Reading, writing and abduction prevention?

You’ve got to keep asking your kids “how was school today?” even if the answer is almost always “fine.” This week, I asked my fourth-grader how his day was and he said “Weird. A lady who runs a funeral home came and taught us what to do if we get kidnapped and thrown into the trunk of a car.”

Say what?

Had I noticed the email from the school last week, I would have known that the school was hosting a special visitor,  a representative of an abduction prevention program sponsored nationally by the Dignity Memorial network of funeral providers.  According to the overlooked email (gee, how did that happen?) the program aims to “empower children and their parents by teaching them how to recognize, avoid and escape potentially dangerous situations.”

I appreciate how challenging it must be for funeral homes to find appropriate public service/marketing opportunities, but isn’t it a little creepy for kids to learn about safety from a funeral director?

But what really bothered me as I listened to my son’s account of the program was the extremity of it. It’s hard to know when common sense safety lessons cross over and become alarmist fear-mongering, but I’d say it’s probably when you switch from talking about what to do when you can’t find your parents in the supermarket to how to locate a wire and cut it so you can disable the car that is speeding you to your doom while you are trapped in the trunk.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to expend a lot of energy reassuring my son that he would never be kidnapped, never have to find one of those car wires that the “funeral lady” described.  He told me that a lot of the information was interesting and smart — like how if they are ever followed by a car they should run away in the other direction — but that when the funeral lady started talking about kidnapping, he and his friend looked at each other incredulously and said “kidnapping????” and started laughing.

I don’t mean to make light of the issue. I can’t imagine anything worse than having a child snatched away. I’m still haunted by a Miami Herald article I read way back in the ’80s, before I could even imagine being a mother, about a woman’s years of searching for the teen-aged daughter who had disappeared one sunny afternoon from the bucolic streets of Coral Gables.

It would be easy to say, what’s the harm? Why not give children tips on protecting themselves even if they’ll probably never need them? But the harm is this: it fuels the fear that rules the lives of so many parents, that prevents them from letting their children walk to school alone or run an errand or play outside unsupervised or climb a tree because something might happen.

Yes, something might happen. Kidnapping might happen, even though the statistics make it very clear that the chances are infinitesimal. As Lenore Skenazy points out in Free-Range Kids, the number of children abducted and killed by strangers has held steady over the years  — about 1 in 1.5 million. Your child is much more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 280,000, according to the National Lightning Safety Institute) or injured in the car that is taking him to school because you are too afraid to let him walk alone.

I’ll learn more about this program next week, when the school hosts a meeting for parents. I’m hoping that the program is less alarmist than my son’s description suggests. Perhaps the advice really will be empowering to parents in that it will leave us feeling that our children are now better equipped to have the freedom and independence they crave. That would be nice. But I have a hunch it will leave even the most level-headed of us feeling nervous.