30,000 juveniles are reported missing annually, less than 200 abducted by strangers

It was 1979, and Nils Johnson-Shelton had a lot in common with a classmate named Etan Patz. Both were 6-year-old boys with bowl cuts, the sons of artists living in lofts in SoHo. They rode the same bus to the same elementary school, where they both attended first grade, reported The New York Times.

On the morning of May 25 that year, Etan went missing and was never found. His disappearance not only shocked New York City; it was later credited as the event that forever altered parenting, a word that had only recently entered the lexicon. From that terrible day, the notion that children in America should be left to their own devices — to run with their friends, climb trees, fall down, get up and keep running — changed. Parenting transformed, too, as mothers and fathers grew more intense, more fearful, more riddled with anxiety about threats, real and imagined, that children newly seemed to face.

“Etan’s case is foundational,” said John E. Bischoff III, a vice president at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “It made parents more aware and concerned for their own children’s safety.”

The biggest change Mr. Johnson-Shelton recalls from his childhood was that he no longer rode the bus to school. Instead, he would clamber onto his father’s bike and the two of them would rattle across the cobblestone streets of TriBeCa.

“I was so young that I didn’t put the two together,” he said recently. It never occurred to him that the bike rides were a result of what had happened to Etan. “I just thought it was an awesome thing to do with my dad.”

Last week, after a federal appeals court reversed the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega worker who was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and killing Etan, the case returned to the spotlight, inspiring a new round of conversations about how to raise children.

At Pier 51, a park along the Hudson River not far from the Patz family’s former home, the playground scene was vibrant last week as dozens of children played and their guardians kept vigilant watch. Parents and older siblings moved around their young charges like shadows, ready to jump and save any falling children before their heads hit the bouncy rubber playground floor.

Keshia Gerrits, who is originally from Amsterdam and is living in SoHo, watched her children, ages 4 and 6, run around. She wanted them to feel “a type of independence,” Ms. Gerrits, 34, said. “But only if I’ve got eyes on them.”

Little fear of kidnapping was evident. A sign outside the locked gate to the playground warned that adults were not permitted to enter without a child. Despite the more than 30,000 juveniles who are reported missing every year to the National Crime Information Center, a number that experts say is unreliable, it is rare for children to be abducted by strangers. Roughly 182 children were kidnapped by people outside their family in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study published in 2022 by the Department of Justice.

“I think that phenomenon is somewhat exaggerated,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and a co-author of the study.

But in the view of experts like Jessica McCrory Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the lives of American parents and children have changed so drastically since the 1970s that it is impossible to peg such broad cultural shifts on the disappearance of a single boy nearly 50 years ago. People who study parenting culture argue that declining labor unions, rising income inequality, more women in the work force, the defunding of social programs and an increase in competition to win admission to top universities all contributed to a heightened belief among many parents that they alone were responsible for the welfare of their children.

“In the U.S., we put the burden on families, and especially mothers, to D.I.Y. a social safety net to keep their children safe from risk,” said Ms. McCrory Calarco, author of the 2024 book “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.”

The ubiquity of smartphones has seemed to soften the divide between “helicopter” and “free-range” parents.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times

Nonetheless, singular tragedies have proved far more galvanizing than broad socioeconomic trends. Anine Colaire was the mother of two children, ages 8 and 11, living in Portland, Ore., when she learned about the murder of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who was kidnapped from her home in Petaluma, Calif., in 1993. When relatives from California visited Ms. Colaire’s home, they criticized her for continuing to allow her children to walk to a nearby park and ride their bikes without adult supervision.

“The Polly Klaas case had a huge impact,” said Ms. Colaire, 64, whose children are now adults. “I had some relatives and friends with kids that were just scared to death to let their kids out of their sight.”

For Jennifer Pimentel, it was the abduction and murder in 1995 of 9-year-old Jimmy Ryce in Redland, Fla., that fundamentally changed her family’s approach to child safety. As an 8-year-old in nearby Miami at the time, she remembers that family trips to the mall or to her brother’s baseball practices became terrifying ordeals, as her mother labored to keep her children physically close at all times.

Three decades later, Ms. Pimentel has children of her own, and even though Jimmy’s killer, Juan Carlos Chavez, was executed in 2014 for the crimes, the fear remains. Every time her teenage son or daughter goes to a Starbucks or has a sleepover, Ms. Pimentel, her husband and all their friends demand constant electronic check-ins.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “It’s an unwritten agreement. We just do it.”

This intensive style, sometimes called “helicopter parenting,” was challenged by a different model, “free-range parenting,” in which adults strive to provide a base line of support and protection, while also giving children opportunities to explore, fail and learn on their own.

“I don’t blame parents for being terrified,” said Lenore Skenazy, author of the 2009 book “Free-Range Kids.” “I blame a culture that has gradually taught them that the most responsible way to parent is to basically conjure up Etan every time they’re deciding whether their kid can do anything on their own.”

Over time, the ubiquity of smartphones seemed to soften the divide between “helicopter” and “free-range” parents, as adults who favored either parenting style found themselves using apps like Life360 to keep constant tabs on their children — even as those phones and social media made children more vulnerable to bullies and predators.

As children in Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, Vanessa Wyeth and Etan Patz attended each other’s birthday parties. When Etan disappeared, Vanessa and her father walked the neighborhood with Stanley Patz, Etan’s father, distributing fliers and asking for information about the missing boy.

For the next two years, Vanessa was terrified that a stranger would break into her bedroom window as she slept, even though the family lived in an apartment on the 20th floor. In part to help her feel less afraid, her parents moved the family in 1981 to Bangor, Maine, where she enjoyed more freedom to explore, she said.

Her experiences of fear and safety as a child caused her to raise her children, now 16 and 18, with a careful mix of independence and surveillance, Ms. Wyeth said.

“We want to know where our kids are in a way that I didn’t experience as a kid in Maine,” said Ms. Wyeth, 52, who returned to Manhattan and now lives in Chelsea. “But I think that has more to do with having cellphones than it does with having my childhood friend kidnapped.”

To read more CLICK HERE