Although I don't have any kids, I can appreciate your concern. I'm sure it's entirely different when you're actually a parent. Part of what I wonder is if it's worse now than years ago, when I walked to school starting at the age of 5, and up through grade school. (High school was much father away, and took a school bus to that.) With so much access to instant news now, we hear more stories involving kids. So, I've wondered if it was any safer back when I was a kid, or if (more or less) the same amount of incidents happened (but we didn't hear about all of them on TV or radio, for example) when we were growing up.
(Side note: we used to just "free range" all over the town, when we went out to play! Sometimes I hung out with one of my brothers, and we covered miles in our adventures--at least we thought they were big adventures!
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