Every parent's secret dread

The disappearance of toddler Aisling Symes was a simple, unambiguous, nightmarish narrative.

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The tragic story of Aisling Symes captured so many hearts because it was a "lightning rod of dread" for all parents.

The anguish of Alan and Angela Symes, a family forced onto the national stage when their youngest child, two-year-old Aisling, vanished for a week before being found dead in a drain, led news bulletins and discussion on talkback radio shows for days.

Clinical psychologist Julian Metcalfe, 50, says the couple's torment went to the very heart of all Kiwi parents because they could imagine the horror of not knowing if your child is safe.

"We just thought `oh my god,' We were all sitting imagining what it would be like to be at home not knowing where your child was," says Metcalfe, a former senior clinical psychologist with Auckland District Health Board, now in private practice, and a father of three boys 14, 19 and 21.

The details released about the blue-eyed toddler were intended to humanise her to a possible abductor. But they also struck a nerve with the nation because she could have been any toddler: lively, happy, loved bananas and cheese, her favourite toy Freddy Frog.

As she danced in the living room on our screens, on footage made public by police, other Kiwi kids were doing just that next to those very TVs.

"I think it touches on our core as human beings, that we connect and relate," Metcalfe says.

Parents carry around a "constant terror" hidden deep inside – we need our loved ones to be safe and secure. "We are hardwired that way." Psychologist Rebecca Daly-Peoples, 37, mother of a four-year-old, points to a parent's role to protect their children. And when something, such as the Aisling case, reminds us that we can't, we all came face to face with our vulnerability.

She says that when parents encounter issues like domestic violence towards children, they can rationalise it. "It saddens us terribly as parents, but we can say `well that's not going to happen to my child because I'm not going to do that to my child and nobody in my family is going to do that to my child.'

"But when you hear something has happened to ... [a child] outside of their family ... it pops the bubble."

As the police arranged for the family to make pleas to the phantom kidnapper, it played further on our fears, she says.

The spectre of international cases, such as James Bulger, JonBenet Ramsey, and Madeleine McCann are buried deep in parental psyches, she says. However, when these cases are international, we can register but ignore them, she says. Suddenly, a child was missing in New Zealand and all those demons emerged.

"This story we could relate to, it looked like my own backyard," Metcalfe adds.

Even when the reality emerged, that Aisling had fallen and drowned in a drain, the shock did not diminish. The suddenness of loss remained terrifying – five minutes away from the sight of her parents.

However, we also witnessed the sympathy of a nation transform into a "Princess Di effect", said Metcalfe. Death and loss was usually personal, leaving you wondering how the world could carry on while you were in a state of shock. When Diana died "everybody could share their grief together. It gave an opportunity for people to release grief collectively and publically."

The emotional journey of the Symes case gave society a chance to exorcise the demons of parental fear that haunt us.

Yet this was in the end a very domestic tragedy. There was no abduction. Aisling's death is a tragedy that happens all too often. In New Zealand a child under five dies on average every day. About 10 per cent of those deaths – 47 or almost one a week – is from an accident.

Each brings tragedy and rips into the heart of a family but most of that grief is invisible to us. Metcalfe believes we should be thankful for this – if tragedy were to become mundane we would become desensitised to it.

Daly-Peoples says events like the Aisling case can cast long shadows. Long after the facts are forgotten, remnants of the fear evoked remain.

Parents are constantly trying to balance protecting their children and not wrap them in cotton wool, she says.

"It's that kind of fear that has actually meant now that kids don't walk to school by themselves and we drive them everywhere."

For the West Auckland family at the heart of the drama, the tragedy will have a lasting legacy of battling to come to terms with the loss of a precious daughter.

The media coverage of Aisling's disappearance ensured New Zealanders were acutely aware of the case.

Massey University journalism lecturer Alan Samson says the extent of the coverage might have been "unfortunate" and focused too strongly on the possibility of an abduction, but it was justified.

While a possible abduction was the focus of the police investigation, the media had to follow.

"I think New Zealand is a very small country and we just don't have abductions like that and if it had been true it would have been a huge, huge story, even bigger than what it was."

Comparing the coverage to that given to the case of missing Auckland student Srikanth Rayadurgam, Samson says while a disappearance or the possibility of an untimely death is just as serious, the possible abduction of a toddler had a greater "emotional pull".

"I think it's about an emotional pull of a young kid being abducted, or thought to be abducted. That is legitimately massive news."