Everybody agrees that our children face new risks in the “virtual world” of websites and video gaming. But fewer seem alert to the latest danger: that our response will be shaped by parental anxieties rather than young people's experience, and we end up closing down their free space online as we have done beyond their bedroom door.

In her government-backed review of children and new technology, Tanya Byron - clinical psychologist, mother of two and Times writer - sensibly notes that we live in a risk-averse world, but children always want to test boundaries. “In the same way that we teach our children how to manage ‘real world' risks, for example crossing roads, in stages and with rules, supervision and monitoring that change as they learn and develop their independence, we need to engage with children as they develop and explore their online and gaming worlds.”

Fair enough. Our daughters, aged 9 and 11-this-week, visit websites and play video games somewhat more innocent than the infamous Grand Theft Auto, but we still try to keep an eye on it and make sure they know what not to do. In the hands of headmaster Gordon Brown and head prefect Ed Balls, however, I fear that this review will turn into something less sensible. The proposals for a government body to oversee children's internet safety, and a PR campaign to educate parents about virtual risks, seem likely to become another exercise in reinforcing fears and treating parents like adolescents.

Let's take this discussion as a chance to get real about risks in the virtual world. These should really be commonsense issues about how parents relate to growing children. But they are being overcomplicated by parental worries about the unknown online.

My friend Frank Furedi, professor of sociology and author of Paranoid Parenting, sees a danger now that “we will repeat the mistakes of 20 years ago” when, in response to panics about stranger danger, parents began evacuating children from the streets. Now many regret that overreaction. Yet it seems that the authorities are keen to rerun it by limiting young people's virtual freedoms.

Websites and gaming, like the outside world, can never be risk-free. Children do need to be guided and negotiated with - by their parents, without government pressing the remote. They also need to learn from their own mistakes. Social networking sites have boomed as the few spaces that young people have left to call their own. To take that away as well would be grand theft online.

When Dr Byron gave up her role as a TV parenting guru last year, she said that parents need to “find their own way with their children” and “trust your instincts”; too much advice can leave them “feeling completely disempowered”. It would be good to think that the Government might implement her review of virtual risks in that grown-up spirit. But in the real world, this parent is not holding his breath.

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