Okay, so I've always considered myself pretty liberal, but there are some things that continue to bother me, maybe it's because of my age. One of them is how obsessed we've become about safety and harm to children, and I'm not talking about anything extreme. As a child I rode a bicycle, climbed on things, fell off of things, and often just hurt myself in the process of playing. I did this in a mostly unsupervised environment, and also in a very small town, so I do understand that small-town life 50 years ago doesn't necessarily compare compare to big town life today. When I would come home with a busted up knee or scraped whatever, my parents would say something along the lines of 'get over it' and provide bandages and some hydrogen peroxide of course. Iodine was the big big bad thing in those days.. They never insisted that I add elbow, knee, wrist or head pads or anything else to prevent me from ever experiencing any pain at all.  Neither myself or any of my friends ever died from any of these apparently very dangerous activities. I also never won a trophy for simply showing up for an event.
I'm a big believer in having positive self-esteem, but I also believe that you have to fall down a few times along the way and scuff a knee or something in order to gain that self-esteem. If you tell a child to not touch the stove because it's hot, he won't necessarily understand that concept, until unfortunately he finally touches the stove. For me it wasn't the stove, it was electrical outlets. I was always fascinated by all things electrical and I tried to fix things around the house. That meant that sooner or later I got shocked more than once. I learned pretty quickly how to ask my father to turn off the breaker before I tried to fix anything around the house. He never realized that sometimes I actually broke things around the house just so I could try to fix them. That's a story for another day.
I guess my point is, we all have to make mistakes in order to learn how to not make mistakes. Beyond that when we prevent our children from experiencing anything, we might be preventing them from learning anything.
But that's just my two cents.