I don't worry at all about kidnappings.

What I worry about is CPS and police officers claiming child endangerment. In my state you can be charged with child endangerment just for leaving the kid strapped into the seat on a moderate day while you walk in to pay the gas station attendant. You could potentially be arrested and charged for letting a 7 year old play alone at the park for a bit.

The kidnappers are real. But they're the CPS and police, and they can't wait to put your kids into a brutal kids-for-cash foster care system. They draw their salary under the guise of "safety" while victimizing children and sapping their independence. And busybodies everywhere have a device at the ready in their pocket, that allows them to invite months of scrutiny into your life based on 30 seconds of effort on their own part, after which the law prevents you from finding their identity or facing your accuser.

Irrational reactions to statistically anomalous "stranger danger" and similiar are why CPS has that power in the first place.

A good point, although it's worth noting CPS and police are not so statistically anomalous as strangers who kidnap children.

I believe the real shift was generational: by 1979 it was the cusp of the earliest Boomers who were raising young kids. They weren't like their parents, growing up in post-war life: They were scared of urban pollution and crime, and didn't have a popular collective experience like WWII, but a divisive one(the 60's, in sum) which helped produce a variety of bogeyman narratives of dangerous Vietnam veterans roaming the streets, illegal immigrants selling drugs, Satanic cult leaders and so forth. Part of the embracing of Reagan's America was in overlooking the parts of this narrative that were self-inflicted by prior US actions, and moving blame to scapegoats. Thus, "stranger danger", distrust of the city, and a general self-alienation with society in favor of personal safety was normalized at that time.

There were definite benefits to the Boomer outlook at the time: smog was curtailed, health-conscious diet and regular exercise became a popular idea(albeit heavily fad-driven). But it also created a more litigious, low-trust climate, which has only driven in the alienation further. Today's political climate is a sort of crescendo on all those concerns, and I see in the current working-age generations much greater willingness to change the deal.