Advice for parents

If you take your child to a playground in a neighborhood that isn’t yours, and you see an adult you don’t know (a stranger) who is talking with other adults in the playground, you might decide that the best way to keep your child safe is to casually threaten the stranger. Anecdotally, this seems to happen with alarming frequency, especially if the stranger has a camera. It happened to me today. But aside from encouraging paranoia and hostility among children and other adults, it’s not clear that you’re accomplishing anything good. Neighborhoods that aren’t yours are naturally full of strangers, and here’s the really mind-bending part: when you’re in a new neighborhood, you are actually a stranger. You see, there are other people in the world, and most of us have unique senses of self.

It’s a delight to see our local playground being used by toddlers, and to run into an old friend there. But the preschool network that has decided to flash mob local playgrounds over the next two months really should consider whether they’d rather be teaching their children hostility or civility, because those are different. Children absorb a tremendous amount from adult interactions, and those children will probably grow up happier and will probably be greater assets to their communities if they learn what communities are about.

So my suggestion would be to either talk to the stranger by introducing yourself or don’t talk to the stranger. But freaking out because you ventured beyond your darkened living room and saw other people in the world? Try not to do that. Not everyone unknown to you is a bad person who deserves to be threatened. And if the mass media has convinced you that everyone you don’t know is a terrorist or a child molester, stop watching television.

Update: I’ve noticed that this never happens when parents are alone or in small groups; parents only start threatening people or calling the police when the parents are in large groups and are the least vulnerable. (Law enforcement tends to behave the same way: individually, they are generally reasonable; in large groups, they are more likely to become aggressive.) The threats are about power, not safety.