Stranger Danger

The statistics seem pretty clear, a child is more likely to be kidnapped by a family member than by a total stranger. That doesn't mean that we parents don't worry about strangers. We worry so much that schools and safety agencies teach about "stranger danger." To be honest, most children are wary of strangers anyway and cling to parents in new situations. Not my child.

Nope, my boy is the ambassador to the world. We take a walk, he absolutely says hello to everyone who passes. That, in my mind, in a good thing. His cheery greeting brings smiles to the world. Every parent (and I mean every parent) who walks his/her child to my son's school knows my son. Both his dad and I have had the experience of being some place only to have a complete stranger say "hello" to Andrew, by name. This is because, due to the autism, he is great with adults. Not so great with same age peers, but adults just eat him up. Thus, our problem.

Due to the likelihood that he suffers from Child Maltreatment Syndrome, with a dash of Disorganized Attachment thrown in, he has very little stranger danger. He talks to everyone, thus no one is a stranger. He does ask me for permission to talk to new people, which is a good thing.

Today, his school caused me a bit of a scare. I had to run errands, so I sent a note to school explaining that the sitter would pick him up, as she does when I am working. No problem, except at the end of the day, he did not make it to her car. She went into the office and was told that he left with his mother. Not true. Meanwhile, someone else called his dad, who dashed out of school to go get him. I called his dad to confirm that he was going to retrieve the boy from the sitter, only to be mildly chewed out. No one called me. That stirs up an issue that is not entirely related here. I suppose that the school thought I was still working.

I dashed to the school, grumpily demanded to know why I hadn't been called. No good reply. My biggest concern is that someone thought he had left with me. What if that "mom" had been some random lady looking for a child. I know that's unreasonable and that because so many people know my son, that would not have happened. But, autism is a communication disability. It took a couple of hours for him to actually tell us how the end of the day happened. If a stranger had tried to take him, he might not have been able to communicate that something was horribly wrong.

Now, I feel like I need to have on file pictures of people who are allowed to take my boy home and that everyone needs to have that file. I know that I have to have a meeting with the school to insure this never happens again.