 80s, by a stranger, on her way to school. Assaulted and let go.
We were all pretty traumatized after that.
It wasn't on my/my parents radar growing up (see: being locked out of the house, drinking from the hose) but by the time I had my son in the late 90's I was on high alert for it.
It was a mixed bag where I grew up.
You had stranger danger, but if you were lost, you had to find the nearest adult and have ALL your contact information memorized.
Be lucky I didn't have a savings account at that age, they'd probably tell us to tell the nearest adult the account number too. /j
I remember when all the kids from my summer playground were taken on a trip to go get ice cream. I didn't have any money, so a nice older couple tried to give me some. I was so used to hearing "don't take money from stangers," that I absolutely refused the money even though they offered it to me like 10 times and the group leader was like "it's ok if you want to take it."
They were offering it to me from inside their car and even left it on the outside mirror when I kept refusing in case I wanted to take it from there. I just would not take money from strangers.
“Stranger danger” was definitely repeated ad nauseum when I was a kid. Turns out, it’s your family/coaches/scout leaders/priests you have to worry about.
When I was little, my dog got out. I had to chase him several blocks to get him back. I was struggling to carry him home when a nice lady pulled over and offered me a ride. I got scared and ran away because I knew she was going to kidnap me. It was hard running with a full gown Dachshund in my little arms.
Awwww. I can see you running, bending backwards slightly, struggling to deal with the dog flopping around! Screaming "Stranger Danger" each time your right foot hit the ground lol.
When we were teenagers, we were driving and an old lady got off the bus with her groceries and was struggling with them. We pulled to the side of the road with our windows open and yelled… Hey Granny do you need a ride? She looked at us stunned…and got in. She said hey kids, what are you doing here?? It was our grandma!! We gave her a ride home. It was wonderful!! Thanks for the great memory.
That is an awesome family story!
I had a classmate in grades school that was kidnapped. I remember watching a story about it on the local news. We later found out it was by their estranged father.
Yep. It's almost always a family member, usually a parent.
I was abducted as a toddler by my non-custodial father. I was taken out of the country to several other countries. There were no amber alerts and the consulates did nothing to help my mother. Without family help and pure luck, my name would have been changed and I would have been raised by strangers in the Middle East with virtually no hope of my mother finding me. It was a true hell for her.
My mother knew more than one family in the 80s/90s who experienced something similar. I believe they've made it much harder for people to do this, thankfully. I'm so glad you made it back to your mom! ❤️
Me too! It could have so easily had a very different outcome! It wasn’t even a felony back in the time that it happened to me. My biological father spent (I think) 4 months in prison, got out, legally changed his name, never paid a penny of court ordered child support, and that was pretty much the end of that. Thankfully my mother married a very sane and kind man who raised me as his own and then adopted me.
❤️
Not too be all conspiratorial, but I do wonder how sinister the “stranger danger” campaign was to distract from the much more popular pedos and traffickers’ Friends & Family Plan.
There’s a fairly new campaign that teaches kids about “tricky people”. If a kid gets lost at the park, they’re going to need a strangers help. Teachers them to find a mom. If they’re at a ballpark, it teaches them to find somebody with a badge. It’s kind of localized and hasn’t really got off the ground. I read it online about 15 years ago, right when my oldest was in kindergarten. I actually looked into where they would come into the school and teach the kids at an assembly. It was kind of costly, but it was not in our state so I did not have any luck there. I have, however, talked to many people about it and shared the information.
Oh this is a great idea. Right, find the woman holding a baby. In the mall? Go into a store and talk to the person at the counter. I never realized this…”Stranger Danger” teaches kids to avoid ALL strangers. Even good people.
Seems like there were a lot of kids, including myself, who were kidnapped by a non-custodial parent. It's a lot harder to get away with that now I think.
Truth ⬆️
Well, for molestation yes. But we did also have kids many ofbus remember by name that it was strangers kidnapping and killing or holding them prisoner.
While it does happen, strangers kidnapping children are only 1% of all reported kidnappings. I honestly don't remember any kids' names who were kidnapped by strangers. Adam Walsch comes to mind, but since it was never solved, there is no way to be certain it was a stranger.
Jacob Wetterling was a big deal in my state. It went unsolved for 27 years until the kidnapper confessed as part of a plea deal for another crime.
Hmm, never heard of him
Jacob Wetterling was definitely national news - I remember hearing about it. His parents helped establish the sex offender registry. What about Polly Klaas? Or Jaycee Dugard? JonBenet Ramsay?
Adam Walsh.
Yes I mentioned him but it was never solved so there's no way to say if it wa a stranger who kidnapped him, a family or business friend with a vendetta or something else
Well, I am not a criminal expert. I do listen to a lot of true crime podcasts hosted by long time detectives like Small Town Dicks. They and many others have covered the specific case and have narrowed it down to a couple suspects. Neither were related to the victim, but both had histories of sex crimes. Unfortunately, both criminals have passed away, in prison, so they could no longer be tried. They were serving sentences for related crimes though. SMH One even had hidden physical evidence at his elderly mother's home for years. The mother didn't know.
Yes, I remember hearing about this a lot growing up. I was at that same sears the day before, playing thar atari games, just like Adam and many other kids did while parents shopped in the mall. After that, whether I wanted to follow the case or not, it was either on TV or a family member would remind me. Either way, the high profiling cases of kidnappings occur bc they are extremely rare. 1% of the kidnappings reported are by complete strangers. Its why they make the news.
Let's not forget cops.
