I remember, when I was about 3 or 4 years old having what I felt was a very important conversation with my mother.  "How can people say that you should never talk to strangers?  If you never talk to strangers, you'll never make ANY friends at all."  This led my mother to discuss with me what makes a person safe to talk to and how to feel out most situations and decide which strangers were ok to talk to and which ones to avoid.

While I do talk to strangers, I keep myself pretty safe overall.

One of the things that I taught my son when he was very little was how to find a safe person in an emergency situation.  "If you get lost or separated from me or your father, the best thing to do is to find a mother with other children and tell her you are lost.  She will most likely help you out."  (Uniformed police, etc. are not overly common in my area and uniforms are an easy way to manipulate and trick people.  It's harder to fake caring for children.)

Anyway, I was reading an article about that Boy Scout and it struck me that one of the things that made this worse than it needed to be was his parents ingraining the scare tactic of "NEVER talk to strangers" instead of taking the time to teach him how to keep himself safe in most situations.

"Some clues to what led to Brennan's four-day odyssey have emerged, though the boy has revealed few details: Factors include his partner's failure to follow a key Scout rule to always look out for your buddy, a wrong turn Brennan took in the woods and the boy's strict adherence to parental advice to avoid strangers _ in this case rescue workers.

<snip...>

The boy said he kept two thoughts in mind, both of them instructions from his parents: Never leave a trail and never talk to strangers. So, when people on horseback appeared on his trail Tuesday, Brennan pulled off the path and out of view until they passed."

I hope that people will take something away from this.  I hope that the lesson here that scare tactics are just as dangerous as not teaching your children anything at all.  Don't get me wrong, I understand that people want to shelter and keep their children safe, but isn't TEACHING them how to take care of themselves the best form of long-term safety that there is?

~FG };^>