My neighbour was the world’s best stay-at-home dad, but I am still saddened when I recall what his daughter said to him when he was walking his two kids to school one day. Their school had two recent lockdowns because of reports of ’suspicious men’ lurking near the school (this was after a couple of prominent abduction/murders in Ontario in the early 90’s). One was fellow was just sitting on his front step across the street from the schoolyard, and the other was a father standing outside the schoolyard waiting to pick up his child. Anyways, this worried his six-year-old daughter, who correctly understood the hysteria behind all of this, so one day she told him “Daddy, maybe you shouldn’t walk us to school anymore.”

Another example was several years later when she fell hard on the monkey bars (the type that has since been banned because of safety concerns) at the playground and was bleeding profusely from the groin. She immediately left her friends, and cycled home to her dear dad. But when he took her to the hospital, it was treated like a sex attack, with him being the presumed attacker. I do not believe that this would have happened if ‘mom’ had taken her to the hospital.