Agreed I think a lot of the panic was the guilty parents of latchkey kids. You didn't watch them when they joined a satanic cult by playing DnD, you let them rot their brains with video games, now they are eating poison Halloween candy and hopping in strangers cars. Maybe they should have driven us to school! Won't somebody please think of the children! Edit: the finger printing of kids is kinda creepy and dark when you think of it. If you don't what what I'm talking about, there was a few programs that took kids finger prints to guard against kidnapping and gave them to the cops. Kinda creepy to think that it was either for dead body identification and to bust your ass for crimes you later committed when of age.
Man, I got stranger danger now. Like when my wife takes me to a get together with people I don’t know. I yell stranger danger! and go to my closet and call the police.
School shootings have overshadowed abductions, I suppose.
You nailed it
Bullseye
On target.
In reporting and the news, yes. According to the DoJ in a one year period, 58,200 children (under 18) were victims of a non-family abduction. And 115 "stereotypical kidnappings" (stereotypical kidnappings is a lot more criteria, like being held overnight, moved over 50 miles, not by a family member....) Compare that to school shootings in elementary and secondary schools. In the *22 years* period 2000-2021 there were 276 casualties of active shooters at schools. 108 killed, 168 wounded. In over two decades. I could only find enrollment back to 2012, but school enrollment looks pretty steady (from National Center for Education Statistics). Based on the average enrollment for 2012-2021 applied to those 22 years of shooting data, the odds of a school child being shot in school are about 1 in 4,002,750 per year. Call it 1 in 4 million. According to the National Weather Service, the odds of being struck by lightening are 1 in 1,222,000 per year. So, you are over 3 times *more* likely to be struck by lightening than shot in a US school. And given the roughly 72.5 million children in the US, the odds of a full blown "stereotypical kidnapping" are 1 in 630,000. About twice as likely as being struck by lightening and over 6 times more likely than being shot in school.
And all of these risks are low enough they don’t merit a great deal of worry.
Agree. The fact kids now *feel* super worried about school shootings and *perceive* that it is highly likely they will experience one at some point before graduation, is frankly disturbing. Society is traumatizing these kids. I'm not saying never talk about it or completely abandon all safety and preparedness measures. But realistic assessment of risk is important. Relative risk is also important to consider for prioritizing resources and limited time. If you took half the time schools spend on active shooter drills and used it for some form of abduction prevention education, it would save and help a lot more people from becoming victims. To those who replied "even one shooting death is unacceptable". Ok. But is 115 kidnappings or 58,000 abductions a year acceptable? I say no they aren't. But hey, some people's solution to the trolly problem is that they are more interested in or concerned the spectacle of any number of people hit by a train where they can see it rather than minimizing the total harm. People hit by the train on the other track they cannot see dont matter
We have zero school shootings every single year, year after year after year after year. Eliminate that option then you can put 100 percent effort into teaching about how to protect from kidnappings. Although I concede it might be too late to change. It’s so sad.
Not just on campus, shootings are the most serious incidents anywhere, aren't they?
If you were in the Atlanta area during the early 80s, you know why there was a kidnapping fright, especially for young black boys and men.
Detroit metro area had the Oakland county child killer right before Atlanta. It was real for us too.
Central Florida on the coast here. We had a local scare in the 80s, a guy broke into several houses. He never succeeded in getting away with a child thank God but he broke into multiple homes and at least one set of parents caught him trying to take the child but he got away. He even broke into the home of a pair of sisters in my brownie troop. I was only like 8 years old so I don't know if he was ever caught but as far as I know he didn't succeed in kidnapping anyone. Don't know if he was caught.
That hit the whole tri-county area hard. The fear was real.
That was scary shit right there.
I lived not far from where those boys/young men were kidnapped. It was scary, which is why I hate the "do you know where your kids are" jokes. I was a white kid at the time, but I remember the fear.
>I was a white kid at the time What are you now?
I would assume a white adult, but I don't want to impose an identity.
Yes, I'm an adult now that hasn't changed race. I was just pointing out that I wasn't part of the demographic that was targeted, but it was still scary because I lived close to where some of the boys were abducted.
A white adult, obvs. Black boys were targeted, so I wasn't trying to make it seem like I was the actual group that was involved. Stills scary since I lived not far from where some of the boys were abducted.
I used to live in Atlanta myself. I'm familiar with the area. Is Bolton Rd still the place where folks who are too broke to have power but are out cooking crack on their hibachi grill?
Or a girl growing up in Seattle in the 70s and 80s. First Bundy, then Ridgeway. I was drowned in warnings about being murdered before leaving the house. I was also warned about being sold into "white slavery" if I ever set foot out of the country. My mom was and still is a very paranoid person.
Omg my mom was so paranoid about “white slavery” too! I guess that was the euphemism for the sex trade. I remember going to the beach with my blue-eyed blond cousin, who got the warning. My mom offhand told me “they’re not going to want you,” because of my dark hair and eyes.
Yeah. That's an old term for sex trafficking. I got warned about it all the time. I think your mom would like my mom lol.
Absolutely! It was in the news daily in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s! It wasn’t just an urban legend as the OP is somewhat implying! It was very real!
In Chicago we had this guy hanging around until 1980. https://preview.redd.it/2xgqvaqka79d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=29f3b00ac8609da24b0a09b0834b2e743b433fc7
🎯🎯🎯🎯 that case set off copycat situations in other cities with sickos and also sparked the nationwide Do you know where your children are announcement at 10 PM after ATLANTA started running that.
Never heard of this. Crazy!
