Believing in a Safe World

I'm interested in a return to a belief that the world is safe. When you talk with people about child-rearing, one of the fondest memories is of unfettered play in childhood--walking to and from school without an adult, playing with the kids in the neighborhood until mom called you home for dinner.

But today's middle class parents keep their children under close supervision. They are dropped off and picked up from school sometimes until their senior year. Their orbits are very small for the first 13-14 years of life. Many kids are not allowed to even run down the block to a friend's house without an adult for fear of being snatched.

My experience is that it's a safe world. I have never been snatched and no one I know has ever been snatched, except by a noncustodial parent. Yet the news would have us believe that there are predators around every corner. That we are bad parents if we let our children have freedom of movement. That it is criminally negligent to let your child play in the neighborhood outside of the watchful eye of an adult.

I have these questions:

• Is it really a less safe world?
• At what point does our own experience get to contradict what we're being fed by the media?
• If we have a nostalgia for another time, why don't we re-create it?
• How does a generation of children raised in a culture of fear govern?

More on this later.