Here's an excellent Salon interview with Lenore Skenazy (HT to Eric Parsons) about the idiocy of today's uber-helicopter parenting notions. An excerpt:
Then there are products out there that will prevent this from happening. Here is a helmet your child could wear when she starts to toddle, lest she fall over and split her head open and die, or suffer traumatic brain injury.
Kids have been toddling -- it's a whole stage we actually call toddlerhood -- ever since we started walking upright, which has been a pretty successful experiment for the human species. But now you're supposed to think that it's too dangerous for a kid to do without extra protection and without extra supervision and without this stupid thing you can buy.
There are kneepads that you're supposed to put on your kid because crawling is considered too dangerous for the knees, as if knees weren't built for crawling. That's why they're cute and dimpled and fat.
Read the whole thing.
My wife and I fell into this trap a bit. We bought a house that had safety gates at the top of the stairs and we locked them up religiously. We plugged the electrical outlets.
But we are a lot less anal these days. I don't require my kids (7 and 8 year old boys) to wear helmets etc. when they rollerblade or ride their bikes. Do I worry about my kids? Damn straight I do. I want them to grow up happy and I want them to grow up safe, but I also want them to grow up to be independent adults which means that they will have to learn how to take their own risks.