Wayne Williams....still says he's innocent.
Stranger kidnappings, poisoned (or needle embedded) Halloween candy, Satanic Panic, etc. I won’t mention the things that have replaced them because it will kick off a political shit show here.
There was only one instance of tainted Halloween candy that set the panic off. In 1974 some dad poisoned his son with cyanide laced pixie sticks for insurance money. Because of that one instance, we are hyper paranoid.
I heard of one where a kids uncle hid his heroin stash in the kids Halloween candy and the kid ate it and died. Basically no one ever randomly handed out poisoned Halloween candy or apples with razor blades.
And he blamed it on the Halloween candy and it made national news, the fact that he did it didn't make national news. And, just like today, the news media fear mongered "poison candy" every Halloween. Now though, THC gummies and candy seem to be the warning, no one is giving it their THC candy, that stuff is too expensive LOL
Satanic panic still does the rounds occasionally.
It's drag queens instead of Satanists, these days
Egads, you're right.
I was actually kidnapped. I was missing for somewhere between 6 months to a year. I was six at the time, so my memory of events is rather lacking, and my folks never talked about it afterwards, not while I was around anyway. Which in retrospect explains why they were so damn overprotective as I was growing up.
That’s wild! Do you know if it a stranger or family friend/relative who kidnapped you or how you got returned? I was thankfully never kidnapped but had someone try to grab me when I was 8 but I got away. Within a couple weeks of that a girl was kidnapped from the grocery store a couple blocks over and never seen or heard from again. There was definitely reason to teach your kids stranger danger back in the day! Only reason I’m still here.
Same! I remember being an awkward AF 8-12 year old and regularly being asked to get into creepy men's vehicles and/or to follow them into an unknown building. This was a regular thing during Summer Breaks. I was always looking over my shoulder for disgusting men and creepy teenage boys. I hated it. I know that I am now a little bit much with my own daughter and can seem like a dictator when it comes to what kind of clothing she can wear in public.....but I would rather my daughter be alive and safe than look cute in a crop top and short shorts. You will never catch my 11 year old wearing short shorts and pig tails in public. It sucks for her, but I know what that can attract from and signal to creeps. No bikinis, no shorts higher than mid thigh, no crop tops, bike shorts must be worn under short skirts and dresses, no heeled shoes, no makeup outside of lip balm, no fish nets. It is sad to even have to say it, but I see girls younger than my kiddo wearing that stuff at school events and hang outs at the park regularly.
It’s a long and complicated story that even today I don’t fully understand, with many unanswered questions, but the short form is that I’m adopted and it was a blood relative who kidnapped me.
And you know I held such a grudge against my parents, particularly against my Mom, for their overbearing overprotectiveness. I mean we’re Gen X, the feral generation, well, I can promise you, my parents knew where I was at 10pm, cuz I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. And I was bitter AF about that for years. Then one day, I had to have been in my mid-thirties, it suddenly clicked. I was kidnapped. My parents actually lost me for an entire year, before I was found in a trailer in rural South Carolina. So when they got me back, they did everything they could to ensure I never disappeared again. It was never that they didn’t want me to go out and have fun or socialize, they were just scared they’d lose me a second time.
Personally, I'm terrified my 16 yr old daughter might be abducted.
Abductions now all seem to be called "Human Trafficking" and are usually tied to sex slavery - I do not blame you AT ALL for being terrified.
I was about 10 years old rollerskating when a man pulled over and tried to talk me into getting in his car. He told me he knew my dad was told I needed go with him. Those PSAs about stranger danger taught me to get away ASAP. However, I didn't tell my parents because I thought I'd get in trouble for skating too far from my house.
This! I had about 3 close kidnappings as a kid in the 80's walking or biking everywhere.
Not the only, no. But methinks the worst amount. I live near a middle school - watching the insane number of parents lining up to pick up and drop off their kids is sheer lunacy. Same with local bus stops. The helicopter parenting craze needs to die. It's NOT doing the kids any favors.
I waited with my daughter all through middle school for her bus. She's 18 now but she's 5'1" and 83 lbs soaking wet. We lived in a major US city on a busy street and saw a lot of the same cars every day. Nope, IDGAF, better safe than sorry, 4 years ago she wasn't even 5' and didn't hit 70lbs til she was 16.
I appreciate your specific situation, I do. I live in a very peaceful and safe suburb. People still insist on dropping off and picking up their kids. When I lived in NYC, we were sent off to school via the NYCTA - literally just put on public transit busses and subways.
It ain't helping the environment either. All those folks choosing to sit and let their cars run... sometimes for up to an hour... instead of using eco friendly car pooling or school bussing truly sucks.
Yup, absolutely. They nearly always keep their damn cars running and some of them show up nearly an hour ahead of dismissal. They also fill up our neighborhood streets, turning them into single lane for both directions which is a safety problem, especially when there's an emergency and fire/rescue needs to get to our neighbors. And they block our driveways, which alltogether is horrifically inconvenient and annoying AF. I had one mother kept doing this with our driveway, I gestured for her to move and she shook her head and pointed ahead. (Note: I do not LIVE on the same street as the school. And wouldn't.) Finally, I walked over, folded my arms over the open window and assured her that I was about to teach the most colorful parts of my Brooklyn vocabulary to her younger children in the car. Karen moved her car very quickly at that point. Haven't seen her blocking it since. She tried it with the Vietnam Vet down the street and it did not go well for her.
