Rather than conducting safety drills, parents can help prevent abduction and abuse of children in an emotionally positive way by exercising basic parenting skills. When children are young, the key is to supervise them. Parents should use common sense and not leave a young child unsupervised. Don't leave the child in a park or car alone or in a toy department of a store while you shop elsewhere.

Parents also need to be more involved in scrutinizing whom they leave their children with, be it a babysitter, daycare worker, or camp counselor. Most parents have good radar and shouldn't rationalize away uncomfortable feelings. If you are uneasy about a babysitter, coach, or Sunday School teacher, get the child out.

Other common sense safety tactics include teaching your child not to allow anyone in the house and not to tell callers that you are not at home. Instead, have them say, "My parents can't come to the phone. May I take a message?" You might want to tape those sentences to the phone.

Also, know the route your child follows to and from the school, friends' houses, or the store, and tell your child always to follow the same route. You can point out offices or homes along the way that the child could run into if help was needed.

Start by asking the child, "What if someone you didn't know offered you candy to get in a car with him?" Move toward more subtle questions such as, "What if someone who seemed to know me said I had sent him to pick you up at school?" "What if . . ." should be played in natural circumstances, such as when driving in the car with the child. The parent should not make a big deal of it or spend a long time at one sitting on it. Use situations like: What if you were home alone and someone came to the door and said their car had broken down, and they needed to use the phone? What if someone walking behind you gave you an uncomfortable feeling?

By exploring these situations with children, in natural circumstances rather than as part of a formal quiz or staged event, you can give them advice to draw on if they ever encounter a similar situation. They can react by thinking, "Mom said I can do this."Focus on the situation, not the appearance of the person. Over-emphasizing the dangers of strangers may instill prejudices, causing children to be afraid of people who look different than they or their parents do. It's important to advise children to be wary of certain situations – adults asking them for help, touching them on private parts of the body, and so forth.

When attempting to alert children to the possibility of abduction, parents should be careful not to frighten children or exaggerate the dangers. Although children can be helped to be more cautious, instilling in them a fear of everyone will cripple their emotional development.

A child can't develop a healthy self-esteem if he visualizes someone coming around each corner wanting to harm him. Normal self-esteem is predicated on children gradually developing the notion that they are not invulnerable as they interact with the world. For some children, the ever-present threat that they could be taken away and killed may be as psychologically damaging to them as actual abuse.

When the negative side of the world is excessively emphasized to children they have two extreme ways of coping. Some children will become paranoid, never feeling safe, not trusting anyone. Or, since it is so scary to feel always at risk, other children will develop a false bravado or feeling of invulnerability that actually makes them less careful.

It is possible to protect your children without unduly scaring them. Do talk about safety, but do it in the same way you talk about good nutrition, hygiene, and the importance of making friends. Make it one more lesson in what we teach our children so they grow up healthy, safe, and strong. Don't present it in a way that overshadows all the other concerns of the child.

To flourish, children need to feel secure. In our haste to protect a child from that one-in-a-million chance of abduction, we should not take away that basic right.