Our parents grew up in a world where children were rarely abducted. They lived in a world where playing outside was something they did every day until the sun went down, riding bikes up and down the street, going to their friends houses, etc.

Now, children are taken all the time, even if they are just playing in their front yard or walking home from school. An Anderson Cooper 360 blog states every year, there is 800,000 children that are reported missing. From that 800,000, “The NCMEC says 203,000 children are kidnapped each year by family members. Another 58,200 are abducted by non-family members. Many others are runaways or pushed out of the home by parents.”

This data was taken in 2007 but those numbers probably have not decreased since then.

I have a strong feeling that this problem will not be solved overnight, in the next decade or maybe ever.

By the time current Cyclone students have children, they will need to keep an eye on them. Current parents have found a great way to avoid some of the less aggressive abductions by giving their whole family and trusted friends “code words”, to be used when that child is being picked up from school or other situations.

“Code words” are key phrases that a family agrees on, like a password, and they ask anyone they don’t know as well as their parents what the password is to make sure they are parent approved. This has saved children from being abducted more than once.

Yesterday, an 11-year-old from Arizona and her friend were approached by a man in his 40’s driving an SUV who asked them to get into his car. She asked him for their families code word. Her mother told Fox10 Phoenix, “We came up with a code word, and this one time, it saved my daughter’s life. She told me that a guy tried to take her.”

It is times like these where doing something as simple as making up a code word and occasionally changing it can save your child from being abducted.

As scary as it is to be a parent during any time frame, it is way scarier to be a parent now. The amount of children that are abducted is extreme. There is no reason 800,000 children should be reported missing every year.

When I was young, my mother would tell my brother and I that if we were ever in a dangerous situation, such as being abducted, we should yell “fire!” She told us that this is because the general public would more likely look towards a child in distress yelling “fire” than if that child was just yelling. If we were just to yell, it could be taken as a child throwing a temper tantrum and everyone would ignore that child.

Words such as these are great for alarming whoever is around your child that they are in danger. Code words, however, should be something relatively easy to remember that cannot be guessed by a stranger. Either way, your child should be prepared if something were to happen.

Even though the world is full of badness, we should not keep our children forever inside and prevent them from playing outside because we are afraid of the unthinkable, but we should just prepare them for anything that might happen while they are away from us.