A society's advance is measured by risk reduction, so stuff can be achieved without a large proportion of people being harmed in the process.
While risk reduction is nice and desirable, there is a problem in risk avoidance. Risk avoidance (one of the traits Geert Hofstede identified as defining a culture) might bring economical stagnation and less breakthroughs in high-risk research, among other things — my country has a very high risk avoidance ratio, btw, and I can confirm this.
We are progressing from what is safe to be concerned about (kids playing with guns are still worrying to me, sorry NRA), to a society where you teach kids they should not climb a tree, jump the rope, or run along for fear of falling and bruising their knee. This, in the long run, will produce less competitive, fearful and insecure adults.
In my opinion, only useless risks are dangerous. TFA argues that by overprotecting children, you take away from them the ability to learn to assess whether a risk is worth it or not, and what are the outcomes of acting in a certain way. Nothing new into that. The *right* way to address *this* problem would be to watch over children while they play, so you — the experienced adult — can guide a child to avoid the worst outcomes while still giving them the capability of choosing what they want to do, and that is the core issue. Nobody has time anymore to play with their children, but that's what parents should do.
In other words, we learn from our mistakes, but we must be able to err in order to do a mistake and learn from it.
Overprotective parents are the worst kind; they actually prevent a child to grow and reason with his own brains. Incidentally, be wary about how you judge someone to be "fearful": for me, heavily armed societies are fearful societies. I would say people screaming "this will make a man out of me!" and jumping in the battlefield would probably be those NOT having any experience about small risks when they were children. Those experiences that would make them say "wait, if I do this I might pay these consequences" (growing up from: "if I punch my classmate in the face I get scolded by the headmaster", to: "if I punch a colleague at work, I might end up without job and in tribunal").