Every Parent's Worst Panic

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Readers tell their frantic stories of losing a young child in public. If you have your own experience to share, drop us a note at hello@theatlantic.com.

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Chris Bodenner

9:00 AM / June 2, 2016

'Losing a Kid in a Split Second Can Happen to Anyone'

Did not realize until this week how many parenting experts, gorilla behaviorists, and zoo architects I was actually friends with. Lucky me!
— Jordan Gaines Lewis (@GainesOnBrains) June 1, 2016

“I was a perfect parent before I had a kid,” quips a reader responding to our callout for stories of losing a child in public:

There are a lot of childless, perfect parents in the world lately. Parenting is the hardest job in the world that no one can prepare you for and everyone thinks they can do it better then you.

Our story: My husband and I decided to do yard work on a gorgeous spring day, our almost-two-year-old son in tow. He was alternating between helping push the wheelbarrow and scooping up dirt.

And in a split second he was gone.

“I thought you had him,” followed by mind-boggling panic. You can’t really describe what it feels like when your world disappears in front of you. It only took a second. It was maybe two minutes before we found him just a few yards away checking out my husband’s car. But it felt like a lifetime.

Another reader can relate: “As any parent knows, it only takes a few seconds for attention to be diverted and something horrible to occur. Not minutes—SECONDS.” That’s the pattern I’m seeing among the dozens of notes coming in from readers: “split second,” “I looked away for just a moment,” “blink of an eye.” That tiny fragment of time, followed by a seemingly endless span of dread, is illustrated in the following scene from The Witch, a brilliant and unnerving film I recently watched and rewatched. (The full scene of the missing baby is so deeply disturbing—one of the most disturbing I’ve ever seen in cinema—that I cut most of it out to create this custom clip on YouTube.)

This next reader, like most of you writing in, wishes to remain anonymous:

I have a story of a lost child. It’s a story we thought of immediately in the aftermath of the Cincy Zoo incident.

We live in Cincinnati, coincidentally. We were at a Cincinnati Reds game and our four-year-old daughter wanted to go on the big, enclosed slide that goes down a full story to a garden area. My wife was at the top of the slide, and I walked down to the bottom—maybe a two-minute walk. Thinking I’d be down there already, my wife let her go down the slide and find me.

I stood at the bottom of the slide for a good three minutes, and my wife and younger daughter come down. She looks at me and asks, “Where is she?” I’m sure my eyes looked like dinner plates as I turned and sprinted through the garden to the top of the slide.

The panic was unbelievable: How in the hell am I going to find a little kid amid a 6th-inning crowd on a Sunday afternoon?! If she got scared and turned and started running in the wrong direction, I’d never find her.

Luckily, I did find her: at the the top of a slide, clutching a stranger who was comforting her.

Does this make me and my wife negligent parents? Turns out, there were two walkways through the garden. I was walking down one, and she must have gone down the other. We didn’t see each other. My wife, a borderline “helicopter parent,” was certain we couldn’t miss each other, so she let her go. Was it our faults? Absolutely. Could it have happened to anyone? Absolutely.

Losing a kid in a split second can happen to anyone, the best parents included. We are good, attentive parents, but this isn’t the only story we have. And it will happen again. As always, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Tens of thousands of online commenters should have considered that Christian adage before assailing the Cincy mother (whom Ron defended at length). This Notes thread is already becoming a sort of confessional space for parents to open up about the extremely common, though extremely judged, experience of losing a child in public. From a reader in Indiana:

Oh boy, do I have a story. Let the parents and non-parents judge me all they want, but make it anonymous so I don’t have to read the comments or fend off death threats.

I was a single mom on a vacation with my kids at a beach in Florida. My daughter was eight and my son was five. We walked down to the beach right after breakfast, where we played in the sand, poked our toes in the water, and generally romped around. I was swinging my daughter around the water’s edge and making her squeal with delight as my son waited for his turn.

But—when we fell onto the sand and I turned to him to take his hands, he was gone. In the blink of an eye.

I looked up and down the beach with my daughter’s hand clutched in mine—no sign of him. The most terrifying panic came over me when I saw that his shoes were gone. There was a pool at our hotel, right next to the beach, and I was sure he’d decided to go swimming without us. But the pool gate was locked and he wasn’t there.

By this time, maybe two minutes had passed, and in those two minutes my mind went insane thinking of horrible possibilities like kidnapping, lurking pedophiles, being sucked out to sea—anything and everything. It was the most incomprehensible, visceral fear I have ever felt.

I ran into the hotel frantically and grabbed the hotel concierge and said “I can’t find my son! I can’t find my son!” The hotel security manager came out to me as I stood on the beach, babbling the story of playing with my kids, trying (but failing) not to weep while comforting my daughter, who was screaming “What are we going to do without him? Mommy!! Mommy!!”

