School is beginning again next week, and once again, with few exceptions, something has been noticeably absent over the summer.

There haven’t been many children on their own, riding bikes, playing games, or just running around on our streets or in our abundant wildlands … at least, when not accompanied by a sharp-eyed parent.

Our children’s free time has become increasingly less free. They aren’t running around free from sunup to the street lights come on, maybe carrying a peanut butter sandwich and a Boy Scout canteen. They’re not climbing trees, drinking from the neighbors’ hoses, or leaving their bikes in a tangle on someone’s front lawn while exploring the woods behind the house.

They’re in day camp … OK, there have always been summer camps, but they were a week or two of tie-dying and birdhouse building and sailing lessons in the summer, not a childcare substitute for frazzled working parents … or they’re spending the summer under the eagle-eye of a grandparent.

Where are the children skipping double dutch jump rope? Where are the kids playing sandlot baseball? Where are the youth building thrilling (and dangerous as heck of course) bike ramps on the only tarred driveway on the block? Where are the young ones with wet bathing suits dragging beach towels behind them after playing … mostly unsupervised … in one of their friends’ three-foot deep above-ground pool? Where are the forts in the woods? Why aren’t they sleeping in the tents in the backyard? Where are the kids playing in the mosquito-rich dusk?

Parents might say that it’s too dangerous for kids to be out and about on their own these days. But is that really the case?

They might say it’s because there’s no one home to supervise the kids. But even when there was a parent at home, there was no supervision. Kids would be gone at first light and be told to be home when the clock chimed six for dinner. And then back out to chase fireflies.

We think it’s not that the neighborhoods that have changed … kids aren’t any more likely to be gravely injured or killed than they were 40 years ago, perhaps even less so with bike helmets and so on … but society has been conditioned to believe that. While some of the media stories of child abduction and in rare cases, murder, have gotten a lot of attention, the truth is that very, very few bad things happen to kids on their own.

Most abductions are the result of a custody disagreement or other family kidnappings. Ninety-nine percent of all abductions are resolved within a few hours. Only about 100 children are abducted by a non-family member every year. When you consider that we have nearly 75 million children in the U.S., there are small odds for that to happen.

To return to an image of summer that once was, we should pledge to reclaim its youthful promise. It won’t be easy, with several decades of concern creating a helicoptery culture. But it’s worth doing.

It’s worth it for parents to let their kids roam free on the playground, figuring out how to navigate the structures and other children playing around them. It’s worth it for adults to watch out for kids — even if none of them are yours — running around the neighborhood. It’s worth it for children to play outdoors, making up games and new worlds, exploring the community and nature around them without adults directing play.

That’s not to say parents shouldn’t make sure their children are safe. There are ways to do that — talking to them about the dangers of strangers as opposed to having to know where they are at all times, for example — while also allowing them a bit of freedom.

If we protect our children from everything bad in the world — whether it be potential abductors, mean kids on a playground or a skinned knee — they won’t learn to how to take care of themselves, how to shrug off the bumps and bruises, how to navigate the scary social world that awaits them. Most importantly, they won’t learn how to make choices.

And that’s perhaps the most dangerous thing we can do.