In the light of the Jaycee Lee Dugard news unfolding this week, how well do we think we know our neighbours or people in the area? Do we now look at the strange guy down the block in a different light?

I am sure that everyone on here has been shocked by the news and the fact that she was held for 18 years without much/enough suspicion from neighbours.

Do we have a duty to be more nosy?

We did some searching around online and found a sex offender living a couple of blocks away from us, using the following free website

www.familywatchdog.us/

Always good to stay informed.

What do you guys think on this subject?

Really interesting thread. Thanks for posting.

My take: If there is a rap on our generation of parents, it's that we've given children much more autonomy to our children inside our homes and much less outside of them (maybe not a rap as much as a characterization). This makes me feel nostalgic for the days when I spent hours on my bike, by myself or with friends, cruising the streets of our suburban Dallas neighborhood.

This story, and so many others like it are horrifying (the fact that the father watched as he child was abducted chills me to the bone), and sites like familywatchdog are useful and provocative (we've covered it here on the site), but I worry that they are turning us into parenting shut-ins and our kids into hothouse flowers deprived of the experience of unsupervised imaginative play.

Full disclosure: our family lives on the 400-acre campus of a private boarding school where my wife works. This life calls for a great deal of sacrifice (mostly from my wife), but the reward is that the kids are free to roam in a relatively safe environment (if you call living in a tiny village with 125 teenagers safe). Therefore it's hard for me to weigh in on how to balance safety concerns with the desire to let kids have some independence. We've chosen to withdraw from the real world to escape those hard choices.

I'd love to hear from more folks about how they pull this off.

Thanks Karma, great website, I looked up our address and there is one guy near the a school? Keep them safe!!!

We know most of our immediate neighbors, and make an effort to meet anyone new to our neighborhood. Ours is a kid-filled neighborhood, and the kids spend as much of their time outside playing with the neighbor kids (ranging from one back yard to another) as much as we will allow.

I am fast becoming an advocate of having "Free Range Kids" (see: freerangekids.wordpress.com/) recalling that in my own childhood, the admonishment to "go outside and play" was a common one. And play we did. From early in the morning until well after sunset. (How else are you going to play Ghost in the Graveyard, anyway?)

There's a bit of difference between the Pop: 400 small town where I grew up and the Pop: 80,000 city where I live, but I am still glad that we live in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and a lot of time to play outside.

I think that we assume far more dangers around us than there really are. The stranger in the panel van offering candy to the kids is largely an invention.

A couple weeks ago I got up enough courage to let my five year old ride her bike all the way around the block unaccompanied. It was a bit scary -- for me -- but I think it gave her some much needed confidence. I want my kids to feel a part of the world they inhabit. I want them to walk through their world with confidence, feeling as if they are a part of their environment. Like "this is my turf!" I don't want to keep them inside or make them worry about dangers all the time. Watching out for them is my job. Their job is to play, not to be scared of the world they live in.

Certainly one must be smart about these things, but one must also keep everything in perspective. We fall for the fallacy of misleading vividness if we assume the rare, unique event (a tragic abduction) is common enough to hover over our children like helicopters.

Yep, know your neighbors. Not just so you can discover the child molester in your midst, but so that you (and your kids) can make friends and build communities.

Good and valid points ECDrew. I guess its another aspect of parenting that requires a delicate juggling act over how much control we exert over our children's environmental exposure. I suddenly feel old when I start talking about my childhood where we would disappear all day with our friends to explore and play in the surrounding countryside, returning home only when we were hungry or if there was a desperate need for the bathroom(specifically No 2!).

I think even then we had a healthy understanding of staying away from and the dangers of strangered drummed into us.

I believe that there is always a need for children to have a healthy fear of what can potentially be a dangerous thing, be it running around in a parking lot, not playing near a cliff or playing with electrical outlets in the home to name but a few.

I have heard the term "helicopter parent" used before and I would like to think that I do not fall into that category.

I believe that there are certain dangers that children have to be exposed to in order to realise that what I am saying holds true, such as climbing on a fence when advised not to, and then falling off a short time later. I'd like to think that would perhaps then lend more creedence to future warnings/advice that I might give.

As I said earlier, its a juggling act and playing amateur psychologist is part of that.

At the end of the day, we are all trying to keep our families safe and at the same time produce children who grow up to be wholesome stand up individuals. Not an easy task with the media exposure we and our kids are subjected to daily.

However, when all is said and done, forewarned is forearmed!