Is that kind of paranoia productive? Especially considering we are at historically low crime rates.

A very young child needs supervision and precautions to prevent them from hurting themselves, as this article sadly shows, and even then, its blind bad luck sometimes.

But otherwise I can’t think any of my family (two young kids, 1 year and 8 years) or friends (many kids of various ages) being super cautious about their kids in public. I don’t live in the USA, mind you.

We let daycare staff care for the little ones, which includes daily walks through the downtown core. We let kids walk to school on their own when they turned 10, we let them play unsupervised outside around age 7, or go for a bike ride with neighbor kids, etc. It’s not that different from when I was growing up. Hanging out and playing the at the park is probably less of a thing, perhaps, but that’s more because of iPads and Xboxes than safety.

The paranoia is counterproductive, it actually makes the world more dangerous. Ten or fifteen years ago this story made the rounds in Britain (writing from memory, can't be bothered to search for it in the BBC archive):

A small boy had wandered off and was found dead in a pond, he had fallen in and drowned because he could not swim. It turned out that the child had been seen by a labourer cleaning a ditch, but he had no cellphone and did not intervene because he feared the pedophile hysteria and did not want to be seen with a child that wasn't his.

It's understandable if you remember what Rupert Murdoch's Sun was like.

Excellent points. There was an article where the author interviewed a bunch of kids a few decades back and examined how they played and then revisited them 20 years later to see how their kids played.

The original group of kids played across a very large area (something like a couple square miles of woodland) and roamed across their hometowns with little oversight.

Two decades later their children by comparison were very closely monitored and played in controlled areas or fenced yards only.

The reasoning of the parents being that crime and abduction have risen when in fact they’ve fallen by a huge amount.

There’s no real sane reason behind it - I’m a parent and there’s no way I’d let my kids play in the local woods alone despite doing so myself as a kid. The world ‘feels’ less safe and it’s very hard to overcome our feelings even when we know they’re irrational.

My parents also placed perceived (by them) safety above everything else when I was a teenager. I missed out on a lot of things in life and am still missing out on things due to never having learned essential life skills and never having had essential experiences. I still resent them for that and so does my sister. Sometimes, I think parents only think of themselves, as strange as that might sound in this context. It's extremely selfish, IMO, to hold back a child from their full potential because the parents have their own irrational issues that they're not dealing with.

I think you hit the nail on the head. So much of today's parenting zeitgeist feels driven by narcissism. I feel like this is another effect of the rise of social media.

> It's extremely selfish, IMO, to hold back a child from their full potential because the parents have their own irrational issues that they're not dealing with.

This really resonates. My kid for example has wanted one of these little scooters which you see toddlers riding around everywhere. I've been refusing up until recently when I realized that by denying her access not only am I excluding her from a valuable social experience with her friends who own scooters but I'm quite possibly harming her ability to master and safely ride the thing.

It's important to realize that sometimes when you're saying to your kid "I don't think you're ready" you're really talking about yourself as a parent.

> I missed out on a lot of things in life and am still missing out on things due to never having learned essential life skills and never having had essential experiences.

New father here...do you feel comfortable talking about what life skills / experiences you missed?, so I can (try to) avoid making the same mistakes?

Mostly everything that teenagers do. Hang out, date, make friends, learn to socialize and not be constantly anxious around other people. Things like that, things that involve socializing. I tried to make up for it in college too by partying and doing plenty of irresponsible shit (because I felt entitled to having the teenage years I was robbed of). I had no problems graduating, but no one else who tried to keep up actually graduated. I'd say learning to socialize and be around people is more valuable than anything else I did learn as a teenager, by far.

Part of it is society, too. If you were to let your (young) children play in the woods at a mile from your house... and something happened to them, there's a fair chance that society would blame you nowadays. Heck, I'd venture to guess that there's a fair chance the court could take away your parental rights in a situation like that. What is considered acceptable by society has changed a LOT over the years.

I would say 100% of it is society, to be honest. I grew up roaming the neighborhood, just like a lot of kids back in the 70s and 80s. It's not that our free-roaming childhood turned us into paranoid parents, it's that the very culture of the USA became vastly more paranoid.

I would probably blame the sensational news coverage nowadays, we didnt have this 20 years ago. Back then news would contain sports/world events and bigger stuff. You hear about so many bad things happening you never think about the probability of it actually happening to you. Like all we read is "Child kidnapped" not "First child kidnapping in a year with lowest kidnap rate ever and in a place so far away that its not relevant to you".

