First of all, you are mixing dimensions. If I perceive a kidnapping as an actual occurrence, I will call the police and/or intervene. The situation may be real, or it could e.g. be a stag party.
Risk is different - it's about what isn't even perceived to have happened in a given situation. If I walk in the street, there is a risk a piano may have fallen out of an airplane and be falling towards me.
If I perceive that as a risk, I may take countermeasures, in this example entering an underground garage would stop the (for me as a part of the example) hypothetical piano.
If I often take exaggerated countermeasures as a parent, I may cause harm to the child. The safest child would be the one locked in a bomb shelter on a healthy diet. It would protect against falling pianos, falling bombs, freezing to death, drowning, transportation accidents, school bullies, sexually abusive authority figures, house fires, sun burns - everything except an attack on the bomb shelter ventilation system.
The prohibitive costs excluded, no reasonable parent would do such a thing. (If air raid sirens go off, of course it still becomes reasonable to take the child to such a shelter - until the 'all clear').
If the child is never given a chance to be unsupervised, when will it learn to tell situations and behaviours that carry risk from those that don't? When will they develop their independent sense of judgement?
Anyways, to answer your -hopefully rhetorical - question: Transportation by car is risky on a population level. Playing in the forest or park is not even close. It may also be argued that allowing children a steadily developing autonomy from an early age leads to a lower risk over the course of a lifetime - since the child then steadily increases its ability to handle a risky world.
Therefore, I claim that unreasonable protection is the true neglect of the child.
Your view is in line with developmental psychologists. Children who are never given a chance to think and act independently will grow up stunted and incomplete. By overprotecting, you weaken the child.
The CPS should have a focus on parents that are unreasonable in their protection. Unfortunately, they have to be policy based. One child out of 500,000 that is snatched when alone creates much more attention than 50,000 children (out of 500,000) that never get the joy of developing into reasonable, competent and calm grown-ups...
Risk is different - it's about what isn't even perceived to have happened in a given situation. If I walk in the street, there is a risk a piano may have fallen out of an airplane and be falling towards me.
If I perceive that as a risk, I may take countermeasures, in this example entering an underground garage would stop the (for me as a part of the example) hypothetical piano.
If I often take exaggerated countermeasures as a parent, I may cause harm to the child. The safest child would be the one locked in a bomb shelter on a healthy diet. It would protect against falling pianos, falling bombs, freezing to death, drowning, transportation accidents, school bullies, sexually abusive authority figures, house fires, sun burns - everything except an attack on the bomb shelter ventilation system.
The prohibitive costs excluded, no reasonable parent would do such a thing. (If air raid sirens go off, of course it still becomes reasonable to take the child to such a shelter - until the 'all clear').
If the child is never given a chance to be unsupervised, when will it learn to tell situations and behaviours that carry risk from those that don't? When will they develop their independent sense of judgement?
Anyways, to answer your -hopefully rhetorical - question: Transportation by car is risky on a population level. Playing in the forest or park is not even close. It may also be argued that allowing children a steadily developing autonomy from an early age leads to a lower risk over the course of a lifetime - since the child then steadily increases its ability to handle a risky world.
Therefore, I claim that unreasonable protection is the true neglect of the child.
[EDIT: Spelling]