I can't say enough about the importance of safety and using common sense on-line. Children in particular can be - and are being - irrepairably hurt, and not just through their own trusting and innocence, but through carelessness and mistakes made by their parents.
This is a true story. My daughter - about the same age as yours - made a new best friend when she started at her new school. Naturally, she wanted to have her over to play…but my daughter told me when I asked that no, this girl's mommy couldn't talk to me on the phone about it that day or meet me for coffee first, because she had gotten 'lost'. Needless to say, given the ability for accurate communication at that age, I blithely assured my alarmed daughter that she must have misunderstood her new friend, that mommies don't just get 'lost'.
That was over two years ago...she is still one of my daughter's very best friends...and her mommy is still 'lost'.
She kissed her husband and her daughter good-bye as usual one morning in the summer of 1996 and caught the train to her job in NYC - and never got there.
All anyone knows is that prior to her disappearance, she had discovered the on-line chat community and began spending increasingly inordinate amounts of time on her laptop computer, on-line, chatting till the wee hours of the morning. No one knows with whom - the laptop disappeared with her that day. Information they could glean from the ISP proved useless.
The police, her husband and her mother, who lived with them, are all convinced that she was abducted - this was not a woman suspect of just walking out without ever another word to her husband and her beloved daughter and her mother, a recent Vietnamese immigrant with whom she was very close - and that she was abducted by someone she had met on-line. But nothing has ever been proven - she vanished without a trace. The case is still open. She remains...'lost'.
And her daughter, a beautiful little girl who is now 7, still won't leave her own house after school - all her friends have to go there to play when they want to see her. There are long times still when she suddenly won't see her friends or any of us, and lies on her bed and won't talk to anyone. Therapy can only do so much.
And my daughter now lives with the very real knowledge that sometimes mommies do indeed get 'lost'.
*JEM* |