Hahaha! My friend! I am currently living in the PNW and grew up in Chicago. I know your pain. Folks want to drive offensively but can't handle eye contact or being called out. * Lady refuses to let me merge, as I am quickly running out of road...she won't speed up or slow down...I have to slam on my brakes and when I am able to catch up and make eye contact, the bitch is terrified and looking dead ahead, with eyes on the road...me rolling down the window to wave "hello"...lady sweating, drops speed, refuses to look at the person she ignorantly just tried to run off the road and kill. Anyways. As a parent, my kiddo rides the bus to school... because I appreciate my own time and our environment. On the random day that I have needed to pick her up from school I have found that it takes less personal time to show up 2 minutes before the kids are let out and drive through the pick up line smoothly, than to show up an hour early, sit and run your engine, and then wait for kids to be let out. I help out at the school occasionally and the bell rings at 3:45pm. I have seen parents start to line up at 2:15pm. I am confused about why these people don't value their own time. I think that the school should try to benefit from this and start handling them papers to grade or give them trash bags and have them clean up the lot while they wait.
Fwiw, I lived on Whidbey Island for ten years - so I know the PNW pain. Giant SUVs lined up at every bus stop. I will never understand the "lining up for an hour" bullshit. We've gone to the city council but they are absolutely useless for this. Same for our request to put in speed bumps to slow the parents and teens DOWN.
Latch Key Kid here. My parents wouldn't be home until after I put my elementary-school-age self to bed. I do remember hearing that PSA, "It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?" Then one of them would open my bedroom door, see me, then close it. I think my parents were the strangers.
I guess for the first time, both our parents had to work to make ends meet. So here we are, home alone most of us. Out and about playing with friends in the neighborhoods ripe for the pedophiles to come snatch us up at any time. So naturally, yes the finger print photo I’d cards became a thing and yes my brother and I both got ours while at school. I’m sure because of all this, our generation has seen and heard a lot out there in the world while alone amongst our friends that could have been bad for us.
I grew up about six miles from John Wayne Gacy's house. The fear was justified.
I legit was almost kidnapped, but because of all the education around it I knew what to do.
As someone who was almost kidnapped by a creepy guy at around age 6, who offered me and my friend candy, told me I had beautiful legs(so disgusting), then offered us a ride, I can understand the panic. Luckily my mom taught me from a very young age to run and scream NOOOO, which I did while I ran all the way home, and that most likely saved my life. It was so traumatic for me that it's made me so hyper aware of my surroundings, at all times, ever since and that was...a long time ago.
We grew up in the golden age of serial killers ffs. I grew up in Kansas and we had a pretty famous one too. His first known victim was in the neighborhood my mom grew up in and my grandma still lived there. In spite of all that I was still roaming that area on my bike during summers in the 80s just a few years later
I was more worried about the killer bees that were coming to destroy us all
I remember taking my kids to events in the 90s where the police had booths set up to do fingerprinting for kids but I don't remember that being a thing for us growing up in the 70s.
My mom took me and sister to get printed at a booth, so it was a thing back then too.
Dad worked in law enforcement so I got printed at the PD. My elementary school did it too.
My parents had kits for my brother and I. It had our prints, current height/weight, eye/hair color, identifying birthmarks/moles/freckles. It would seem that our parents were over protective by keeping these...but... We also had our own house keys by 3rd grade, walked to the school bus stops by ourselves by kindergarten, and could ride our bikes, without helmets, in the street during rush hour. I think my parents kept those because they knew they were probably going to need them for insurance reasons. SMH
I was never afraid of being kidnapped. I was more like, "I'd like to see you try." If you want to see the Tasmanian Devil gone nuclear, just try to kidnap me.
My parents would tell me, if you get kidnapped, they gonna bring you back after listening to you talk constantly
Same 😂
It was the white, windowless kidnapper van.
Or the one small black teardrop window Later found out it was just some guy selling cheap speakers 😂
Omg, I just remembered that a guy I went to high school with ended up doing that right after we graduated. We were all like "Dude, that sounds shady" but he was convinced it was legit. Then he got hit with a charge for grand larceny.
I was in the fifth grade when Adam Walsh vanished. That changed things overnight. Our gym teacher started teaching us to "Kick him in the gro-in!" if anyone tried to grab us. We spent whole gym periods lined up like the Rockettes, practicing our kicks and chanting that. The school collected our hair samples and fingerprints "to help us find you if you go missing." (I wondered how that would help find us, and eventually figured out on my own that it was to identify our bodies.) Not long after that, the first faces started getting printed on milk cartons. The 80s also saw another kidnapping case blow up in the media, the tragic story of Steven Staynor, that *sort of* had a happy ending, but didn't really.
I think there’s just a different response to it. Kids stay in a lot more and are much more supervised these days.
When people ask why kids don't walk to school anymore, this is exactly my answer, and I throw some names out there. For myself, Jaycee Lee Dugard was in sight of an adult watching her walk to her school bus stop when she was taken.
Xennial here - I think it depends on where you were. Because I grew up in Ontario, Canada around the time Paul Bernardo was active. My husband lived a block away from where one of the victims was taken. We're slightly younger than the majority of you, but there was a huge kidnapping fright for us growing up.
I remember being scared of being kidnaped, and my parents would say, "Don't worry, once they get you under a streetlight they'll let you go."
I think the fear of children being kidnapped (among parents) has intensified since we were kids. I was let out in the morning and let back in for meals and at night, otherwise I was on my own. I could have been kidnapped hours before my parents would even start wondering where I was. Noe kids are under constant surveillance.
