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.)