London is a scary place to bring up children and its very easy to become overly protective. My daughter was mugged in Dulwich Village a few years back on a light summers eve at 8pm. My boys have been hassled when I allowed them the freedom to go to Dulwich Park alone a few weeks back. As someone rightly said, and maybe this is a sign of getting older, that in my day you feared a punch on the nose but today it is all about weapons, and that scares the sh*t out of parents. Its a very hard call to make when considering the freedom v safety issue. I think that some of you childless peeps need to be a little more lenient when opinning on this as until you are there and faced with this reality, you wont know how difficult it is to make these decisions.