General Chat

Although I don`t have children myself, I wonder if parents find it difficult to get a healthy balance between teaching children to be polite and not ignorant, while at the same time, telling them not to talk to strangers. It seems to me, that by telling them not to talk to strangers, you are, in effect, telling them to ignore people who speak to them, which is not really polite. How do you parents cope with this dilemma?

My children are all grown now, but I never taught them to specifically 'never talk to strangers'. It is very complicated but children are much more at risk when it comes to people they know, as I learned to my cost. The stance I took was that it was rude not to answer if spoken to and general conversation with a 'stranger' was fine. What was not fine was to do anything that a strange person said they should do if it was not comfortable for them, (it was ok for someone to tell them to stop doing something if they knew they should not be doing it for example) and that if they ever needed help there were certain 'safe' people they could approach. I also arranged with them that if I ever had to send someone they did not know to them, to collect them from school in an emergency or something, there was a special 'code' that only the child and I knew, so if someone else knew it, only I could have told them, but I never needed to use that thank goodness. The fact is most people are good, kind and gentle and I did not want to make them afraid of everyone. As I said, it was a member of the family who did my child great harm, someone I never anticipated they would need protection from. Most important of all, though, my children were rarely far from adults they knew and could trust. They are not old enough that they knew the luxury of being able to play far from home unattended, with the freedoms that the children of the 30's and 40's seem to reminisce about.

Thank you for that Felicity It is something that I have always wondered about.

Hi Carol, we used to get round this one by telling our son not to talk to strangers - unless mummy and daddy talked to them. He then understood that he should be polite and say 'hello' if we stopped to talk to someone we knew, but not to speak to anyone unknown to us all. Mandy :)