Beginning in 1984 with missing children on milk cartons, American culture became obsessed with the idea of child predators and the assumption that any unsupervised child would be snatched, even as actual crime rates remained stable or declined.

A Kentucky mother was threatened with child protective services reports if she did not have an adult waiting at the bus stop every day to walk her 9-year-old son home from school, even though she could see the house from the bus stop and her father normally walked him home.

Children are told they are not safe even when they are safe, which teaches them that nothing seems safe—explaining why campus students say 'I don't feel safe' as a blanket term for anything they dislike.

A 9-year-old boy on Long Island imagined his maximum independence as walking from a car door to his judo class while his mother parked the car—approximately 57 seconds without supervision.

A young nonprofit worker reported that an employee asked for two weeks off due to anxiety, and although Skenazy feels compassion for the person's anxiety, she attributes it to never having experienced independence—suggesting the anxiety is created by overprotection.

Even if one grants that an overcorrection is happening now, it might be a good overcorrection compared to the historical undercorrection of ignoring systematic discrimination, so the question becomes whether it is wise to correct the overcorrection.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, Dean of Freshmen at Stanford, observed that brilliant students at Stanford were perfectly designed to get into elite colleges but hadn't learned how to do their own laundry or manage their lives, creating anxious and depressed people despite their accomplishments.

When children learn a language at ages 6-9 by being immersed in a new country, they acquire it without an accent; but after that critical period, language learning becomes much harder and always includes an accent—the same principle applies to learning independence and resilience.

Lenore Skenazy allowed her 9-year-old son to ride the New York City subway alone, which generated significant negative reaction from other parents who said they would wait until their children were 38 or 39 to allow similar independence.

The Let Grow project is a school-based intervention where teachers assign children to do one thing without their parents—it breaks the overprotection cycle fast by giving parents permission and producing pride in the child's independence.

Crime rates today are lower than when Skenazy was growing up, yet parental fear of crime and strangers has dramatically increased rather than decreased.

Microaggressions and overemphasis on small slights has a historical precedent: for centuries, minorities and women were told to 'tough it out' and stop complaining about slights, so dismissing contemporary concern about small offenses repeats that harmful dismissal.