Stunned joy is what most of us felt when we learned that the 9-year-old abducted while riding her bike in upstate New York, Charlotte Sena, has been found and returned to her family — alive.

The alleged perp has been seized, bringing the number of active Amber Alerts in the entire country to … one: Keshawn Williams, a 15-year-old from Cleveland, not seen since June. One is one too many, obviously. Yet it is a far cry from the hundreds of thousands that the press mentioned in the coverage of Charlotte’s disappearance.

The Washington Post reported that “[a]bout 460,000 children in the United States are reported missing each year, according to the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.”

The reporter added that “most are found and returned to safety.” Yet that phrasing made it seem to me, at least, as if “most” had been taken by someone because “returned to safety” sounds as if the cops or someone else found the child and returned them to their parents. And by the way, “most” seems to imply that at least a sizable chunk never made it home.

Yet the number of stranger abductions every year in America is somewhere between 52 and 306 a year. Those are sad numbers. Though they are more than 100 times lower than the numbers mentioned in the Post.

Yes, the 460,000 number comes from the Office of Juvenile Justice. So does the estimate of the 52-306 stranger abductions. It would calm most parents at least a little if they didn’t worry that nearly half a million children are abducted — even if later “found and returned to safety” — every year.

In a country with nearly 50 million children of elementary school age, half a million abductions would mean a couple children in every elementary school were snatched each year. By the time your child graduated fifth grade at a medium-sized school, they’d have seen about 20 children abducted. Almost an entire classroom full.

Thankfully, that is nowhere near the case.

Clearly, we can’t say that there is no crime in America, or that no children are ever abducted. Only that this crime is so rare that we are all thanking the heavens for the one single child our whole country focused on and prayed for over two very troubling days.

If you are looking for more stats — are you? Do stats ever move the fear needle? — here are a few: I just went to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website. Scroll down and you can see a graph of the number of children abducted by strangers in 2022 whose cases remained open: three. Another 98 were “resolved.” These numbers are dwarfed by the number of runaways — more than 20,000 — and the family abductions — children taken in custodial disputes of divorced parents: about 1,500.

Yes, abduction is “every parent’s nightmare.” Yet for the sake of our own sanity — and our children’s mental health — we must try hard not to let it dictate every parenting decision. Because avoiding any risk often creates a risk of its own.

To wit: Parents who fear kidnapping may drive their children to school. Yet far more children die in car accidents than abductions. It hurts to point this out, but it’s also true that ever more children are falling into anxiety and despair and even harming themselves. And part of that despair can be traced to having so little independence to play, explore, or, yes, even ride their bikes.

It’s impossible to keep children perfectly safe. Laws, practices, and parenting decisions often try to achieve this goal. Yet if there’s any way to keep the sad and then miraculous story of Charlotte Sena from making us question every freedom we give our children, we owe it to them to try.

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