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Get ready for a blast from the past. The father of one of the most famous murdered children of all time -- 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey -- has a new book out. Sixteen years after his daughter disappeared from their Colorado home, John Ramsey has a message for other parents that may be difficult to hear.
Whoa. Wait a minute. It's been 16 years since the pictures of the gussied up little pageant girl were on the cover of every major newspaper in the country? Hard to believe, isn't it?
And it's even harder to hear John Ramsey beat himself up for allowing late wife Patty to put their little girl in pageants, to bring attention on her beauty. Ramsey told ABC's JuJu Chang that he doesn't know if it was the pageants that brought a killer to their doorstep. I'm no fan of pageants, but watching this poor man struggle to come up with the appropriate level of protection for our kids, I couldn't help feeling like he was being unfair to himself ... and seriously stressing out the rest of America for nothing:
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There he is, warning us to be aware that "regardless of where you live, there could be evil" in our communities, and telling us not to be "naive about it." But let's be real here. He doesn't know who killed JonBenet. The police don't know who killed JonBenet!
Every day we sit here debating whether parents are doing a "good enough" job of protecting their kids, but the fact is, there is only so much we can do about the evil that Ramsey is talking about. I know I check the sex offender registry list. I don't let my 6-year-old wander off in the neighborhood alone. I don't let her out of my sight when we go shopping.
But those are all evils we're pretty aware of, that we aren't "naive" about. The problem that the Ramseys faced, that we all face, is the evil we don't know about. The child sex abusers who are actually trusted by a kid (who, by the way, make up the greater number of offenders). The kidnappers who are known and trusted by a kid (again, kids are more likely to be grabbed by someone they know). The nice guy from down the street who has lived a quiet, normal life with a wife, and a dog and two beautiful kids who just up and snaps one day.
They're the fears that have created helicopter parenting and sucked a lot of the fun out of being a kid. I hate to say I ignore some of it, but helloooo, guilty! I have chosen to stop thinking about the stuff I can't control, because I can't spend my life sleeping in my kid's bed just in case some guy sneaks in during the night or up her butt when she just wants to swing on the damn swings. I could do all that ... and then some drunk driver could blow through a stop sign and ... no, honestly, I don't even want to think about it.
You know why? Because I can't control it all. Like most parents, I have enough balls to juggle between the ridiculous March Madness dress up days at the kid's school (seriously, every day for a month?), and the fact that they just dropped another day off on me with less than a week's notice, plus trying to get her bedroom repainted, and ... yeah, that's enough people. ENOUGH!
My heart breaks for John Ramsey that, 16 years later, he still doesn't have answers. But until he does, I just have to tune him out. Not to be cruel, but to stay sane!
How did the JonBenet Ramsey case change how you parent?
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