<<You totally just tried it, didn't you?

THIS HAPPENED, click here to read.  

Some morons staged a fake kidnapping and taped it to highlight “kidnapping awareness” or as I like to say “try to impress people by getting attention via terrifying utter BULLSH!T tactics.” This deserves a cuss, people. I try to use them sparingly in my work, but this is ridiculous.  I’m MAD.  This is EXACTLY why kids play video games 100 hours a day.  Because parents have been beaten over the head with this type of fear mongering where if they let their kids out of their sight then they will be stolen by a stranger. This is not the first video like that out there – and it won’t be the last. 

Read what this article says, right now:

“Parents worried about their child being taken by a stranger should know that out of the approximately 800,000 children reported missing in the most recent national study, only 115 were the victims of “stereotypical” kidnapping involving someone the child did not know, according to The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

In comparison, more than 6,000 kids a year are killed in car accidents, more than 1,000 drown and more than 900 die from accidental poisonings, according to the National Center for Child Death Review Policy and Practice.”

WHAT’S THAT AGAIN, NATIONAL CENTER FOR MISSING AND EXPLOITED CHILDREN???  Did you say out of 800,000 children 115 were the stranger-kidnap type?  

Let me please pause for a moment.  I grieve for those 115 kids.  Sick. Wrong. Horrible. Nightmarish.  I am in NO WAY minimizing the fear, pain and anguish that those families and children must feel every day.  

Allow me to continue now to say please, look at those statistics.

LOOK AT THEM.  And then look again.  

Look one more time.  

Do you believe me now?  

Take a gander at this article, click to read, written by a columnist and college professor.  

She says that college students have become binge drinking duds. The have been managed so closely by mom and dad that they don’t know how to have fun otherwise.  They are boring, set in their ways and fun means drinking until you’re in the hospital.   CHEERS TO THE FUTURE, EVERYONE!  

I’m not making this stuff up.  I didn’t write those statistics.  I didn’t write that article by the professor.  There are countless other articles and statistics and literature out there.  Over parenting causes depression. Anxiety.  Fear.  Insecurity.  It hinders creativity. Impedes social development.  

If you knew that a sandwich you gave your kid every day would make your kid feel all of the above, would you keep giving it to him?  

Of course not. 

It’s time to ignore the movie “Jaws” of parenting.  Remember Jaws?  How often do you think about that movie when you’re at the beach?  Did you know, The United States averages just 16 shark attacks each year and slightly less than one shark-attack fatality every two years. Meanwhile, in the coastal U.S. states alone, lightning strikes and kills more than 41 people each year.
That video was the equivalent of yelling shark at the beach.  It’s the oldest marketing trick in the book – to make an impact, hit em where it hurts. Right in their children.  

These panic mongering videos and stories are designed to get you emotionally involved.  Here are a few video titles I put together in the spirit of terrifying you as well:

Parents horrified to find out that 30 year old in basement is not a tenant but their child.

Small child screams in agony for three hours because iPad was abducted.

12 year old confused and scared at the sight of first scuffed knee. “It looks like the skin just came right off!” he was heard saying between sobs.

Electronics not allowed at sleepover causing widespread social anxiety and panic attacks.

Be stronger than marketing.  Be smarter.  Stand up to it, parents and use common sense.  The future of your kids depends on it.