A few days ago I finished an interesting book called "Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedoms We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry." The premise of the book is that the dangers of letting children playing unsupervised have been blown way out of proportion in recent years, and that we should be letting our children be at least as "free-range" as we were as children.

What has caused us to be so overprotective of our children these days? Mostly the media - every child abduction story is publicized and harped on to an amazing degree, making us more and more paranoid about our children being abducted and killed.

One of the biggest reasons people give for being so clingy with their children is that the world has become so much more dangerous than it was when we were kids, or our parents were kids. Actually, the crime rate (especially violent crimes and abductions) has been dropping steadily since the 1970s! It just seems like the world is a scarier place because the media wants to get our attention with every violent and scary crime they can get their hands on.

So how likely is the abduction-and-murder scenario, really? Statistics show that 1 in 1.5 million children are abducted and killed. Of course you don't want that one child to be your child, but with such remote chances of this actually happening, our worries should really be transferred to other things that are more likely to happen.

A child is 40 times more likely to die in a car accident than be abducted and killed, yet we allow our children to ride in cars every day. Also, a child is 20 times more likely to be killed in a house fire, yet more and more of us are keeping our children cooped up indoors because unsupervised outdoor play is "just too dangerous."

And here are some even more amusing statistics that I figured out myself: 10 times more likely to be killed by a vicious dog, 15 times more likely to die in an earthquake, and 18 times more likely to die by being struck by lightning than to be abducted and killed as a child.

After the recent discovery of Jaycee Dugard's abduction for 18 years, the media is constantly reminding us just how unsafe the world is, that we should never leave our children unsupervised at any time, heaven forbid they get abducted! Yet, where are the news stories warning us about lightning strikes?

Or what about the recent murder of Annie Le? The media tells us not to let our children go anywhere alone - shouldn't they also be telling us to never - ever - let our children go to Yale, lest they be murdered? Of course not.

I'm not saying that you should just let your toddlers roam the streets in the middle of the night. However, I did enjoy this book for giving me a more correct perspective regarding the safety of our children. I hope to be able to give my children some of the "free-range" experiences we enjoyed in our youth.