What do you do when you find out that an 11-year-old girl abducted a few days ago has been found dead …. and when you find out, your own 11-year-old is snuggling in bed next to you? Do you spare your 11-year-old the disturbing news that evil preys on children his own age? Or do you play the video of the girl’s abduction and use it as an object lesson in not talking to strangers?
I kind of played the Carlie Brucia story both ways. I actually watched the video clip of Carlie’s abduction – even more heart-rending the way it turned out – but didn’t call it to the attention of my son. Then my 15-year-old walked in, saw the laptop and the headline, and said matter-of-factly, “Oh, she’s dead.”
My 11-year-old pretended not to have heard anything.
“You know,” I said. “All those times I worry about you…”
Silence.
“And you say, ‘Mom, don’t you trust me?’”
From under the covers. “Yeah.”
“And I say, “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s other people. Bad people.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you see why.”
Silence.
Lesson over.
When something like this happens, you hear about parents putting a tight rein on their kids – sometimes not even allowing them to go into their own backyards alone. But in our town, kids walk to school on their own, ride bikes on their own, visit friends on their own, play in the street on their own. And all this seems right. Even so, when my 11-year-old was late coming home from school twice this week, I felt like my heart had been kidnapped. Then he wandered in, oblivious to the drama that had been playing in my head, and plunked down his backpack. After which I could breathe again.
Should I go with the statistical odds and allow my kids their freedom? Or should I pull in the reins? Drive them everywhere? Arm them with cell phones and beepers every time they step outside?
I’m sure mothers everywhere are debating this very subject right now.
My mother never learned how to swim. When she was growing up, public swimming pools were places where you could get polio. Or so she told me.
On the other hand, my father, who grew up not too far away, did learn how to swim. In a lake. The sink-or-swim method, no less.
My grandparents’ caution may have prevented my mother from being paralyzed. And yet it led to paralysis of a different sort: a lifetime fear of boats and water.
Who knows what shadow we cast across our kids in the name of protecting them.
Did Carlie Brucia's parents fail to innoculate her against evil by insufficiently frightening her on the subject of strangers? Or was she simply the victim of evil, and really, really bad luck?