I grew up in a time where in a big city like Louisville, at 7 years old, I could take the city bus with my twelve year old brother and take 2 transfer buses or we'd ride our bikes 8 miles just to get to the city pool.
All summer long kids would play outdoors away from home, all day, all evening, everyday. We'd never be home, unless all the other kids who weren't at their home where over in your yard having a blast.
Kids had two rules, be home by dinner-time and after dinner the 2nd rule was to be home when the street lights came on.
The freedom kids had in the 70's and 80's would be unthinkable to parents today.
I do not believe kids were any safer in the 70's or 80"s than they are today, I think the availability of information access has increased and parents who can read have legitimate concerns about letting their kids out of eye sight.
The stranger danger campaign really started in the 80's. In 1979 a six year old boy in Manhattan was abducted on a two block walk to his school bus stop. The main stream media turned it into a multi year frenzy of educating us all to not talk to strangers, or accept gifts, etc.
I can a agree, a more watchful eye should be kept on your kids and there are very real dangers, some of us understand how deep the rabbit hole goes with this.
However, as I look back, I see that campaign doing far more harm than good. It took away the freedom and innocents of childhood and parenthood. The days of a Tom Sawyer youth evaporated and were replaced with over protective fear programmed asshats whose children stayed living in their basement into their 30's and 40's.
Agree, but what is cause and what is effect here?
I believe in the law of attraction, I know we co-create our realities, I know we, as a collective, can effect our environments profoundly, especially through our unconscious thought.
As an example, in the late 90's there where raging wild fires tearing through the south east US.
A late night AM radio broadcaster named Art Bell wanted to try a collective thought experiment. He told his audience of 1 million plus listeners to focus on rain and intent for rain to put out those fires.
Out of nowhere a storm not only put out the fires but caused mass flooding. After that Art repeatedly said he would not try anything like that on the air again.
For arguments sake, let's say that was cause and effect.
What would a decades long campaign like Stranger Danger do to the subconscious minds of the kids who would then grow up to be parents?
The campaign was fear based programming, sure it made you fearful for your kids but it also subtly told us as adults (subliminally) to not talk to strangers, or to accept generosity, it taught us to recoil from the most gracious gifts humanity has to offer and made us doubters suspicious and fearful.
I disagree wholeheartedly. The reason caring parents are naturally cautious is because their children haven't yet learned discernment. By the time humans are adults, they have learned at least some discernment. They are no longer 'afraid' of strangers. In fact, the concept is preposterous to me. I don't know anybody who is afraid to strike up a casual conversation with someone they have just encountered. Virtually all 8 billion people on the planet are strangers. We quite naturally have to interact with people we don't know well, and do so daily.
Spoken like a person who didn't or won't get their last child to move out until they are 38.
I'll tell you, over protective sheltering parents create creepy pedos, who live in mom's basement and never have real relationships and because mom was there to; as Pink Floyd said it, put all of her fears into you. The over protected child greatly delays the development of their pre-frontal cortex, and fall pray to more programming from porn, mass media and video games.
Prove me wrong. I agree with the individual points of your post but you are blanket discounting the long term subliminal effects of fear based programming in conjunction with all the other mass programming pushed through our radios, phones, computers and TVs.