Reply #32: True. I kept my son on a leash until he was about three and a half.

[1monster]

He loved the freedom of the leash, and I loved the security of knowing he couldn't dash out into the street or into an ocean wave that could swish him away. He always stayed close to us after we stopped the leash.

Even so... When he was five years old, we went to Universal Studios while visiting with out of state relative. The day we were there, it rained and everyone was wearing Universal's yellow rain slickers. He stopped to look at something and when he turned around to find a sea of yellow slickers and paniced. We were only about three feet away from him and turned to find him really scared.

On the same visit, we saw him up the ladder to a kid's tree house and walked around to the exit of the tree house, only to find that he had just run across, went down the slide, and went looking for us, losing himself. But my little boy looked around till he found a woman holding a baby and asked her for help. My smart little boy remembered everything I had taught him about asking for help if he got lost.

Kids can and do get lost quickly and with little effort on their parts.

(Now, if there were a pattern of such incidents, an indepth investigation would be warrented.)