[MarchHare]

This also points to your lack of understanding of parenting today. Parents aren't necessarily more worried about a more dangerous world.

This is factually incorrect. The incedence of parental "over-protectiveness" as a response to irrational paranoia rather than actual risk has shot up dramatically in recent decades. You can Google the topic and find numerous reports and studies discussing this.

A few examples:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1156063.stm

In the aftermath of any high-profile child murder, newspapers routinely scream that our children are in mortal danger.

Yet in Britain today, a child is no more likely to be abducted and killed than 30 years ago, when boys and girls tended to roam with more freedom.

Of course, parents tend to act on instinct rather than statistics.

[...]

Professor John Adams, a University College London academic who has examined the role of risk in society, believes we have gone too far in shielding children. The result, he says, is that we are depriving them of learning and valuable life experience.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...nt-expert.html

"Very rarely are children seen on the streets, playing outside, taking themselves to school because we live in such a risk averse and paranoid culture around child safety."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...hildren.health

This week the decline in children's play will be laid bare when ministers admit that one in four eight- to 10-year-olds have never played outside without an adult and one in three parents will not even allow older children, aged eight to 15, to play outside the house or garden.

A national consultation on how to reverse the decline, to be published on Thursday, will also show that children start playing outside later in life; the average age at which they are allowed out without supervision has risen from seven in the 1970s to over eight today. The crisis is being made worse by increased traffic and parked cars, less tolerance of young people and fear of 'stranger danger'.

[...]

'In our consultations parents told us this is because there are not enough safe places to go - and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that parents think their children are safer playing inside on a computer than outside.'

[...]

'We argued very strongly that children need safe places to play,' he said. 'There is evidence that parents are less willing to let their children play out and that can turn into a vicious cycle, because if play areas are not used by families then we concede them to less desirable groups.'