I guess I have to amend my answer. I play games in game stores. Just yesterday as we were wrapping up our Pathfinder session, a 10-12 year old kid who had been playing came over and we talked a bit, I showed him my character, etc. No big deal.
That is one place where you SHOULD freely speak to children. If they ask you something, talk to them like you would anyone else.
Yes, all the time. Growing up in the 1970-80s. At the park, at the library, in the grocery store. Someone would come up and ask about what I was reading, one woman made a joke about the fact that my winter coat was Head brand (and that a head was a bathroom on a boat), told us to be careful riding our bikes (not imminent danger, just a friendly word of caution)…
Lots of times adults who I didn’t know in the least spoke to us and were interested in what we were doing.
FWIW, I’m inclined to make small talk with kids who are nearby as well. Kids have always been vey nice about it.
Yeah, I missed part of the context. I did realize that he was there at the park with his kid and that it turned out to be a misunderstanding.
Anyway, the OP’s story (from the other thread) does make it sound creepier as it goes along, so I see where the OP is coming from.
Heck, I talk with kids all the time. In public even! How we got to the point that someone calls the cops because some dad talked to some kids that were not related to him is beyond my understanding.
I will be clear here, I am a middle aged, large, biker-looking dude. Scary!! I have several grand kids that I take to the park by myself. Sometimes it is just one and sometimes it had been seven or eight of them & their friends. I know, it is scary who some folks let their kids go off with. Often the other kids at the park will come up to me and just want to chat. I am OK with that. If their parents want to ask me some questions, no problem. If the parents are too intimidated to talk to me, that is their problem. So far no one has called the cops on me that I know of. I like to play with dogs as well, If that scares folks, so be it.
Like many things that freak other folks out, I choose not to worry about “pedophile paranoia”. If I were to worry about that I would miss enjoying the time I get to spend with these kids. I refuse to let others control my life that way. Heck, kids are fun!!
I walk my dog on suburban streets. Depending on whether school happens to be in session at the time, random kids will run up to me and start asking me about my dog, can I pet the dog, I know a dog that looks like that, etc.
So yeah, I talk to random kids on the street. I don’t START the conversation with them, but I’m also not going to snarl “Get away from me,” to some six-year old who just wants to ask me about my dog.
I forgot to add, IMHO, the OP of the other tread overreacted. The least they should have done is ask the fellow which kid was his. They had already engaged him in conversation. Just ask for goodness sake! Barring that, just wait & watch, it will become obvious who his kid is. Get a grip!
Women can still have conversations with children. Men can’t really do this anymore without risking something bad happening.
I’m a little bit paranoid perhaps, but in situations like the OP, if the parents want to chat with me, I always chat about my kid. Firstly, I never mind talking about my kid. Secondly, I always like to explain why I’m there and what I’m doing.
And regarding the OP: involving the police never makes things better. Would you have called the police if you’d know that three cars would turn up? And their behaviour when they arrived? Now you know, and you can consider that context next time you see people playing with kinds in the park.
While incidents of stranger abductions are very rare, incidents of children experiencing sexual assault are far too high. Sometimes it’s an acquaintance, like the camp counselor who assaulted my first girlfriend when she was a child; sometimes it’s a stranger, like the guy who assaulted me in the arcade when I was a child. From what I understand, often such assaults are prefaced with a grooming conversation designed to allay the child’s suspicions and to ascertain whether there are any adults nearby who can protect the kid.
I have no problem at all with people talking with my kids, of course, or with kids talking with me. Just make sure that there’s contact between the parents is all. It’s how you keep kids safe.
As for “some dude,” show me some evidence that a significant number of children are sexually assaulted by women they don’t know, and I’ll mix up the genders next time I post about it.
Depends on the situation. In a library or bookstore (or ages ago when video rental stores still existed) or the Lego store, I sometimes find myself in conversations with children. Mostly, its in the form of “If you like Book A, check out Book C afterwards” or “Battlefield Earth is colossally bad, and not in a good funny way.”
I am a children’s librarian, so I talk to kids all the time, all ages, kids of every stripe. I’m very comfortable around kids and enjoy interacting with them. I believe that children benefit from intergenerational relationships, and part of growing up straight involves learning how to talk to people who are outside your peer group.
I’m very careful, though, about engaging kids outside of my professional setting. Parents, some of them, are paranoid and operate on a hair trigger when it comes to their children’s welfare, but I know from my long experience in dealing with children that they are – most of them – inexperienced, naïve, and easily manipulated. The protective reaction of parents is understandable.