> I would probably blame the sensational news coverage nowadays, we didnt have this 20 years ago.

Yes, we did, and the media-driven false perception was already well-established 20 years ago; I saw papers about the media-driven false perception in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Media sensationalism isn't new. Even the heightened form driven by the 24-hour news cycle is older than that (CNN, the 24-hour news network that drove the 24-hour news cycle, is 37 years old. Fox News and MSNBC, the two competing general 24-hour news networks that made that cycle competitive were each founded 21+ years ago in 1996.)

Not sure if this is the same article, but this one has stuck in my mind for the past 10+ years: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-...

Obviously with little kids in an urban environment we kept them pretty close to home. Once they were in 7th and 8th grade then the ranges got longer. And honestly, it was a challenge dealing with my spouse and other families who insisted on hover-parenting or refusing to let their kids walk 3 blocks to our house. To a certain degree, that is to their detriment because it doesn't allow kids to learn and explore.

Of course, my argument, along with the article above, was "They sneak out at night and wander all over multiple neighborhoods, so why do you feel the need to keep them in your sight at all times?" But that leads to lots of other parenting stories that I'm not going into here.

>Is that kind of paranoia productive? Especially considering we are at historically low crime rates.

I balance the likelihood with the potential consequences when making my decision.

For example, logically, I know that there's no danger of contracting anything from sitting on a public toilet seat but I still make a bird's nest when I have to poop in a public place.

Intellectually, I know that the world is now statistically safer than it was when I was a child but I still do not allow my children to roam unsupervised in public places.

Your first paragraph seems to directly contradict your second and third.

Extremely low likelihood versus maximum severity of consequence versus moderate likelihood with low severity of consequence.

I choose to guard spend more time being vigilant against the former.

That's fair. Another way to look at it is "Fat tail risk".

Having you head on a swivel for would-be child snatchers at all times seems like irrational paranoia.

I imagine it's the deceptively mundane that is the true danger, automobiles being the most obvious.

This is true. The number of child abductions by strangers in the U.S. is extraordinarily low—in the neighborhood of 100 per year [1, 2]. There are lots of abductions, of course, but nearly all of them are by family members, acquaintances of the family, or other non-strangers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-mis... http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/31/kidnapping-stats

The same is true for murders. The objectively statistically most dangerous people are those around you that you know relatively well, not some random stranger passing by or sitting on the next bench. This irriational fear of danger of strangers stops us from bonding with new people.

Have a look at the Megan's Law registry. Tell me how close the nearest violent sexual predator is to you.

A few months ago, I discovered that one lived on my street. He has since been arrested and is no longer in the neighborhood.

But, it's not just out-of-place perverts. I am also on the lookout for under supervised children who "play" too violently.

I knew that I would be concerned about vehicles, so I was sure to buy a house with a large, fenced in, backyard. It's away from the street and even adjacent to a small patch of woods. They can have outdoor adventures and I can have peace of mind.

Children are sexually abused by family members, then by adults at schools and clubs they visit. Abuse by strangers is rare.

True - my molester was a long time friend of the family, close enough that me going on a vacation trip to his state park campground trailer wasn't an unusual summer thing. Took me 25 years to remember exactly what had gone on, and a couple of years of therapy to get back to somewhat steady on my emotional feet. Never 100% sure of that anymore, but I try.

True. My position as a sheepdog isn't limited to strangers. My children aren't unsupervised with many relatives or family friends either.

They're also not left unsupervised with clergy.

Research is tricky, but at the moment we think the person most likely to abuse a child is their sibling.

I have no proof of this but I would suspect that this happens more often when the sibling had been a victim of abuse.

>Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me.

Can you expand? What type of father are you?

Honestly, you'd do better to be more vigilant of bees and mosquitoes, both of which are much more likely to kill or harm your child than a stranger abducting them.

Try not to worry so much. ;)

By "father like me", I mean one who is on the lookout for threats to his children.

Do you feel most other fathers aren't?

I’m very much like this.

BTW if you want to give your kids the best chance at later childhood, select their school not based on hearsay or image, but based on how resilient, motivated and kind/warm their teacher-to-be is. Those teachers keep bullying at a minimum, and let kids keep their natural curiosity. Spending 4-5h every day in class can make or break you at 6-8y old.