Talk:Succubus/@comment-90.214.164.211-20141209194643/@comment-26097222-20150213181146

Taking your points in reverse order: Yes it's human (also, in MGE, monster) nature to protect children. Part of protecting them is teaching them how to protect themselves. If you don't do that, you wind up with an 18 year old going off on their own (to college, to work, whatever) who is less able to take care of themselves than a properly-raised 10 year old. The constantly hovering helicopter parent denies their child that education in self-reliance. Not necessarily a Sherman tank unless we're talking about a Dragon or Baphomet, and probably not including Weresheep or Dormice who get at you while sleeping, but just about any monster who is capable of taking a human by force HAS to be stronger than that human. Doing so without leverage means they're a lot stronger. As for letting kids ramble, why not? This comes back to that self-reliance thing. The belief that children will die or suffer a fate worse than death if they leave your sight for a minute is a recent thing. Like in the last 30 years recent. It has grown out of sensationalist media looking for something, anything, to draw more viewers and sell more commercials. So they hype up things that really aren't a crisis until they get the crisis they want, then go on forever about it. And that's the ones that are relatively honest, rather than peddling a corporate or political agenda. For those latter types, the hype is even more shameless. Aside from the odd blip from statistical anomalies, the rate at which pedophiles and similar predators go after kids is pretty much flat. It's not increasing, even though you hear more horror stories every year. What is increasing is the amount of media coverage each attack gets. Kids are just as safe running around playing on their own now as they were 60 years ago -- going by the actual amount of danger rather than the hype, your kid is safer out on the streets than they are in your back yard if you have a hot tub or swimming pool. Also, all cities are not created equal, nor are all neighborhoods homogenous. Some cities are large, some are small. Not all towns count as even a small city. Then there's rural small towns. Dangers differ depending on where you live.

Just because one city has a higher danger rate doesn't mean all of them do -- the appearance of this is due to the global village effect, where you hear about what is otherwise strictly local news much further away than ever before. Cities have bad neighborhoods and good ones. Sure, it might be dangerous to let a kidnrun around a neighborhood with aggressive drug dealers and shootouts between gangs, but that's just those neighborhoods. There are also neighborhoods where the worst thing that ever happens is someone's cat gets hit by a car. Both represent extremes, and most places fall somewhere between them. But judging danger by the worst of the worst when you live closer to the best of the best is silly. It's just another add-on effect of the media's race to ever increasing hype. You hear about how awful neighborhood A is, even though you live in neighborhood L on the far side of town from neighborhood A -- but the evening news makes its money from scaring you into worrying your neighborhood is next, even though it's about as likely to happen as you are to be struck by lightning. Would I let my six year old daughter wander on her own? Depends on how dangerous it is. For a human kid, the main dangers are wandering so far she can't make it how on her own and getting lost. Pedophiles are about as rare as being struck by lightning.

If she's strong enough to get free from any human attacker (even if not quite strong enough to rip his arm off) and can charm a pedophile into buying her candy then taking her home safely instead of attacking her, then I'd worry a lot less. Granted, the same dangers as a human kid apply, but she has a LOT more stamina than the human kid so unless she's trying to walk to Disneyland or something, she won't get too tired to walk back. Anyone can get lost of course, but the odds of it drop off sharply if you let your kids explore and learn how to find their own way.