I've been letting my 8-year-old play outside with the neighborhood kids unsupervised, and some parents think I'm reckless. But isn't shielding kids from every scratch and disagreement actually making them more fragile? I see kids who never negotiated a game or resolved a fight on their own struggling with basic social cues at school. Maybe we've swung too far toward helicopter parenting when a scraped knee teaches more than another hour of structured play.