Yes, it sucks that I --a man – might be suspected of being a pedophile if I talk to strange children, but the vast majority of pedophiles are men. So I’ve just got to suck it up. The chance of a child encountering a pedophile might be very small, but the damage that could be done by such an encounter is very large. I cut parents some slack for erring on the side of caution.
My office does a charity thing with kids every December where we take the kids for pizza and then out for shopping at the local Walmart for needed clothing. It’s mostly a one on one situation, but in a public setting. The men in my office refuse to do it if they don’t have another adult to pair up with. Gotta have the second witness to prove you are actually a good person.
This summer we took the kids to the public pool in a town we were visiting. My husband is a friendly guy and enjoys talking to kids (always done very carefully so as not to be accused of “grooming.”) A little blind girl latched on to him and wanted to play. She would grab his hands and was very tactile. He was kind and played with her without encouraging her too much and tried several times to get her to go find her family. I stayed within three feet of them the entire time for fear of my husband being accused of harming her. And my fear was very real. I didn’t want to transfer it to her or my own children though so I sucked it down and just stayed close.
Pedophilia Paranoia is real and it affects everyone in a very negative way. I know we have to be careful and that kids do get hurt. It’s important that we teach kids how to watch out for the red flags and basic safety while watching out for them. But it would be awfully nice if we could do it without any man who shows the slightest interest in children being suspect.
I don’t think it’s very small.
If these stats are comparable–they’re in different places on the website–it’d mean that there are a little more than 20,000 cases of children younger than 9 who were sexually assaulted in a single year.
From another cite:
Again, there may be complications here that make these numbers not proportional–but if they are, we’re talking roughly 2,500 cases of children sexually assaulted by strangers each year.
That’s not every kid, of course, but it’s enough that a bit of caution is appropriate when you see a stranger talking with your child in an unusual fashion.
This is my memory as well. Remeber, too, that back then children were allowed to roam unsupervised. Maybe not at ages 5-7, but certainly by 8 I would walk from school to my parents’ store, and would certainly talk to people I encountered.
I still treat children like the human beings they are, not like extensions or possessions of their parents. Most people appreciate it, but some find it creepy because they assume a perverted motivation. Truly sad.
I remember at age 5, walking about 3 blocks to a small store with a dime in hand. This was back when candy bars were 5 cents.
Within a year or two I was everywhere by myself. We moved into an outer suburb when I was 8 and it was a good mile to the convenience store. My friends and I roamed far through development and fields. By 11 or 12 I got my 10-speed bike and regularly rode 8+ miles to visit a cousin all by myself.
Would happen all the time to me growing up in Australia in the 70s. Times have changed.
My bolding.
Some people call it caution, others call it paranoia.
2,500 kids sounds like a hell of a lot of cases. OH MY GOD! What should we do? Until you realize that there are 74.2 million kids in the US. So the odds of any particular child becoming a victim this year is :drum roll please: 0.0034%.
HOLY SHIT. Let’s race over and give the guy the hairy eyeball!
It’s even more ludicrous when you actually take time to think, rather than blindly react, that not all victims are equal.
Strangers engaging in grooming behavior are not headed to carefully manicured suburban parks with overly protective helicopter parents with stable families who will rush to defend their child from all evil: real or imagined.
What are the odds of a pedophile really engaging in grooming when the only chance of a child going to the park is in the family minivan? How and when is the grooming actually going to occur?
We give our children warnings about adults who are overly friendly. (The odds of a female known to us molesting our children would be far, far higher than a random stranger in a park. The odds of a male known to us would be even higher, of course.)
What I won’t do is give in to mass hysteria by relying on statistical nonsense.
Then you can’t understand numbers. There are three hundred million people in the U.S. If we assume half of those are children, which is about right, that means you’ve shown 0.3%. And that’s one interaction over a lifetime, not any particular interaction.
Stop fear mongering. It’s why Trump was elected.
[Bolding mine.]
I think the above is a very good point worth considering. The adults I’ve known who have encountered ‘stranger danger’ as kids were mostly ungoverned. Broken homes, latchkey, poor supervision even when a guardian was around and even less instruction of any kind. They were just kind of out there all alone and vulnerable to being groomed. Unlike currently when everyone and their dogs is concerned about sexual abuse, these children literally had no one to protect or look out for them. So I feel a lot of this angst is misplaced for those who try to do a decent parenting job.
Kids and Oddballs migrate to me…they always have. I willingly talk to children (and oddballs) They’re funny and have a unique outlook on the world.
FWIW: I am a middle aged female, so I think I look (am!) “safe” to parents