There are 626,000 children under 18 in Dallas County.

This year, statistics say, 34 will die in a car accident, while one will be kidnapped by someone he or she doesn’t know.

Sign up for our newsletter!

* indicates required

Translation? A child is 34 times more likely to die in the car on the way to school than be abducted by a stranger.

Yet most parents these days won’t let their kids out of their sight. The kids don’t walk to their friends’ houses or to school. They don’t ride their bikes around the block or to the nearest creek. They don’t even play in the front yard without our watchful eyes.

Why then, given favorable odds of 1 in 626,000, don’t we allow our children more freedom?

The answer to that question rests in the hearts and minds of neighborhood parents.

As a child growing up in Tulsa in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Lake Highlands resident Lisa Hartshorn remembers spending her days running wild and free.

“We used to play outside all day long and come home when our mothers called us,” she says. “We would walk all the way to the Quick Trip to get penny candy, which was probably a mile. But my mother wasn’t worried about us.”

Most of us born before a certain date have similar recollections of childhood – a time of relative freedom, when we were free to explore the world outside our homes for hours on end, with little parental involvement. Endless bike rides, fireflies caught in jars and rock collections uncovered in out-of-the-way places are common experiences among those of us who grew up in the 1980s and earlier.

But Hartshorn doesn’t expect her own children – Hannah Kate, 4, and Henry, 2 – to have the same memories.

“I’m not sure what we’ll do,” she says. “Hannah Kate has little friends now that live one street over. Will I allow her to walk over there by herself, unescorted? I don’t know yet. I think it will depend upon her character, and if she really gets that there is potential danger out there.”

Not surprisingly, Hartshorn isn’t alone in her beliefs. A survey conducted in 2002 by Web site Parentcenter.com revealed that only 5 percent of more than 10,000 parents polled let their children play outside unsupervised.

For Hartshorn, the decisions that she and husband Chris will face when their children grow older already are confusing.

“Everything has changed since I was a kid,” she says. “Kids have all kinds of pressure now, things that I didn’t have to worry about. It was a lot easier being a kid in the ‘70s.”

And it was probably a lot easier being a parent, too. These days, moms and dads have much more to worry about. Whereas the biggest fears of our own parents didn’t amount to much more than neighborhood bullies or speeding cars, today the overriding fear seems to be that someone will kidnap our children.

This isn’t surprising, given the media attention paid to child abduction cases, which repeatedly illustrate the tragedy, worry and grief we could face by turning our heads for a moment.

News stories like these are powerful motivation for not allowing your children to play outside alone.

“We worry a lot about our kids being abducted,” says neighborhood resident and mother Farrel Chapman. “No one wants to be that parent that lets their kid play outside and then something happens to them.”

“Abduction by a total stranger, while the consequences are devastating, in actuality is a rare event compared to other crimes against children.”

So says Lt. Bill Walsh of the Dallas Police Department’s Youth and Family Support Division, which oversees family violence cases and incidents of child abuse, exploitation and abduction. Children are much more likely to be harmed or kidnapped by someone within their family or closely connected, he says.

Stereotypical kidnappings, he says, where “a complete stranger takes your child by force for the purposes of sexual assault and perhaps murder” are relatively uncommon.

But these are the cases we hear about over and over again on the news, cases such as those of Amber Hagerman and Opal Jennings. Cases, Walsh says, which nationwide “probably happen about 150-200 times a year.”

According to a United States Department of Justice study about missing children, the figure may be even lower. That study found that only about 115 cases annually are classified as the most serious type of abduction – where the child is harmed or killed within the first three hours of being taken. By way of comparison, the U.S. population for children under 18 is about 73 million. If those same statistical odds are applied here, only one of the more than 626,000 kids in Dallas County is likely to be abducted this year.

Walsh also says child abductions probably aren’t any more common now than they were back in the 1980s and earlier, when many of us spent hours outside, unsupervised.

“It didn’t get the attention it gets today. We didn’t have the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children. The national media didn’t cover it,” he says.

So, if it stands to reason that most of us spent countless hours outside, unsupervised, without being hurt by a stranger – not to mention that the chances of our child being abducted and harmed are actually startlingly low – shouldn’t our kids be allowed the same freedoms?

