Discovering A World Beyond The Front Yard

In some places, yes. Cherita Whiting, Advisory Neighborhood Commission chairman for Ward 4B in the District, said her Riggs Park neighborhood was full of children playing when she was young. Now, she said, drug dealers, drive-by shootings and speeding cars in the area have scared parents into keeping kids indoors.

"It's really a shame," she said. "A kid should be able to play without worrying that some fool is going to be racing up the street because they did something wrong."

As for kidnappings, Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the number of abductions by strangers has remained steady over the years and is lower than many people imagine.

"I do not think there are more," he said. "I think the numbers have been very consistent."

According to center statistics, about 115 of 260,000 child kidnappings a year nationwide fit the classic scenario most parents fear: children snatched by strangers. Most kidnappings are done by family members or by people the children know.

Still, high-profile cases of abduction by a stranger have sowed fear, especially since cable TV and 24-hour news have made the details easier to disseminate.

Jane de Winter, president of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, said she lets her children walk to a nearby park, but she theorized that she and other parents worry more because they know more about potential dangers.

"In my neighborhood . . . there have been people who have been registered sex offenders, and that puts a damper on whether parents want to let their kids outside," she said. Regardless of whether there actually are more sex offenders now, she said, "once you know someone is there, can you responsibly let your kids be out there without an adult?"

Hart calls such fears an example of "moral panic" -- a collective fear fueled by the mass media until it becomes self-perpetuating.

But he said there are also valid explanations. "In a more globalized world, people feel generally less secure about place, because the world becomes more and more anonymous as it becomes more mobile," he said. "It feeds on itself, and if you watch more and more television, you have more sense of these dangers. And there's less and less engagement with community. Outside has become more dangerous, because there's no longer multiple eyes on everything."

Accordingly, the freedom to explore and improvise -- which he called crucial to children's cognitive development -- has been reduced dramatically.

"They can no longer go as far, alone or with their friends, as they used to, and they can no longer be spontaneous in their planning, in their decisions about what they're going to do," Hart said. "Once you have adults having to be the supervisors, that means kids' schedules have to be coordinated with adults' schedules."