Parenting Expert Says The Concept Of “Stranger Danger” Actually Makes Kids Less Safe

As parents, we want nothing more than to keep our children safe and sheltered from anyone who could bring them harm. But TikTok creator Jon Fogel wants parents to think about how we talk about this issue with our kids, especially when it comes to how we encourage them to move through the world and interact with other people. Because it turns out something a lot of us have taken for granted is actually doing our children a disservice.

“Stranger Danger,” he asserts in a recent video, “makes kids unsafe.”

“Fact #1: your kid is most likely to be harmed by somebody who they know.”

This is a sad fact that many people, at this point, are aware of, but often don’t want to really think about because of the upsetting nature of this reality: children are overwhelmingly abused or otherwise hurt by people they know. Usually, these are the parents themselves, but they can be other trusted adults or even other children.

“Stranger Danger will not protect them from those people,” Fogel points out.

“Fact #2: The fewer interactions that your child has with normal, safe adults, the less data they will have to recognize when an adult is doing something strange.”

“Think of it like this,” Fogel offers. “If your kid goes around having interactions with ... 100 adults, and 99 of them are just normal people who have a normal relationship with them —librarians, cashier at the store, person who’s getting your food at Panera — the actions of that one predatory adult are going to stick out.

“On the other hand, if you are like most parents who teach their kids to be afraid of all adults, which includes all of the safe adults that are just unknown, that child is not exposed to the data that is requisite to identify strange, unusual behavior. In other words, predatory behavior.”

Interacting with strangers gives you a good data set to understand how most people behave in a given situation or circumstance. Take away normal interactions, and you have nothing to compare negative ones to.

Fact #3: Stranger Danger doesn’t keep predators from kids.

“While most adults have learned to just ignore children because of the perceived Stranger Danger thing, predatory adults do not do this,” Fogel points out. “So they will still get access to your child.”

So while predators harming children they don’t know beforehand is rare, Stranger Danger as a concept isn’t going to keep them from children. Moreover, it can make children scared to reach out to other strangers for help.

“This is why I don’t do Stranger Danger with my kids,” he concludes. “So if you want to keep your kids actually safe, let them talk to adults. Encourage it.”

This is not new information. In 2011, the U.S. government shared a report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children titled “Child Safety Is More Than a Slogan: Stranger Danger Warnings Not Effective at Keeping Kids Safer.”

And certainly, that did not mark the first time experts began to question the efficacy of Stranger Danger messaging. But it seems it’s taken a while for parents to unlearn the idea that children need to stay away from adults they don’t know.

Of course, with misinformation about abductions and child trafficking rampant in media, social and otherwise, it’s perhaps no surprise that parents’ fears are sustained and passed on to their children.

According to the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, who pull its data from the FBI, approximately 460,000 children are reported missing every year. While that number is staggering, “reported” is doing some heavy lifting here. Reuters notes that up to 95% of these reports are actually misunderstandings (aka “the kid was in the basement/a friend’s house/napping in their closet the whole time”) and, most commonly, runaways. And fortunately, almost all children reported missing, approximately 97.8%, return home.

So we get it: it’s hard to trust people, and it’s scary to let your kids out in the world. But strangers are usually just run-of-the-mill people, and when it comes to the many, many, many things we worry about, we can probably cautiously cross them off the list. Ironically, it will make our kids safer.