I think standards of what is or isn't considered "safe" have shifted quite a bit too, and I don't think that's entirely a bad thing too. I lived in Asia for a while and some of the things I saw people do there... Yikes! From entire families (wife, husband, 2 young children) on a single scooter without helmet to the guy repairing my roof by stacking a chair on a wonky table and standing on top of that. They think it's perfectly fine though.
The UK in particular is somewhat obsessed with "health and safety", which is probably #2 on the favourite thing to complain about (after the weather, of course) but at the same time people gleefully participate in it too.
I lived in England for a while (as a Dutch person) and my English girlfriend was always paranoid about things I didn't see as a problem, for example I was perfectly comfterable carrying stuff from the car to the house and leaving the car unattended on the (enclosed!) parking lot for a minute, but she'd insist on locking it. N=1 of course, but I observed a number of other similar things over the years I lived there with different people. When it snowed for a bit the British were in a state of near-panic, and things like the Met announcing "there may be power cuts and shortages" didn't exactly help calm fears. It's 5cm of snow people, announced a week beforehand. We don't get snow that often in NL either, but I've never seen it anywhere near as chaotic as in England.
I guess I'm rambling a bit here, but my point is I think the problem is wider than just "kids". Partly, I think that's good: we're more aware of risks and deal with them a bit more consciously, but you can go too far in this; a risk-free life is a boring life hardly worth living.
"It's dangerous" or "it's a risk that [..] will happen" is almost always true in a sense and hard to argue against; "yes but no life can be without risk" comes of as weak, especially when it concerns something like your children.