Another agonizing 15 minutes passed when a maintenance man at the hotel radioed the security guard and said they’d found a little boy in a blue t-shirt trying to get into a hotel room. It was my son.

They carried him to me and I picked him up and said “What on EARTH made you leave the beach? You KNOW you never leave Mommy in a public place! We almost lost you!” He told me he’d decided he didn’t want to play and promptly picked up his shoes, went into the hotel and got in the elevator, and went up to our room on the 11th floor to wait for us.

So do not underestimate the ability of a small child to do something in a split second. My story has a very happy ending, although I had flashbacks for years about those 20 minutes of hell. I know the fear that parents can feel in that first moment when they notice their kid is out of sight. But that doesn’t make them bad parents; kids are slippery little devils.

Chris Bodenner

9:45 AM / June 1, 2016

Judging the Mom Who Let Her Boy Run Away at the Zoo, Cont'd

If you haven’t yet heard about the story of the four-year-old kid at the Cincinnati zoo who climbed into the pen of a gorilla that was subsequently shot dead, Ron covered it yesterday. He defended the mother against the hordes of online commenters blaming her for the child slipping away in a split second. (An edited version of events is embedded above, and the original smartphone footage is here in full.) One reader’s reaction to the story:

There’s a post going around Facebook from a woman on the scene who indicated that parents simply lost their kid in one of those “blink of an eye” moments. Most parents will tell you that yes, small children are curious and impulsive and can act stupidly in an unbelievably short span of time. In the meantime, the rush to judge the parents has led to:

Death threats against the parents

Avoiding the question of why the zoo didn’t have better protection against a stray kid falling in

Valuing a gorilla over a child

Monday-morning quarterbacking the decision to shoot the gorilla. (Show me your gorilla-expert credentials before you judge the zoo.)

Here’s a quick rule: If your reaction to a gorilla’s death causes you to lash out at a set of parents and call for their deaths and/or criminal prosecution (speaking as a lawyer, I can’t imagine what charge you’d bring against the parents, much less how it would possibly stick), consider whether you’re acting more like a rational human or an angry gorilla.

But this next reader, Olivia, doesn’t think the scrutiny is entirely unwarranted:

I am not a parent, but I have a gnawing question about this incident that I cannot shake. In 38 years (the zoo opened in 1978), not one person has ever fallen into the enclosure. In that 38 years, I have to assume there were thousands of toddlers and curious four-year-olds. Why did none of them make it over the barrier? Is this four-year-old boy deeply rare in his abilities? This is the main reason I feel there may be justification for the scrutiny of the parents.

A few core points from Ron’s piece:

Our judgment matters. Twenty years ago, a story like this would have been heavily covered by three broadcast networks and the wire services. There might have been some tut-tutting by those media gatekeepers, but nothing like the internet mob that rallied against this Cincinnati mom.

Where is our empathy? Show me the parent who hasn’t lost sight of a daughter or had a son bolt from their grasp and run into danger. I’ll show you a parent who’s either uninvolved in his or her children’s lives or is lying.

On that note, have you ever been in a situation similar to the Cincinnati mom’s, losing your kid in a public place and narrowly averting disaster? Let us know if you’d like to share: hello@theatlantic.com. Update from a reader with a quick story:

When my son was around three, we went to a bookstore at the mall. I had to let go of his hand briefly to bend down to pick up a heavy book from a bottom shelf. He ran from me so fast. I raced through the store, my heart pounding, tears welling in my eyes, when a member of the staff up on a ladder called out where he was running. He had gone back to see some stuffed animals at the front of the store.

I’m a good mother, but a child can get away from you in less than a second. What happened in Cincinnati was an accident. Instead of turning our fury toward this family, we should be looking for ways to protect animals in the wild, so we don’t have to see the last of them in a zoo.

Another reader also opens up:

I think most parents, if they’re honest, have a story like this. While I’ve never “lost” either of my kids in the store, a miscalculation nearly cost my oldest her life.

I was heavily pregnant when I took my then two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to the local park. It was surrounded by a fence and had a gate at one end leading out to a very quiet residential street. Usually, I would have followed my daughter around to make sure she didn’t get into anything, but it was humid, I felt horrid, and decided to sit down on a bench and watch her play.

She got it in her head that she was going to make a run for the gate. Why I don’t know, but she did and the latch on the gate wasn’t fully secured. I immediately saw what she was doing and tried to run after her, but I simply couldn’t move quickly enough (I didn’t anticipate that either) and she ran toward the middle of the road. A car was coming down the road, and I only managed to get her to stop by screaming as loud as I could. It startled her; she stopped, the car stopped. I was hysterical.

So, yeah, I never lost a kid, but I almost lost a kid.