At a theme park in the US - the home of paranoid parenting - I let my two older children explore. Occasionally - because they run faster than I can - they were out of my sight. "You're crazy," shouted a critical friend. "Haven't you seen the milk cartons?" In the US, the milk cartons are emblazoned with pictures of missing children - the majority of them "abducted" by their own divorced parents in custody rows. With the theme park security staff so vigilant that it was like having a personal "secret service" in tow, I wasn't worried. And when one of the kids got "lost" - four security staff with walkie-talkies found her within minutes. If I were a predatory sex abuser, Sea World is the last place I'd go cruising for victims.
My child was found playing happily with a bunch of other children on an enormous pirate ship, waiting for us to walk by so she could squirt us with a water cannon. Which is precisely what she should have been doing.
So why the panic when my child "went missing" for two minutes? Because we don't trust children anymore to look after themselves.
Play used to happen outdoors. Children used to learn to assess risk sensibly. Now play happens in front of a computer. Instead of running around and having adventures, children sit still for hours making little cartoon figures run around and have adventures. The average weekend for the average child means being connected for 10 hours or more to a range of electronic media.
Fresh air and physical play only happen if the parents have the energy to impose a forced march to the seafront or in a local park. Even then, many children are so closely supervised that they don't act like children. They walk like robots because their parents are too afraid of them getting dirty, wet - or abducted.
We're rearing "battery" children, like battery hens. The British Mental Health Foundation has warned that children are failing to develop self-confidence because over-cautious parents are afraid to let them out to play. Sociologist Frank Furedi, in his book Paranoid Parenting to be published next week, believes that parents are visiting their own distrust upon their children: "The breakdown in adult solidarity breeds parental paranoia." Parents feel they can no longer trust other adults, so they are teaching their children not to trust adults either.
A 1998 survey by Families for Freedom found that nine out of 10 parents had a general sense of foreboding about the safety of their children. Eight out of 10 saw "other people" as the chief danger to their children's safety.
British parents - and a lot of Irish ones too - don't let their children walk to school anymore because they perceive "stranger-danger". Furedi states: "The army of professionals concerned with child protection take every opportunity to promote the message that children are constantly at risk."
Yet unsupervised, adventurous play is essential to healthy development, Furedi argues: "For some time now, educators and psychologists have been pointing to the dangers of children becoming couch potatoes, because `timid parents' are stifling the sense of adventure of British children . . . Chaining children to their parents benefits no one. Allowing children to play on their own is essential for their personal development. Children thrive when they have the freedom to explore the world with their friends. For their part, parents also need their own space."
While scare-mongering over tragic cases such as Jamie Bulger and Sarah Payne puts parents on edge, the reality is that in this State, Irish children are very rarely abducted and murdered. The Philip Cairns case, which has never been resolved, stands out as a harrowing exception.
Fred Lowe, a Dublin-based psychologist specialising in child abuse, believes that Irish children are safer than British children because Irish parents are more vigilant. "Children don't disappear in Ireland. What makes Ireland slightly different is that the Irish mother is more protective than the English mother," says Lowe, who grew up in England. "Relatively few children are attacked by strangers, but a few cases can create an enormous amount of terror."
Eight out of 10 Irish children who are abused are abused by people they know and sex abuse statistics show that parents abuse children more than anybody else, he points out. Home is the most dangerous place for children, in other words, because bad parents make children unsafe both inside the home and out.
LOWE explains: "Children are more at risk in the family context with bad parents than they are from strangers. And it is the bad parents who set low limits and let their children wander at risk. Good parents let their children wander where there is no risk and they set limits. That is not the same as controlling them."
According to Lowe, most sex abusers say that they know the areas where children are susceptible to abuse. These are socioeconomically disadvantaged areas where some parents let their children run with no boundaries, and where children may be alienated from the Garda so that if something bad happens, the children are not necessarily going to tell.
So how do you give your children freedom, without putting them at risk? Lowe advises parents to assess the dangers of where they live and seek out safe havens. A park in a wellheeled area is a much safer place than a park in a poor area frequented by down-and-outs, he says.
He thinks that most Irish parents, in fact, aren't protecting their children from other people - they're protecting them from traffic. Parents need to keep their nerve and have the confidence to keep risk in perspective. Furedi urges parents to "let go". He writes: "It is always important to recall that our obsession with our children's safety is likely to be more damaging to them than any risks that they are likely to meet with in their daily encounter with the world. . . "If parents stifle their children with their obsessions and restrict their scope to explore, then the young generation will become socialised to believe that vulnerability is a natural state of affairs."
Paranoid Parenting by Frank Furedi, will be published on March 19th by Allen Lane, the Penguin Press. £9.99 in UK