British mums are paranoid

The UK Sun reports:

MILLIONS of parents are playing safe — by keeping their kids indoors as fear of crime stalks Britain.

A whopping 78 per cent of mums and dads polled in a new survey said they would never let children under ten play outside in the street.

And over half don’t think youngsters are safe online either.

The shock findings also reveal most people feel less safe than they did ten years ago, even though crime is DOWN.

Lenore Skenazy is the only one with the guts to refute such paranoia. Here is a sample from her blog:

Dear Free-Range Kids: I love the show “Parenthood,” which is produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. It’s a sappy hour-long drama that very loosely follows the premise of a movie by the same name, which came out in 1989 and starred Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen. ...

I have noticed, though, when watching the show, that helicopter parenting is rampant. ...

One of the main characters, Kristina Braverman, has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She needs a lumpectomy right away. The soonest her surgeon can get her in is the same day that her son, Max, is giving a speech because he is running for president of … wait for it … his middle school. There is lots of hand-wringing over the date. She initially schedules her surgery for a much later date, over the objection of her husband and her surgeon, so she won’t miss Max’s big day. It is important to mention here that Max has Asperger’s. Why is that important to mention? It is actually not. It has nothing to do with anything; he needs his mom to be healthy just as much as a kid who doesn’t have Asperger’s. But it does provide a comic moment when he tells his mom he doesn’t care that she can’t come because, ”You can’t vote anyway.”

This is what American moms like to watch on TV. Are the helicopter parents really that bad? No parents should be allowed to sit in on middle school speeches anyway.