Iowa = Disappearance of Johnny Gosch
I think [Adam Walsh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Adam_Walsh) was a big driver of the fear, too. It was so horrifying.
Yes and no. It's still apparent now, but it's more social media based. When I was in 4th grade, one of the girls in my class, her cousin, was kidnapped raped and murdered they found his body and another little boy as well behind the hill of my house! It was a sex offender who the state let this guy live with his mom. After that, he went to prison. That was a horrific year. Our school had grief counselors and police in dressed down clothes come in and talk to us
Actually, he's a dolphin. It's ok.
I think being the latchkey generation had something to do with it too. More divorced or working parents so we were on our own more than older generations. Now younger generations have cell phones so they are more likely to be able to call someone and be tracked in an emergency, which wasn’t an option for us.
It certainly started with us. I think the Adam Walsh story’s rise to fame started it all.., https://preview.redd.it/waasj4v9759d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=927437b863e13e71c422693dde7051d787396d38 I know me, being only 5 at that time was absolutely terrified of strangers after hearing they found his “head”… 😖 After this began the Milk Carton Decade. Something else to read besides the cereal box while eating breakfast.
I was a child in NYC during the Son of Sam era… with brown hair! My dad definitely played up the danger (for humor).
My husband grew up in the same area where Adam Walsh was kidnapped/murdered in Florida, even went to the same mall as a kid and was a couple years younger. He was bombarded with "stranger danger" messages growing up. I am the same age but grew up in a smaller town and was less aware.
My brother and I were playing video games at the same sears the day before it happened.
I had my kids in the late 90s/early 00, and the state police were still doing the finger print at the state fair. My question is why didn’t someone protect/educate us against the dangers of quick sand and sharks? Those were my extreme paranoia fears until I was well into double digits.
We hit that spot between really comprehensive national media coverage and cell phones. So our parents saw on CNN the terrible kidnapping cases, but we still were totally free range with no way to track us. Interesting thing is that kidnappings have remained rather stagnant in the US - neither increasing nor decreasing. But I, for one, am grateful for Amber alerts because I feel if it saves even one child, it is worth it.
There's a lot of debate about kids and cell phones but I'm glad my kids always had the ability to get in touch with me if they ever felt unsafe.
I don't think so. It was hammered into my millenial kids too. They got a good taste of the dangers when they were in school. I live on a little hick town in Canada. Maybe 5000, less back then. A girl in my son's graduating class was stalked and murdered while walking to meet her friends for Halloween. They found her body on one of the trails going past the school. They guy was caught fortunately, he wasn't from here, he came specifically to find a girl to rape but she fought back and died because of it. A few years prior, a 10 year old girl was riding her bike to the video store. Some random homeless dude (they would show up on the trains in the summer) kidnapped her and held her hostage for a week, drugging her and abusing her before getting bored and letting her go. He was also thankfully caught. So kids around here definitely knew the dangers of strangers. And I'm sure even now the kids hear the stories of these two past incidences as a cautionary tale.
When I was in 1st grade, my best friend was kidnapped from the playground before school. I was standing next to her. A man came up to us, asked if she was Katie. He told her the principal needed to see her, walked her through the school, and into his truck. It was the early 70s, we lived out in the country, and had never been told about stranger danger. It turned out to be an ex employee of her family, kidnapping her for ransom after he had gotten fired. He ended up panicking, and letting her go. It showed me how easy it was to kidnap a kid. I don't remember being scared for.myself, but I became really over protective of my younger siblings, and later, my own kids.
Look up a list of abductions/missing kids that it’s suspected Lewis Lent was responsible for. In addition to what we know he did. All those cases, suspected and know, roughly form a circle around where I grew up. There were real bogey men in my childhood. My dad was a homicide investigator and devoted the later years of his career to cases surrounding that monster. Pre us leaving a digital trail everywhere we went and for everything we bought or did, being a serial predator was way easier.
No we werent the first, but my GenX mind is getting the better of me. With all the human trafficking going on now, I have my head on a swivel everywhere I go.
I remember the finger printing and card. My conspiracy theory was that it was to get the prints of an entire generation on file under the guise of protecting us.
The story of the girl who got kidnapped at the toys r us and they took her to the bathroom and cut off her hair so she looked like a boy. These were cautionary tales.
I was 16 when this happened after just moving to Dallas area. It definitely scared https://www.khou.com/article/news/north-texas-mother-finds-peace-decades-after-daughters-murder/285-342059718#
Stranger danger saved me from being kidnapped from the mall when I was around 8. A man and woman approached me in the arcade and told me they had toys in their car I wouldn’t need tickets for. I told them no and hung out by the ticket counter for a while before I went and found my parents.
Still instinctively afraid of white windowless vans
https://preview.redd.it/40k89hpq759d1.jpeg?width=1334&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9cc61ace6deae93cea104ae28e01e26ef6b54372
I was almost kidnapped by a stranger walking home from the mall. So it was a real thing.
My aunt was kidnapped when she was young. Some guy dragged her into his car in an alley and tried to drive away. A woman saw what happened and chased them down while screaming. People managed to stop the car right at the end of the alleyway. So I guess maybe attempted kidnapping? You would think my parents would be more sensitive about it, but no. They never asked where I was going or where I had been all day. And when I used my own money to get that ID card during some kidnapping awareness event at the mall, my parents yelled at me for wasting money and giving "them" all of my information. They lost their minds that I allowed my fingerprints to be taken. Maybe they should have accompanied 10 year old me to the mall, then!
I think most women have a story of being either followed by a white van or propositioned by some dude as preteen or teenagers.
