In honor of...

..."Take your child to the park...and leave them there day"

Last Saturday was "Take your child to the park...and leave them there day." This was proposed by Leonore Skenazy, the author of "Free Range Kids". She proposed that parents look and see if they have well-populated and generally safe park nearby, and if their kids are 7 or 8 or older (she pointed out that 7 is the age when kids around the world generally start walking to school alone), that parents simply drop them off for a period of time. She said it could be for just 15 minutes while you walk around the park, or for longer. The problem being that kids are isolated from each other and from society, live sedentary lives, all at a time when the world is safer than it's been for the last 30 years or more.

Some statistics:

Are you afraid of being struck by lightning? No? Why not? Because the odds of getting struck by lightning are-- 1 : 280,000

• Number of missing minors each year (includes teen runaways, parental abductions, and kids who wandered away for a couple of hours): 750,000 ⁽¹⁾
  
• Number of missing minors who are kidnapped by strangers each year: 115 ⁽¹⁾
  
• Number of missing minors who are kidnapped by strangers each year and never return home alive: 50 ⁽¹⁾
  
• Rate of sterotypical kidnapped kids who remain unrecovered/killed vs all missing: 1 : 15,000
  
• Number of kids in 2000: 72,000,000 ⁽²⁾
  
• Rate of stereotypical kidnapping per capita: 1: 626,086
  
• Rate of stereotypical kidnapping and murder or never-recovered per capita: 1: 1,440,000

• Number of children injured annually in car accidents: 184,000 ⁽³⁾
  
• Number of children killed annually in car accidents: 1,335 ⁽³⁾
  
• Number of children: 72,000,000
  
• Chance of child dying in car accident: 1 : 53,932

• Number of minors who die of cancer every year: 2,300⁽⁴⁾

In other words:

• A child is 11.6 times more likely to die in a car accident than be kidnapped by a stranger.
  
  
• A child is almost twice as likely to die of cancer than in a car accident.
  
  
• A child is 26.7 times more likely to die in a car accident than be kidnapped and killed by a stranger.
  
  
• A child is 46 times more likely to die of cancer than be kidnapped and killed by a stranger.
  
  
• A person is 5.1 times more likely to be struck by lightning than a child is to be kidnapped and killed by a stranger.

It's a pretty-safe world out there. Maybe it's time we act like it.

(1) link: DOJ report on Stranger Kidnappings (data is from 2002)
(2) link: US Cencus data 2000.
(3) link: CDC data from 2008.
(4) link: Cancer facts.