A break, but here take some more insanity

Courtesy of your children.

I can think of occasions where having kids on a leash is useful. For the safety and convenience of people other than the children themselves.

I cannot think of a reason why someone would raise a child essentially on a leash.

Things I remember doing that are apparently so dangerous that you may as well feed your child razor blades.
1) Walking to school. Walking home from school. Alone.
2) Going out without having to call when I got there safely. Or really inform as to where I was going.

Now for the most part I don't remember playing with too many other kids. Or talking to too many strange adults. Or interacting much with the neighbourhoods. Part of this was not really growing up in an urban environment. Where this would be more likely. Most of it was the anti-social business end of my outlook became hardened pretty fast. I wasn't interested in the same things as other kids as I got older and strange adults, for the most part, often assumed I was. One consequence of this, in part, was that it was generally assumed that I wasn't going to go out very often and I wasn't going out to do something dangerous or illegal. For the most part. So checking up probably wasn't deemed as important anyway.

But here's the interesting part of that: that sort of checking up is designed not to keep me out of danger from other people, but to assure I'm not the one causing it. Of the two things, I'm far more likely to consider kids to do something to get themselves hurt or into trouble than some random person is to wander up to them and carry them off, stab them, give them something illegal, etc. We had a huge national scandal over somebody supposedly putting needles into Halloween candy. Never happened. We had/have a huge national push over random abductions of children. They're exceedingly rare. We had/have a huge national push, complete with TV sting operation shows, concerning sexual predators and paedophiles enticing kids over the internet or on the street. Most of the actual cases are parents, relatives, and trusted figures (teachers or priests). If you are a parent, I'd suggest looking in the mirror. Most of the problems your kid will get into are not going to come from the random people that you supposedly cannot protect them against. I suppose there are reasons to be wary of strangers. But most of them, such as I can remember from childhood, have more to do with the average person being tremendously boring and uninteresting than with the average person being a masked crusader of evil and vengeance preying upon the young and innocent. Most of the actual problems your kid is going to have, especially when they're younger, are things you can control and probably caused. Like over-sheltering them and preventing them from learning about other people or things in their curiosity, taking risks, and so on.