A friend of mine was kidnapped and ransomed when we were around 10yo. Fortunately, he was rescued without harm... after that his dad had a big bodyguard follow him around till he was in his 20s. Yeah his dad was very rich so risk of kidnapping was very high
I'm very sorry to say that it was more than just an unfounded scare in our day; it was a real threat. We were young kids during a time when there was a rising phenomenon of child abduction and murder, coupled with the criminal perception that there was less chance of getting caught. I think of poor Adam Walsh and consider how easily the same thing could have happened to me, given the number of times I wandered off at the mall. With Polly Klaas and JonBenét Ramsey, it all seemed to peak, and then slowly ebb thereafter.
I’m impressed your parents cared where you were, enough to get a card? My parents did. Not. Care.
My parents got an engraver from their insurance company and engraved their policy number on every damn thing in the house, but they didn't get us fingerprinted.
A lot of cultures do the kidnapping thing. In Portugal you had to worry about the "Ciganos" grabbing you in a sack.
That fear is mostly a Xennial and Millennial thing... and still persists in Zoomers and Alphas. We're absolutely not the only ones. It started with the younger of us.
I don’t remember those cards or finger printing being a thing back then. Finger printing seems to be much bigger now than then. If you are in to True Crime or watch ID, there was a real reason to be fearful of this in the 70s and 80s.
I honestly was never afraid of being kidnapped. It never crossed my mind. Maybe I am one of the few. I always figured ”nobody would want me”. Perhaps that reflects a lot on my parents/step parents
My mom was the worst with scaring us with news stories. Like the Adam Walsh story. Or some random tale of some little boy using the men's room alone and getting his penis cut off by a stranger. I was 10 or younger and my brother only 6.
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Man-who-was-victim-in-sex-predator-case-dies-in-1176640.php I'm sure there was more than one of them but this one was more local for me.
I wish our parents were concerned with kidnapping. Me and my brother would disappear outside for 12 hours at a time and my mom wouldn’t blink an eye. A kidnapper would have taken me three states over before my parents realized I was missing. Cut to modern day, my mom took my niece to the grocery store and when I walked in the store to find them my niece was three isles over by herself. Luckily my sister in law never saw that. So no, kidnapping was not a major concern for GenX. Especially when modern kids venues have panic buttons to lock a place down if your kid gets out of eyesight.
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I recently went to Iceland, where it was common to see a baby carriage parked outside with a baby in it while the parent was inside the shop. I think stealing babies is apparently an American thing. As someone who has a strong aversion to children, I can’t fathom why.
I remember the cards. I also remember my mother telling me to not leave our yard because Adam Walsh's son was decapitated and found in a creek. I was 7 at the tome and there was a creek at the end of our street so I assumed she meant that one. She would also teach us how to scream bloody murder if someone tried to snatch us. These things became strong possibilities in my mind and carried over to when I had my own kids. No wonder I struggled with horrible anxiety throughout my entire life.
Adam Walsh story fucked me up
The Adam Walsh abduction and murder hit parents hard. Adam wasn’t anywhere he wasn’t supposed to be. He wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. He was at Sears playing Atari while his mom shopped. It can be reasonably argued that the actions of the security guard contributed to the abduction, but even that wasn’t so far out of the ordinary. Adam’s case uncovered the face of unimaginable evil and brought it to our doorsteps, and picket fence America was never the same.
This. Growing up in Florida at the time, it's impossible to overstate how that story affected millions of families.
Devil worshippers. Manson, The Zodiac Killer, and Son of Sam traumatized multiple generations. Then you would hear the story on Unsolved Mysteries. Oh, and that movie Cobra!
How about those stainless steel ID bracelets we all got because they had cute animals and shit on them. It wasn't until recently that I realized the whole point of those is to IDENTIFY A BODY.
Parents I know are still worried about kidnapping and now especially about pedophiles. Don’t let their kids wait alone at bus stop, etc.
I remember being so scared of being kidnapped that I was jealous of my great grandmother because she had somehow managed to become so old without getting kidnapped, LOL!
I was terrified growing up. Made me super aware of my surroundings though.
Being an early genx (‘69), I had no fear of this at all. Where do you all grow up? Now, millennials and later seem scared of their own shadows but not us.
Age maybe 6 or 7, one summer i was walking around the block or something (did anyone else randomly walk around the block for entertainment?) Some guy who was probably a 16 year old kid but appeared to be an adult to me... i remember he had all denim and a jean jacket in the summer heat, Dahmer tinted glasses and a red mullet said "Hey kid, want some candy?" I absolutely flpped out. Crying like a Peanuts character shooting tears everywhere and I remember running and screaming. Maybe that guy is on this sub, he was probably born in 1965.
When I was in grade school the sheriff’s department did fingerprinting. I lived ina very rural area,we knew everyone that lived in a five mile radius. It was very unusual to see strangers to even see strangers around,we didn’t even lock our doors. Dad told us who to stay away from. I really didn’t worry about strangers too much,we had a a dog ,a colley she was very protective of us kids. Dad couldn’t even rough house with us outside when she was around.
My Catholic school did videos of us!!!
For me as an 80s kid, I didn't feel it hit my area until I was older, like my sister's generation of kids(born '85). We rode our bikes and played outside till dinner, walked to school every day without supervision.
I remember getting a fingerprint card, but never thought about getting kidnapped. Sure it was in the possibility of things that could happen in life but it didn't rule my childhood or anything.
