Yesterday, we had a big family bash. Dad and Uncle Naren were swilling some whiskey in the backyard. My mom and I were in the kitchen making pasta and soup. Steve flipped some chicken on the grill.
The kids asked if they they could run down to the field at the elementary school, which is about 100 yards from my house. It has a big soccer field and a playground. We told the older ones to watch the younger ones and off they went. We let all nine kids aged 4 to 14 go down on their own, while we got down to business with the whiskey and pasta.
After about 40 minutes, the kids came running in the house. They said with some amusement that some old man took Arianna's shoes. What?!!! It's very hard to get a straight story from a group of kids, mostly verbose girls, who talked over each other, but we finally pieced the bits of the drama together.
The kids were playing soccer and had left their shoes and their sweatshirts next to a goal post, as they ran through the grass. They saw an old Indian man, wearing a traditional long jacket, watching them on the field. Half of our kids are part Indian. He looked like a relative and seemed harmless. They noted that he was looking in the garbage. They even saw him pick up their sweatshirts and put them down. One of the kids saw the man walk off the field with a pair of shoes. They came running home to tell us this strange tale.
Solitary male. At a playground. Taking shoes.
I immediately put down the tongs and called the cops. The police showed up at the field with lights flashing within minutes. At the same time, there was a car accident one block away. There were as many police cars at the soccer field as at the site of the accident.
The cops tracked down the guy. Behind the tinted windows of their SUV, my cousins drove by the man and the kids positively identified the dude. They missed most of dinner, but we nuked the pasta for them when they returned. It was not clear if the guy, a visitor from out of town, was a pervert or an addled old man, but nobody was taking chances.
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting article in the New Yorker about Sandusky and how he used various methods of child molsters to groom his victims. Thanks to all the readers who asked me to read it.
Modern parents have been aware of perverts for a while. High profile cases of abductions and killings are always on the back of our mind. Cases like Sandusky, the Catholic priest stories and the poor Leiby Kletzky story have increased the anxiety levels. Creeps are everywhere, even among the most trusted members of society.
Fear of perverts has drastically changed the way that we parent our children.
When the kids came running in the house to tell us the shoe story, we immediately gathered the kids in the house. We second guessed our decision to let the kids go to their field on their own. We believed the kids' story and called authorities. The old man, who very well could have had dementia, was feared and the authorities forbade him from spending any more time around the playground. And all of that was right and good.
The downside is that kids today have much less freedom than we enjoyed. They can't roam a neighborhood freely. Parents pick up the kids from school, rather than let them walk home. They get less exercise. They spend more time inside, where we can protect them. We remind each other to check out the child predator lists online. We know that there are very, very few of these people out there, but no parent wants to play the odds like that.
Perverts have turned us all into helicopter parents.