Look, I'm glad they found the kid

[pegkerr]

But don't you wonder a little a bit about a) our culture and b) this kid's upbringing when you realize that he wasn't found for four days because he was purposely avoiding the searchers because he had been told never to talk to strangers? I mean, come on, the kid's eleven years old! Don't you think he should have better judgment at this point than to think, "Hmmm . . . break the no-talking-to-strangers rule . . . die in the wilderness . . . boy, tough choice there. . ."

Good lord, I hope Fiona at age 12 would have more sense.

Comments

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

It does suggest that his instruction in survival was a little...lopsided?

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Ryan was watching the news earlier, and he said the kid had that facial expression and aura of "massive brat" going. It's theoretically possible that he was having a great time making everyone search for him. They say he had no food or water, but there's no real way to prove that he didn't. His parents told the media he "wasn't in the mood" to discuss how he wandered away and got lost in the first place, when he was supposed to be at the climbing wall.

The whole thing is a little Runaway Bride for me. I expected, after her sordid tale, that there would be copycat disappearances. One has to wonder.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Interesting idea. I hadn't thought of that. If that was it, I bet it will surface in the next couple of days.

[nmalfoy.livejournal.com]

I kind of agree with you, just based on his reaction when he was first found. Smiling and waving and then suddenly, spoiled brat.

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

This definitely sounds more likely than a boy scout avoiding search-and-rescue because they are "strangers"...

[madlori.livejournal.com]

Well, I give the kid a break. He was probably semi-delirious from exhaustion, exposure and dehydration. I wouldn't be thinking too clearly in those circumstances, either.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah . . . but I still don't quite get it. If he's exhausted, cold and thirsty, don't you think he'd figure, hey here are some people. Maybe they can give me what I need. How does he think he's going to get them all on his own if he doesn't know where he is?

A six year old, yeah, maybe, I could see it. For an eleven year old, it just seems strange to me. I mean, Fiona was a trained Red Cross babysitter at that age. And presumably a Boy Scout would get some rudimentary lessons in survival skills. Like, look for people. Duh.

[zephyrious.livejournal.com]

You know, I think the behavior is strange too, but I just finished reading Not Without Peril which tells the stories of numerous deaths on Mt Washington. The kid's actions look more normal in that context.

[nmalfoy.livejournal.com]

I think that's just it. The boy doesn't appear to be the brightest crayon in the box. I have no doubt that your girls have enough sense to know, in a situation like that, to go to a "safe" stranger (a cop, a teacher... my mother would always tell me when I was little to find an old lady and ask her for help, or a sales clerk, or some such). Either the boy just isn't very bright or he's making excuses because there's a deeper reason why he didn't want to be found.

Just an opinion based on what little I know.

[snippy]

I don't, actually, think he should have better judgment, but I do think he should have been taught better. His parents taught him never to talk to strangers, and to fear being kidnapped. Are these fears unreasonable? No, but they are out of proportion to the other dangers he faced.

And the guy who found him did the right thing: stay there and call for help. Don't try to take the kid away from where you found him, because he might think you're trying to kidnap him.

[mark356.livejournal.com]

Well said.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

One of the news stories I've read makes it sound like the kid is a wee touch developmentally disabled. That might explain it--and why he'd wander away from the camp in the first place.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

"The Hawkinses said Brennan didn’t remember much and they don’t plan push him to talk about his four days in the woods. “It’s going to take a while to get everything out,” Toby Hawkins said. “This is how he approaches all situations.”

They described the boy as socially immature, but not mentally disabled."

[moony]

I know a pair of kids who are similar in nature - socially, they are not mature at all. They are NOT, technically, developmentally disabled, but their emotional development is severely compromised (they are adopted, victims of the typical Romanian orphanage). Going on five, one is barely able to speak and is still not trained, where the other one can communicate but does not respond to discipline and cannot discern right from wrong. Both do not register physical pain and have no measure of their own strength. It is feasible to me that this boy could be similar, which would explain why he was able to survive, and why he is being what most adults would call pig-headed about telling people what happened. He may not even realise that what happened to him was a dangerous, bad thing. He may not have any concept of what he's done, what's going on around him. Most kids like that are almost entirely self-contained.

Interesting story, nonetheless.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and would you go on national media and tell god and everyone your kid was slow?

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

LOL. I'm sure one would rather not, you're right!

But given the nature of these searches one of the first things authorities will need to know is if the kid is disabled or has any special circumstances. And that does get released to the press. So if this kid were actually functionally disabled, the headlines would have been trumpeting lost mentally challenged Scout the whole time.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe the kid is a jackass.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

Given the phrase "socially immature", another possibility that comes to my mind -- and of course it's only a possibility, I know nothing of this child or his family -- is undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome, which could account for an excessively literal understanding of the "don't talk to strangers" rule. Asperger's kids can have real difficulty understanding that rules have exceptions, even if they're of normal intelligence and an age when kids can usually easily grasp that.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

And there you have it:

The parents said they do not plan to push Brennan for answers about his time in the woods and referred reporters to Christensen. The couple said their son was born prematurely and described him as immature and a little slow, although not mentally disabled.

from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/23/national/main703669_page2.shtml

Which actually counts as going onto national news and saying that your kid is slow.