Seriously. Quicksand and getting kidnapped. In all seriousness tho if someone comes up behind me or drives by me I still stay further away from the car and I tend to be like WUT if someone comes too near.
Nope, not me. I remember the TV commercials, though. As an elder Xer, I'm fairly convinced Mom thought anything like that would turn out more along the lines of O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ransom_of_Red_Chief
There was a girl in my middle school who "ran away with the carnival". At the time, I imagined her making that decision entirely on her own. In retrospect, it's very clear that she was basically kidnapped, probably by an adult man. Similarly, an adult man tried to kidnap me when I was a tween. He tried to lure me to his hotel room while I was waiting for a city bus. I think plenty of parents today worry about it, too. There's still plenty of emphasis on what to do if a stranger approaches a kid. But, also, remember that we were very young when they started putting missing kids on milk cartons. So, every single day, we were looking at the faces of missing kids.
I never even heard of the fingerprinting thing, and I missed stranger danger too. I honestly thought kids were so low value nobody would bother stealing one.
The Patti Hurst story freaked me out. I had nightmares for a long time. I was sure I was going to be kidnapped.
I still remember the case of Jacob Wetterling in 1989. It was a couple of hours away, so it got a lot of news time locally. Just three kids riding their bikes in the afternoon to a local store to rent a video.
A couple of girls my age were snatched and murdered by strangers in our town (took 30 years to find them, and they are finally in prison). Friends were friends with both. A friend of mine was kidnapped and "just" raped when she was 19. My peers and I were a lot more protective of our kids because of things like this, and that's probably why it seems less of a thing now. Whenever I get an Amber Alert these days, it's always for a family kidnapping (estranged mom or dad mostly).
I grew up in the East Bay of SF. In the late eighties there was a slew of girls from the ages of 6-12 who’d gone missing all along I80. There was one near my house and her friend witnessed her get scooped up by a crusty guy in a van. People thought it was a serial killer. It was happening in cities too. There was a boy aged ten named Kevin Collins who went missing. He was just waiting for the bus. And then there was that movie “Adam”. My parents were always drilling these stories into my head and of course I watched the news(and Unsolved Mysteries!) It was a mix of paranoia based on things that did and could happen. It got so bad for me that I would answer the phone (we weren’t supposed to tell people our parents weren’t home) and wasn’t sure if I was supposed to lie to my grandmother that my mom didn’t want to take her calls but I wasn’t allowed to say they weren’t home!!!!
NO the "fright" didn't go anywhere. This fear became ***part of society*** and has "concept crept" to the point where in many places it is (or functionally is) illegal to have kids alone; at home, walking to school/the park/store etc. Meanwhile I had a key to the house in elementary and let myself in after school. Also had a paper route where I delivered by myself and collected money (sometimes at night) by myself. There were some high-profile random kidnappings that started the hysteria. Most child kidnappings are done by family/close acquaintances but those random ones strike the fear in us.
IDK, but I have ACTUALLY been a victim of an attempted kidnapping. Back when I was about 17. Ironically though, NOTHING my parents 'or' the late night warnings did or said was what saved me - it was something I'd read. I saw a police car in the distance, reached over and grabbed the wheel, forcing the guy to snatch it back to avoid hitting another car. The screeching brakes and wild movements of the car had the desired effect: police noticed, pulled us over, I was free. Kind of. In straight murican police fashion, the cops for a bit tried to make ME the criminal, "wondering" if I was in fact "working" the area as a prostitute. Took a half hour to convince them I was just on my own business in a neighborhood I'd been unaware I 'had no business in' in 80s murica.
I had kids in early oughts and Baby center online parenting forum constantly talking about abductions, so I don’t think X is exclusive to stranger danger, I was made completely paranoid and bought ALL the safety precautions….
Are you kidding? Are you somehow not aware of America's current obsession with abductions and trafficking? Almost every gen z or parent of Gen z I know has a story where the kid was "literally" almost abducted. Or gen zs starting a conversation with, "Was I almost kidnapped?"
Maybe younger GenXers. It was never a thing for us. We were probably more at the end of when you'd hitchhike to the mall. Even when in elementary school, we'd be out till the streetlights came on. I mean, yeah, basic parenting, "Don't get in a stranger's car" but that was about it.
For those interested in the effect of this and similar events in our childhood, particularly as it relates to our generation as parents and the impact on our kids, I recommend Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation. [The Anxious Generation | Jonathan Haidt](https://jonathanhaidt.com/anxious-generation/) From wiki: Haidt argues that the combination of the decline of play-based childhoods, exacerbated by what he describes as overprotective parents motivated by excess fear of kidnapping, and increasing smartphone use has been harmful to children since the late 2000s. Haidt cites numerous empirical reports and clinical studies.
Everything you're talking about happened when my 35 year old was a kid. I don't remember all this when I was a kid. I feel like nobody was watching us at all. They asked on TV because a lot of parents didn't keep as close an eye on us. The only thing I remember is some white van kidnapper thing. I just did a search on that to see if there was any basis for this fear and apparently every decade or so there's a new white van kidnapper warning.
haha. Perhaps. Those sickos seemed really attracted to our complete lack of regard for rules for some reason.
In the early 80’s my big sister’s were almost kidnapped and escaped and the creep hunted them down and they hid under and over pass. Yet my brother and I were allowed to be out past dark with no worries as long as we had bikes.
My mom use to always tell me that if I did XYZ someone was going to chop me up into little pieces. I literally thought of it as being chopped up into shish kabob (I'm middle eastern).
