This is why, when I need sitting for my middle-school aged kids, I drop them off in the middle of Union Station instead of bringing them to their grandparents.

At least they won't get fat! Those grandparents...

> Strangers, even unvetted ones, almost never pose a danger to children. The vast majority of harm done to children is done by friends and family. Having more strangers around makes your kids safer, if anything.

I hear this a lot and my guess is this is simply a function of how much time family and friends spend with a child (in relative privacy) compared to complete strangers. The surface area of attack is way smaller for random people; they don't have the "reasonable" opportunity.

So if you were looking for a babysitter, would you prefer someone randomly selected on airbnb by your downstairs neighbor to someone you've vetted yourself?

The real key here is to look at who does the selecting.

The danger comes from the self selected, if you have a crowd of random people and you choose one at random, then the chances that they have malicious intent are related to the incidence of that in the population; OTOH if you ask for volunteers, or worse, if someone spontaneously volunteers then the chance is way higher...

Lol. Most harm to anyone, regardless of age, is caused by friends and family, but that is primarily because friends and family have the most opporunities.

If strangers were afforded equal access to your children, the numbers would not be so favorable. Having strangers around does not make your kids safer. At best, your kinds would be just as safe around strangers. At worst, they would be exposed to far more risk.

Where is the data to support your claim? It's possible that strangers are more dangerous on a per opportunity basis, but I suspect it's untrue. For example, children spend about the same time at school as at home (at least on weekdays). Yet abuse is much more frequent at home.