[graygirl.livejournal.com]

Runaway Bride, Runaway Boy Scout. Bleh.

[http://users.livejournal.com/anam_cara_/]

Off topic, but- saw this and thought of you:
http://www.religionnews.com/press02/PR062205B.html

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link!

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

This story is highly fishy. He didn't have anything to eat or drink for four days and was sunburned but only suffering minor dehydration? He spent four days on a hiking trail and never found his own way to at least relative civilization?

[rabican.livejournal.com]

I missed something. What is this about?

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

This story, which has been all over the news.

[rabican.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. Man, that article is more creepy than anything else.

Thanks for the link. I missed it because I tend not to notice a lot of the domestic American news while I'm in Europe.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty weird. It's common for very young lost children to hide from their searchers, but I think that's usually something affecting the six-and-younger bracket.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Good lord, I hope Fiona at age 12 would have more sense."

You mean the 12-year-old who isn't allowed off the block? You have to wander the streets before you can develop street smarts.

(Yes yes, I'm sure she wouldn't avoid people if she were lost in the wilderness. But there's no substitute for experience, especially experience at a developmental age. I was taking the subway, by myself, to school in New York when I was twelve.)

B

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh, she's allowed off the block now! We're loosening the leash, slowly but surely. [g]

[mark356.livejournal.com]

I was nodding with you when I read the comments; it's been a rant of mine for a very long time that we're taught stranger danger and not how to interact with people; teaching us stranger danger is far more dangerous. (You probably know sexual abuse stats already.) But I just read the article, and my theory is as follows: He just wanted to have a little adventure. I know that when I was 12 (and often sometimes now!) I thought it would be so romantic and fun to escape all of the trappings of civilization, and go as far away from all other people and as far into the wilderness as I possibly could, alone, and see what things I might discover from that experience, either about the land I'd wander in, the world in general, or about myself. If he was demonstrating how he kept warm, and he was prepared enough to only suffer from minor dehydration, and it was his decision to go away from the other people in the first place, and he was hiding from the searchers, and cracking jokes very shortly afterwards, there's very little doubt in my mind that that was how he was seeing it.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

I actually read a book or short story about same when I was in 6th grade--the kid was trying to be like Thoreau and his family even allowed it. I wish I could remember the name of it.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

My side of the Mountain? Except Thoreau was never so extreme at living off the land.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Well, then as now, I've never read Thoreau. Tried once and just couldn't get into it.

Ooh!

[skg.livejournal.com]

I love this trilogy.

[mark356.livejournal.com]

I remember a lot of popular survival books in the 6th grade (either they were really popular a couple of years back, or they're just a fixture of 6th grade) but I suspect you are talking about My Side of the Mountain; it's the only one where the person goes out on purpose on his own, and his family allows it. Someone in the book does compare him to Thoreau, but if you read Thoreau's book, you know that what he does is way more hardcore than anything Thoreau ever did, since Thoreau was really only just outside of cities that he was always going to, and just by the train, and he always had visitors over and things like that.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Well, 6th grade for me is a cool 18 years ago, so my memory is allowed to be imprecise.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

The thing that always amused me was that while Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, (I have heard) he had his laundry done by his mother.

[whapnoggin.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of something that I did when I was pretty young--7, I think. I decided I wanted to spend the night at a friend's house and set out with a blanket and a bag to do so. It didn't occur to me until the cop picked me up and I was restored to a very worried grandmother than anyone would miss me.

Still--12!

Stranger Danger--overkill?

[skg.livejournal.com]

To mark356's point, it seems that in the past ten years or so, there has been a dramatic increase in teaching (overemphasizing) "Stranger Danger".

2004 (I think) statistics showed that fewer than 100 children were actually kidnapped by strangers. (I'll see if I can find the ref) Most abductions are by family members (often an estranged parent, sadly), but the media has made such a huge splash with each stranger abduction that everyone fears it all the more.

I realize that it is small consolation if your child is one of the 100, but the fearmongering is out of control. More children were abducted when I was a kid--and I was allowed to go pretty far from home. We were taught not to talk to strangers, but not to take it to such extremes that we would not ask for help if lost or hurt. We learned to trust our instincts and avoid people who made us feel uncomfortable.

My mother told me that there was a woman with a small child (of about three) in a store she was in the other day. The kid couldn't get more than two feet from the mother and she would say "Brendan, come back over here. Do you want someone to steal you?"

That, IMO, is going too far. That kid is going to have a complex.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, it is not uncommon for people lost in the woods to hide from searchers. It is not a rational behavior at all; it stems from being mentally impaired by exhaustion, dehydration, low blood sugar, hypothermia or whatever. Adults do this too. I suspect it is a lizard-brain reaction that takes over when the higher brain functions aren't, well, functioning.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/talking_to_stra.html

B

[diony.livejournal.com]

And thus Gavin de Becker (in Protecting the Gift which I attempt to get all parents everywhere to read) suggests that teaching little kids not to talk to strangers is foolish -- it's much better to teach them how to tell whether or not a stranger is safe to talk to.

It's something that comes up in my teen classes, too. When we do boundary-setting scenarios the younger girls (13 or 14) often try to pull a 'I'm not supposed to talk to strangers' or 'I'd just go find my parents' and I have to point out to them that as they're becoming adults they'll be talking to lots of strangers & their parents won't be around.