The world was never safe, it just had different degrees of danger.   

At age 12 in 1944, my mother was already helping her mother cook, riding heavy horses without safety equipment or saddle, lighting the fire and milking cows by hand. They had 5 strange men dumped on them from nowhere (soldiers billeted with them for the duration) and were constantly aware of the danger of invasion by the German forces.

When I was 12, my mother wouldn't allow us out of the garden, but we did have a pretty big garden. The farm was gone by then, so there were no horses to work but I'd helped out with the milking from 6yrs on. What was dangerous then (rural Dorset, temporaly 1970s but in reality 1930's) was traffic on the roads, falling into rivers/brambles/stinging nettles or off walls/trees/swings/bikes. There were no such things as perverts/child molesters/rapists/flashers/kidnappers even though there was a 'mental hospital' a mile up the road, that had a secure unit [it had been the County Lunatic Asylum since about 1790 until Maggie Thatcher shut all the Psychiatric hospitals in the 1980s.... Anyone else see a pattern?].

You have to read the environment around you and your child before you decide on degrees of independence. Limpit walks home alone from school now. She knows about stranger danger and there is a lollipop lady (crossing guard) on the only road she has to cross. She goes out on her bike around the block, but not across roads - we know the way people drive around here.

There is no longer a 'now you are N yrs old you can....' rite of passage. Each child grows as much or as little as we parents let them. The best we can do is try not to make the mistakes we think our parents made with us.

LTS