.correction ' I believe the world as I knew it is a far cry to the one my kids know today.'

“I am very upset with my sister and am astounded that she has let herself become a victim of the epidemic of fear that punctuates our media and politics.”

Scout , I think everyone has to find their own balance between protection and freedom. Your sister has a different balance to you. But is it necessarily a worse position to hold?

“Yes, we do overprotect our children and by doing so are saying we don't trust them and then wind up surprised when they reach their teens and don't respect us.”

Some of us are overprotective. Some of us are the opposite. Some (probably most) of us are protective some of the time and then let our guard down when it might really count.

It’s all over the place.

You worry about an apparent fear campaign leading to over-protection. I’d be more inclined to worry about a lack of sufficient expression by our political masters, academics, teachers, P&C associations etc about the ever-present dangers for our naïve children and adolescents.

I say, let there be full expression, and if it leads to a bit of overprotection, well that’s got to be better than underprotection.

When our kids reach adulthood, they will respect us if we were a tad overprotective. They won’t respect us if we let them get into trouble that we could have prevented with a little more loving care.

If you watch a lioness with her cubs, she will give them what they need while training them for the future when they must get out on their own. If they persist in any behaviour that could be dangerous to their well being, she will bring them smartly back into line.
We must do the same for our children, we have to equip them physically and mentally for when they ,too, must go out into dangerous waters. Maybe kids today are not getting enough rigour. Cut out some of the [babysitting]play stations and let them use their imaginations more in real time. They are learning while they play just like the cubs.

I agree with most people to some degree. Let's not look through rose coloured glasses though. In previous generations, children were raised in families where domestic abuse, sexual abuse and alcoholism were rampant and endemic, yet society as a whole often turned a blind eye to all of this, just as they turned a blind eye to the severe bullying at school (both from other students and teachers).

Mercurius: Indeed, kids have all these new-fangled toys and are spoilt rotten! What they really need is for every male role-model in their lives to piss it all up against a wall every Thursday pay day, and then come home and give them all a hiding. That'd teach them some morals, the ungrateful little bastards. It worked for my mother and her siblings and all of her neighbours growing up.

Great thread, folks, and thanks to OZGIRL for raising the question.

When I talk to my friends with kids, most seem to have the belief that kids are more at risk from abductions and sexual assault by strangers than ever before, and this is the reason for the extra protection so many think is necessary. Strangely, I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that this anxiety has any basis in reality.

In the US, there was a massive increase in reported child abductions during the 1970s and 1980s. When you actually look at the cases, in nearly every situation the “offender” was the non custodial parent of the child, reluctant to accept a court’s judgement – a sad and dysfunctional situation, and one that deserves sensible attention, but not as sinister as was originally believed.

My own impression is that the abduction and rape of children is rare now, although when cases do occur they are highly publicised and cause understandable repugnance. But I’ve never seen any evidence that such cases are any more common now than they used to be. In fact my guess is that such perpetrators are more likely these days to be caught and punished and controlled. Most sexual abuse is by perps known to the child and his or her protectors, and always has been.

So why the anxiety?

cont.

In the mid 1980s in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK and Australia, there developed a widespread belief that Satanists had taken over control of many childcare centres and kindergartens and were subjecting hundreds of little kids to horrific rituals that included torture and sexual abuse. These beliefs were taken up by many in the mainstream child protection, policing, medical and legal professions, and led to such popular, but bogus, concepts as “recovered repressed memory” and the “anal wink test” for sexual abuse. Dozens of innocent people were convicted and jailed for terrible crimes that never happened, and hundreds of children were traumatized by well meaning professionals lacking basic critical skills in medicine, psychology and jurisprudence. We can look back on this phenomenon as another example of moral panic or witch hunting which have always been recurrent dysfunctional themes of human societies, but I reckon we’ve got some lessons in this. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
Or http://skepdic.com/satanrit.html

I reckon we’ve got to look more broadly at how anxiety functions in society, how it is used by the media and entertainment industries, how it’s used by politicians to corral support. OZGIRL, I don’t think there are simple answers to your question, but it’s a really important one.