I'm a parent and I have no clue what they're going through. I can empathize on a human level but it's all as much speculation as my childless friends (and far, far less of an understanding than unfortunate acquaintances of acquaintances of mine who have a still-missing relative).
The thing is, there are far more things about this that I can't understand as a parent, more than people with no children who would just think of these things as curious. Leaving my kids sleeping alone in a room with an out-of-view door they could up and walk out of (well, only the one that was old enough to walk :rolleyes:)? That's unfathomable -- not that I'm a great believer in there being hordes of bogeymen child-rapists out there, more that I know that sleeping children have this tendency to, well, wake up (something "only a parent can understand"). And if they wake up alone they get scared. Now, I worry about my daughter getting scared about fifty billion times more than I worry about her getting plucked from her bed by that chap from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. If they don't recognise the place they're in, they get even more scared. And when they're scared they try and find one of their parents so that they can calm them down.
Everybody's saying things like they were mad unlucky that this child-snatcher (totally hypothetical) happened to break into (lies) this safe place (lies) and steal their adored child from under their very noses (lies) and it was a one in a million chance and all. What is not a one in a million chance, though, is that a sleeping kid would wake up. They appear either not to have been aware of this fact -- even though they're doctors and this is pretty much a 'medical' fact -- or not to have given two hoots.
How many other times has that kid woken up on her own not having a clue where they were, and they out gallivanting? How many times has she wandered off, crying, frightened, from where she was sleeping to go and find them and get a hug off them?
I do relate to this story as a parent, but that's not where my compassion and whatever empathy I feel for them comes from. Absolutely the opposite. I feel for them despite being a parent myself.
Hopefully they get their kid back (unless they had something to do with it, obviously).