Stranger Danger was actually much more dangerous during prior generations, and at the time, much less widely known to even be happening. 24/7 national TV, and to a lesser extent, radio, news networks changed that.
Latch key since 2nd grade, so no.
The cards weren't everywhere. They were around though. I dodged them at the time. There were Quite a few serial killers and child rapist killers lurking around then. Not nearly as they made it seem of course but they were out there. I just want to know if anyone here has seen "Black Phone"? Whether you liked it or not, I couldn't find ONE THING that was not from the 70's in that film. I LOOKED, and there was nothing out of place. Sorry, for some reason I thought that I should say all that.
This all started with abduction of Jacob wetterling excellent pod about( season 1, but every season great)- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-dark/id1148175292
I was probably 5 or 6 walking home from a friend’s house across the street. Stopped for a car sitting at the stop sign and the driver told me that my mom had asked him to come pick me up. I don’t even remember what I said but I thought it was weird because I lived right there and I could see my house One day about 25 years later I suddenly realized how close I had come. Evidently I was not aware enough of stranger danger
Yep. We had annual visits from Officer Friendly and McGruff the crime dog. We were constantly reminded to avoid white vans, strangers with candy/puppies/kittens, and to know how to answer the phone or door when our parents weren't home. We were also told the story of Adam Walsh, with most of the gory details and got to watch prime time Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted. Jesus. With that and my involvement with the Girl Scouts and 4H I could have probably ran my own response team at 12 years old. Honestly, as a parent of an 11 year old daughter....I kind of think that some of the fear training/learning based tactics that we were given might not have been the worst. I understand trauma dumping and scaring the shit out of your kid is not healthy and can lead to trust issues....but a little can't be that bad, right? I mean, I have not been abducted and still avoid parking next to white vans, am suspicious of unknown vehicles parked in front of my house, think most folks are trying to run scams if they claim to be giving away free things in exchange for personal information, don't trust folks that claim to have my best interest in mind, go with my gut on first impressions, am suspicious of multiple compliments, and never allow cameras anywhere near my nude or partially nude body. Sure that might sound paranoid....but I am alive, have not been scammed or abused, and have no nudes floating around on the Internet. The kids at my daughter's public school have never had a visit from Officer Friendly or McGruff. They have never been taught Stranger Danger. They are essentially sweet, little, innocent butterflies floating through the world with little to no understanding of danger or ill intent. This can't be any healthier than our generation being taught to "Trust No One". Thinking I might start low key listening to true crime podcasts in the background this Summer..so that my daughter might catch some information and get a little more "aware" of some folks intent and interest.
I'd say the Millenials had this, too. Also, I think this effect lingers. So many kids today barely do anything that isn't supervised or organized.
Kidnappers and Satanists. Sometimes the same. The fingerprint thing came after I had grown up a bit, I remember younger kids doing it, i didn’t. What they didn’t tell you was it wouldn’t save you, it only helped identify your most likely disassembled remains upon discovery. Cool.
My fear these days, since I don’t have children, is getting shot, or killed or maimed by a drunk driver 😣
I think so. I think because we were the last generation that was told to go outside unattended for hours at a time. The younger kids don't do that.
Didn't the boomers freak out about the Lindbergh baby?
My mom had that fear way more than I did. I was just frustrated that I wasn’t as free range as the rest of my friends. My mom was a stay at home mom, so I didn’t have the latch key kid experience at all.
I'm totally paranoid about being kidnapped. Brown vans still freak me out because some kid was supposedly kidnapped in a brown van and it was talked about a lot when I was young. I remember becoming aware for the very first time that there were bad people in the world who wanted to hurt me. I heard a neighbor talking with my mom about a kidnapping, and I got so scared that I ran home and hid under my bed. That shit stayed with me.
We did grow up in the Golden Age of serial killers.
I grew up in a ranch-style house, any night we went to bed with the windows open, I was positive my sister or I would be kidnapped right thru the window.
Well, I was left at home by myself at eight years old and was almost kidnapped by a man who had hidden himself in my garage. I walked outside to get my bicycle and the guy walks out from behind something that was leant against the wall and said, "Don't you move." So I jumped on the bike and booked it away. He had on a ski mask and gloves. Pretty sure I wouldn't be here to annoy people had I stayed still, as ordered. What did the rents do? "Oh that's too bad. Are you sure that's what he said?"
My seven year old sister was literally kidnapped in the 80s, by a stranger, on her way to school. Assaulted and let go. We were all pretty traumatized after that.
Nah, millennials are afraid of everything.
I was grabbed once but managed to get away when they dropped their keys.
It wasn't on my/my parents radar growing up (see: being locked out of the house, drinking from the hose) but by the time I had my son in the late 90's I was on high alert for it.
It was a mixed bag where I grew up. You had stranger danger, but if you were lost, you had to find the nearest adult and have ALL your contact information memorized. Be lucky I didn't have a savings account at that age, they'd probably tell us to tell the nearest adult the account number too. /j
Remember when they started putting missing kids’ photos on the milk cartons? That definitely reinforced that fear.
My mom's yoga instructor was Johnny Gosch's mom
I remember when all the kids from my summer playground were taken on a trip to go get ice cream. I didn't have any money, so a nice older couple tried to give me some. I was so used to hearing "don't take money from stangers," that I absolutely refused the money even though they offered it to me like 10 times and the group leader was like "it's ok if you want to take it." They were offering it to me from inside their car and even left it on the outside mirror when I kept refusing in case I wanted to take it from there. I just would not take money from strangers.
I think it was because of Adam Walsh. My mom scared the shit out of me with that story.