Timesonline.co.uk | Children who have everything, except freedom to play outside

How to balance parents' fears of 'stranger danger' against the apparent good it does for children to have opportunities for wholly unsupervised play and the friendships that result? According to a survey report out of the Children's Society's Good Childhood Enquiry, paranoid parents with the resources to do so increasingly wrap their children in cotton-wool, whilst lamenting their 'need' to do so. This seems to have significant implications for the definition of childhood itself, and reminds me of the conclusion to Steven J. Mintz's book Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Belknap Press, 2004).