I wonder how many parents read about that one example and then behave in a way that ignores the likely millions of cases every day of kids playing in their front yard alone where that didn't happen.
> Debra Harrell, 46, let her 9-year-old daughter play outside alone at the park. The South Carolina child had a cellphone she could use to call her mother in case of emergency. On the girl’s third day alone at the park, someone asked her where her mother was. The girl said her mom was at work. (Harrell works at McDonald’s and didn’t want her daughter to have to sit inside the restaurant for hours on a beautiful summer day.) The result? Harrell was arrested for “unlawful conduct towards a child” and put in jail; her daughter is now in the custody of the department of social services.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/debra-harrell-arres...
The park in question was half a block from their home.
Meanwhile you have gangs of roving kids in Philadelphia robbing and beating people up.
And you have elementary schoolers in NYC walking to and from school.
Really it comes down to location. And the people most likely to be roused by news stories are people living in very sheltered locations (e.g. no one in Chicago is taking the "Chiraq" propaganda seriously).
If you don't want to have busy bodies getting involved in your life, don't live in busy body shitholes (most of the south -- coincidentally where much of this stuff happens).
I very much agree that helicopter parenting and snobby neighbors are a major issue. Just that it is hard to judge individual situations without all the facts.
Hearing about these kinds of tail-case incidents at least once or twice a year is probably enough to bump them up to the 5% category.
*I'm not committed to any specific number here. The relevant threshold is "high enough to consider when making decisions".
almost no chance / remote := 1%-5% very unlikely / highly improbable := 5%-20% etc...