“I’m afraid to say it, but I don’t think so,” Walsh says. “It only takes a few minutes for someone to grab a child. It is a chance I wouldn’t take with my own children or grandchildren.”

But why?

Because, Walsh insists, there are factors out there beyond our control. He knows the tricks abductors use to lure kids in, claiming they’ve lost pets, have candy, or have come to take the child to his or her parents.

But, he says, explaining to our kids that this kind of behavior is out there isn’t enough.

“What can you tell children? You tell them not to talk to strangers, for instance, but Ted Bundy put on a paramedic’s uniform and told his victims their family members had been in an accident and asked them to go off with him. Do you think they went? Of course they did. People can be very, very devious.”

And, he says, even if you teach children all the common sense in the world, even if you explain to them the most commonly used lures and drill “stranger danger” into them, it’s still not enough. There’s nothing to stop a potential abductor from resorting to even more frightening methods.

“No matter how much a child is schooled by his or her parents to not go with a stranger, do you think someone could resist me if I decided to just use brute force?” asks Walsh, himself a father of two.

“No.”

It’s not that neighborhood resident Jennifer Thomas doesn’t worry about her kids being kidnapped. It’s just that she’s not worrying about it much while they’re outside playing.

Her three children, particularly Jared, 8, and Kate, 6 (the youngest, David, is 3), do play outside, often while she’s in the house. But, she’s quick to point out, their ability to do so has more to do with luck than anything.

“It just happened that way,” she says. “When we moved here, our son was about four years old. Right after we moved in, we saw all the boys in the neighborhood playing in kind of a cul-de-sac area.”

The Thomases live on a street where, she says, “everyone’s watching out for everyone else’s children,” so that even if she’s not out there keeping an eye on them, someone else is.

“In the afternoons after school you’ll start seeing children outside playing,” she says. “They go from yard to yard, but they’re always in sight, always pretty close. You can usually go outside and almost hear where they’re at.”

Unfortunately, most neighborhood parents don’t have that kind of ideal situation, and Thomas admits that the ability to let her children have that modicum of independence is “something that ties us here.”

“We love the street we live on,” she says. “They’re doing the things they should be doing. They’re exploring, they’re using their imaginations.”

Indeed, there’s little doubt the freedom to play is an important part of childhood. The Institute For Play (IFP), a California-based organization that studies the effects of play on Americans’ lives, asserts that play time is a “foundational factor in good mental and physical health.” Play teaches kids, among other things, to:

  • Learn to share.
  • Resolve conflict.
  • Use their imagination and develop creativity.
  • Hone their ability to enjoy life.
  • Develop their foremost personality traits.

Most parents these days try to substitute unsupervised play with other activities, whether it be organized sports, scheduled play dates, trips to the Museum of Natural History, the Science Place or some other family-friendly adventure.

But the fact remains that most parents still feel a certain sense of loss for their children.

And if most of our children can’t have the same freedoms we did, will there be consequences?

The answer, of course, depends on whom you ask. Some people says that if our kids don’t know what they’re missing, they won’t miss anything. Others say that it’s “just life,” a natural progression of our children’s lives being different from ours, the way ours were different from our parents.

“It saddens me,” says Farrel Chapman, herself a mother of two. “Because back yards are great, but they’re very limiting. There’s nothing new in a back yard. There’s really no exploring to be done.”

Hartshorn agrees, worrying that, above and beyond her kids missing out on those feelings of wonder and freedom she knew as a child, they’re growing up with too much knowledge of what a scary world we live in.

“We were out having fun all day, messing around with no worries,” she says of her childhood. “But our kids have it drilled into their heads by their parents what to be looking out for. And I think that puts an element of fear in them while they’re out.

“I feel a sense of loss for them,” she adds, “that they can’t be carefree.”

Walsh wishes times could be easier, but he says there’s no easy solution to the problem.

“As times change, we have to change,” he says. “Throughout the whole childhood life cycle, the challenges our children face will change, and your response has to change as a parent.”

But one thing remains a constant, he says.

“Protecting them,” he says of our children, “is a lifelong job.”

For information about the NISMART study and other tips of child safety, visit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Web site at missingkids.com.