10 stats that show American children are the safest they've ever been

While you'd never guess it from the number of murders, rapes, and kidnappings that are in the news, America is the safest it's ever been.

Especially for kids.

The statistics say it all.

Writing for New York Magazine, Jennifer Senior collected the following data points:

The physical abuse of children fell by 55% from 1992 to 2011.

Sexual abuse fell by 64% from 1992 to 2011.

Abductions by strangers fell by 51% from 1997 to 2012.

Motor vehicle deaths for children under 13 years old fell by 43% in the past decade.

The Washington Post came to a similar conclusion, with a headline "There's never been a safer time to be a kid in America."

As in:

In 1935, there were just under 450 deaths for every 100,000 kids between ages 1 and 4. Now there are 30 deaths per 100,000 kids in that age range.

More than 800 child pedestrians were killed from being hit by a car in 1993. There were fewer than 250 such deaths in 2013.

Reports on missing persons under age 18 have gone down 40% from 1997 to 2014.

As spotted in the Chicago Tribune, the 2014 National Child and Youth Well-Being Index from Duke University furthered the good news.

As in:

The number of young Americans who were the victims of violent crime fell 59% since 1994

The number of 12th graders reporting binge drinking, smoking, and alcohol use has fallen since 1995.

In 1991, there were 20 teen births for every thousand females aged 10 to 17. By 2013, that number fell to 6.3.

Senior, the author of "All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood," says that it's "hard to think of a safer time and a better place than the United States of 2015 to raise children - but we act as though the opposite were true."

Thus the rise of "helicopter parenting," a trend where adults are constantly attending to and micromanaging their children, and never allowing them to experience being on their own.