Thank you for asking. I think many of the responses to my comment ended up talking about parental rights, rather than this question you brought up, and I appreciate the opportunity to explore this.
I am most definitely not saying that well-being is safety, but that it seems the way people are talking about it now conflate those. I am not necessarily talking about police enforcement (though I would not be surprised if sometime in the near future, police are using well-being as a criteria for safety). Rather, I am talking about parenting style. That is something the author of that article is talking about in the broader sense; the author of that article also authored a book about "free range parenting", and why it is needed.
Safety is something that is easier to see, though I think is still problematic. There are statutes and precedence that describes levels of safety in different context. For example, from this site (https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...)
> An adult caring for a child has a legal responsibility to ensure that child is free from unreasonably dangerous situations. When an adult caregiver fails to adequately protect a child, states often punish this as a crime known as "child endangerment."
> Child endangerment occurs whenever a parent, guardian, or other adult caregiver allows a child to be placed or remain in a dangerous, unhealthy, or inappropriate situation. Some states charge this crime as a type of child abuse.
Note that generally, the legal responsibility here is for the circumstances, that is, the situation external to the child. (With the original article that started all of this, the question is, what circumstances are "unreasonable"?)
But what is well-being? Well-being is not the circumstances, but rather what someone experience.. Because it is not describing a circumstance, it's not something that is as easy to observe, measure, or intervene. People can (and probably will try) to use circumstances as a proxy for someone's well-being, and as such, start using the criteria already in use for "safety" as a (poor) proxy for "well-being". Because we are using safety and circumstances as a proxy for "well-being", that scenario where police starts interpreting things that way is ... not at all surprising to me, if it starts happening. Another scenario is that police enforces child safety, but it does nothing for the child's well-being.
More broadly, our society had been fairly poor about taking "well-being" into account. Setting aside the well-being of children, we also have the well-being of students, employees, livestock, family, community and ecology. Our society is setup to organize resources and means of production. Year after year, people are less and less able to participate in their own well-being, and even more importantly, less able to participate in the well-being of the community they belong to. Despite that, there are greater call for "well-being" popping up in news articles or comments from people.
Well-being is how well a living system is capable of ... well, living. If a living system is unable to live, it enters into a degenerate spiral, and dies. This isn't just the physical or biological, and includes emotional well-being and mental well-being. (There's a lot more to explore from here, such as the mental health epidemic of teenagers and young adults going on right now).
Furthermore, living systems are anti-fragile (up to a point). They grow stronger with a certain level of stress. To put it in a different way, trees grow strong because wind will occasionally shake it. The trees that grew in Biosphere 2, having grown without wind, are all fragile.
I'm not advocating you deliberately go out and shake the tree, or put a child in stressful situations. Life will already do that, naturally. And one of the best ways to do that, is to let a child have the opportunity to be independent, where they have to figure things out for themselves. My view on this is that, my job as a parent is not to remove and erase all risks, but rather, curate the environment of any catastrophic risks. The kind where a child cannot easily recover from. You gradually open up the environment to greater challenges as a child grows into their own ability to handle them.
That is difficult to do when child endangerment laws and the ways interpretation of "safety" has been shifting.