I’m looking for a reality check here. My daughter turned 12. I’m aiming to foster her independence, so at this age I let her walk the 5 blocks to Broadway (she loves the fries at Dicks) so long as it’s in daylight, with a friend, and she has her GPS tracker.
Yesterday afternoon on her fourth such trip there was a “weird creepy” guy (I presume mentally ill) who she said was uncomfortably close, was making weird comments like either talking to himself or at her. She felt uncomfortable and left with her friend. The weird guy came running out to catch up and follow them. A passerby noticed they were in distress, and told the weird guy to go away, and escorted them most of the way home.
Reality check: Am I crazy for letting her go to Broadway without someone older? or is this an acceptable age for this kind of independence and she just got unlucky but nothing worse would have happened? She’s understandably still quite shaken by it, and couldn’t sleep last night wondering about what-ifs.
I’d been planning on having her read “The Gift of Fear” but had kind of thought the right time would be when she was a little older; I guess not. She tells me that she loves being a child and isn’t in any great hurry to grow up. I assume she should attend a personal safety class so she’s with peers in the same situation. SPD offer “women’s personal safety classes” but they say 14+ and that children should not attend. I also saw https://www.strategicliving.org/classes-item/for-teen-girls-only/
submitted by /u/lucianw
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