Revisiting the Fearful Parent: The Crucial Decade

This article uses materials from Parents' Magazine to highlight the point, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when fears about children's safety rather dramatically increased. It then turns to a fuller assessment of the reasons for the change at this point, with special attention to a combination of specific incidents and major changes in media impact. Consequences included a number of new laws and institutions that worked to maintain anxiety and some measurable exaggerations, feeding in turn into new monitoring and constraints on children into our own time.