The Great Mom Debate: How Do You React When Your New Neighbor is a Sex Offender?
By Charlotte Hilton Andersen, REDBOOK
Letters taped to your door are rarely good. If it's not an ad for pizza or a message from UPS, it's a letter from your angry neighbors offering to fund a new lawn mower because your current one has been devoured by children's toys in the Serengeti of your front yard. (No? Just me?) So when I read the note taped to my door the other day, my stomach dropped: "A registered sex offender has moved into your neighborhood."
The letter didn't include the exact address, but it did have lots of helpful and not-at-all scary tips like, "Advise your children not to play outside alone," and, "Tell children not to enter strangers' homes, even if they offer candy and puppies." Okay, I might be paraphrasing a bit, but you get the point. At the bottom was a website were I could go for more information.
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Running back inside, I went to the site as quickly as my mouse could click. This might have been a mistake. The sex offender registry website allows you to type in your home address, and then it populates a map with a little flag for each known sex offender. The quiet, suburban Midwestern town were we live? Covered in red flags. I was overwhelmed. Sure, when you break it down per capita, it's probably a reasonably small number, but when you see a map like that… well, I started hyperventilating.
I'm already very cautious with my children-some might say overprotective (tomato, tomahto)-so I wasn't sure what to do with this information. Do I rein them in even tighter? Do I tell them about our new neighbor? How do I prepare them to live in a scary world without making them afraid of the world?
Help me out. How do you handle this type of information?
-I just do my best and don't look. It makes me have nightmares.
-I read the information, but keep it to myself.
-I tell my children about it and change our day-to-day life.
-I'd move.
Charlotte Hilton Andersen is a mom of 5 and the author of the book The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything and the blog of the same name.
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