We sleep with strangers

Everyone should try it!

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Eloise and Teddy. The hitchhikers we picked up in Norway. They did not kill us!

What if we all…

just opened our doors literally and figuratively to strangers? Does this sound completely crazy? How many mamas are reading this and sweating? It goes against everything we have ever been taught, right? I am of the ‘70s and ‘80s generation of stranger danger; the man in the white van, don’t take candy from strangers, and if someone loses their dog, do not go with them to find it. On top of it, my mom watched many horror movies during this time, and she was obsessed with Stephen King. There was always a hitchhiker picked up by a car, and one of the two ended up being a violent serial killer. The political scientist Dietlind Stolle, from McGill University in Canada, argued that decades of this messaging may have damaged a whole generation's ability to trust other people. This is problematic – trust being key to the functioning of many societies.

Abductions by non-family members – which include those where a child is taken by someone unknown to them – account for just 1% of the missing children cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US.

Do you worry about talking to strangers? How has this impacted the way you engage with the world, how you parent, and how you travel? It affected me for several decades until I said, “No more!” Now, I sleep with strangers as often as possible and as many as possible. This attitude has yielded new friends in far-off lands, and I am still alive! No one has abducted me, nor even come close, not even any creepers.