PLAYING out used to be easy. It was, to coin a phrase, child's play.

After a hearty breakfast that gave you a warm red glow like you had just stepped off a plane from Chernobyl, your mum would chuck you out of the house, slam the door and not expect to see you again until tea time.

What you did during the eight or so hours in between was up to you. As long as you didn't actually kill another living thing (other than worms and spiders which are just too squishable to resist) or add too many stains to your already impressive collection, you were given pretty much a free rein.

When I was a kid I lived in a quietish cul-de-sac at the top end of a big Leeds estate.

There were loads of kids in our street, from incredibly cool, know-it-all teenagers with flicked, bleached fringes and ridiculously tight jeans (complete with cack-handed stitching up the side where they had to sew themselves in each morning) to tots barely out of their pushchairs (buggies hadn't been invented then, and Pampers' Pull-ups were but a dream).

Although we were only a few minutes bus journey away from the city centre, we were lucky enough to be surrounded by fields, woods and farmland. This meant that we could spend every waking hour when we weren't chained to our school desks - a practice that I believe has actually been criminalised now - running wild, climbing trees, building dens and generally having an adventurous, rough-and-tumble time.

If this makes it all sound a bit Famous Five, all wholesome fun with lashings of ginger beer, then I apologise. It certainly wasn't.

No one, to the best of my recollection, ever said "Cripes! You were right Julian, they're a bunch of bally pirates!"

In fact, I believe the phrase most likely to be heard ringing across the fields was "I'm gunna tell me mam on you!", which never really had much of an Enid Blyton ring to it.

My point is that while we were pretending to be castaways from a shipwreck on Choccy Island (I have no idea why we called the bluebell wood Choccy Island, in the same way that I don't know why marbles were called 'spuggies'), I don't remember our mums ever fretting about our safety.

If you turned up with blood down your T-shirt or one of your spindly limbs sticking out at an odd angle, then they fretted. Or, in my mother's case, they fainted. But then they had something to fret and faint about.

Now, we fret all the time. I've just started letting my son play out in the street (no further than the post box and never up on to the top road) and I'm so jittery I'm liable to spontaneously combust at any moment. He's barely wheeled his scooter out of the side gate before I'm leaning precariously out of the bedroom window scanning the street for speeding cars, rabid dogs and men with pockets full of puppies.

I literally cannot sit down and relax (to be honest, I can barely breathe) until he's back in the garden, pootling about with his football behind a firmly locked gate.

And I know I'm not alone. My son's best friend has also been granted the freedom of the street (don't leave the cul-de-sac and never cross the road) and his mum is as jumpy as a wallaby on Bonfire Night. She's even taken to following him, like a member of M(um)I5, ducking down behind parked cars and wheelie bins if it looks like he's on to her.

But why are we so worried? Are there really more paedophiles, reckless drivers and mad dogs around now than there were in previous generations or are we simply more aware of them?

Answers on a postcard please - just slip them under the barbed wire fence and watch out for the snipers.

Well, you can't be too careful.

Updated: 09:28 Monday, August 01, 2005