I'm getting lectured right now by my co-worker about how eventually "one day [I'll] know" what it's like to be a parent. I'm sitting here and trying to explain to her that despite her overwhelming fear that her 12 year old son is going to get raped by a pederast the second he steps outside and that's why she, and other parents like her, don't allow her children to go anywhere unsupervised, that the world is actually safer place now than it was back when she was a kid.

She actually sighed, reminiscing over her youth in the 1970's, saying, "It was just freer back then."

She doesn't even realize she's a walking case study of helicopter parenting. She's told me, "I prefer that my son stay inside and play World of Warcraft instead of go outside because it's dangerous."

She even defeats her own points, saying, "We're just more aware now. There didn't used to be a website that told you there was a child rapist living within three miles of you."

There's nothing to say really, but that we live in a society paralyzed by fear. This poor woman can't let her 12 year old son walk down the street for a mile without being terrified that he's going to get harmed in some way. Harmed by what? By who?

She says that her line of thinking is that "the internet has made the predators more ballsy, before they were isolated but now they can get on the internet and plot together and encourage each other to snatch away a child." I tried to say that that seems far fetched but, really, who can say.

Which is best? To err on the side of fear or to err on the side of hope? These are people who you could show statistics to, show them that crime in their area is less than it has been in years, and they'd still insist that the "outside world" is too dangerous for their children. What can you do? What can I say?

All you can really do is hope that when all these children grow up after being over-protected by their parents, that when they have children they don't buy into the same myth inspiring hysteria. They'll realize their parents were silly and kick their children outside and say, "Go play! Come back for dinner!" and don't worry about them incessantly. The parents addicted to their children will give rise to parents who know that it's another form of sickness to be avoided, that smothering your children in a protective cocoon motivated purely by fear is not the way you should raise a child who is meant to cope with reality.

What about the children... what about the children...