...and Don't Accept Candy

“Okay, boys, I’ll just be inside, see you in an hour and work hard.” That was what my mom said one warm afternoon to her two eleven-year-olds. We were alone in the car behind the Ansonia YMCA, left to entertain ourselves with books on tape and school worksheets. It was the only time that we sit alone at the Ansonia YMCA, the only time that both Ansonia’s and our own Milford’s resources for children would be closed. We were mature and responsible eleven-year-olds, familiar with the workings or the world, certainly of the car, and how to handle ourselves alone.

What child’s parents haven’t told them not to talk to strangers? Any middle school student knows the basic tenet of dealing with unfamiliar people, surely a competent sixth grader should know as much.

The scene which a particular stranger found was a minivan, running to play a cassette, with two small children in the front two seats. We had climbed into the front to get control of the cassette player and I was filling out a worksheet on the steering wheel.

She looked interested in what we were doing, so when she stopped next to the driver’s side window, I thought I should roll the window down and see if we could help her out.

“Where are your parents?” she asked, somewhat shocked to be finding us alone.

“She’s in the YMCA.” I replied. There was not much to say; everything was pretty simple. There was no one there, we were not tall enough to drive, and we were in the YMCA parking lot.

That was the last that we saw of her, still a stranger to us, but she went into the building to ask whose children were left unattended in a vehicle outside. Eventually the staff found our mother, who received a short lecture from the woman, who had reported our situation to the police and, as we would later find, the DCF.

We stopped at the police station on our way home to look for some confirmation that we had not misjudged the competence of us sixth graders and to explain any complaints that were filed. When the officer asked us, “Did you feel threatened or uncomfortable?” neither of us did. There was no lasting trauma and actually no significance in the incident for us until the DCF officers came to our house. Once we were questioned, with our parents out of the room of course, about abuse or negligence and a letter was obtained from the school principal about my mother’s character, we were set to happily continue our elementary school experiences.

So while some forms of child care are more reliable than others and it is important to educate children about the workings of cars so that they can be trusted sitting in their front seats, the simplest advice is just “Don’t talk to strangers.”