Mild Anxiety Disorder and Missing Child's Producer

A mom at Abby's pre-school was the Missing Children Producer for America's Most Wanted for a few years and she has held a child's safety meeting each Halloween that she's been at the school. I missed last year's, but went today.

There were definitely scary things - but also very interesting things I hadn't thought of. Mainly the whole idea more than anything that holidays, especially Halloween, are so dangerous not only because stores are hectic, but because bad people can dress up! I hadn't really thought of it that way - where they may look out of place on a normal day, not during this holiday especially. And any holiday generally we are more encouraging of our children to go up to strangers to accept candy or follow on an Easter egg hunt or speak nicely to strangers etc.

She was very pro-Halloween, just on THAT day a parent should be a little crazier than normal because things are just out of whack. She told one story of a guy being able to grab a boy just because he was wearing a cool costume and even though there were a bunch of kids in a gated back yard, he was still able to get their guard down because of the costume and holiday. And normally those kids would have been safe in the back yard, but on THIS day, you have to be aware that kid's instincts are off.

On non-holidays she said biggest danger is shopping...

All in all, not as alarmist as you'd think. Definitely discouraging and awful, but not too anxiety producing if I don't let my mind wander.