It seems an odd moment for sociologists to gather to discuss parental paranoia. The search for the world’s most familiar-faced four-year-old, Madeleine McCann, is in its third week – the third week in a row that her parents have had to berate themselves for taking an apparently infinitesimal risk over their holiday eating arrangements, in the process dividing the nation over whether leaving their daughter alone was irresponsible.

Yet on this grey morning at the University of Kent, on a hill overlooking Canterbury, Susan Douglas, a media historian from Michigan and author of The Mommy Myth, chooses to condemn the press’s “Maddy mania” as “almost pornographic”. She mocks advertisements for GPS tracking devices that can be sewn into children’s clothing. “What is Maddy doing now? She's selling newspapers,” she says.

The hysteria over child abductions (“rare in the United States,” says Douglas, but a perennial headline during “slow news cycles”) is just another way of getting at the “new mommy”, a notional woman she has identified as being judged by such high standards that she cannot hope to live up to them. These standards and this promotion of fear are, she concludes, “the primary vehicles of a backlash against women”.

Ellie Lee, the social policy lecturer chairing the two-day conference Monitoring Parents: Childrearing in the Age of Intensive Parenting, says that it was inspired by the reaction to a paper she co-wrote two years ago about maternal anxiety over bottle-feeding. Mothers kept telling her that it was not just guilt over formula milk and reluctant mammary glands that they felt, but a much wider anxiety about parenting aggravated by “a culture of monitoring and watching”. Judgments even from fellow parents had become “moralised”. And no, mothers had not always felt this way.

“The sociological imagination demonstrates,” Lee says, “that things are never just how they are.” The sociologists, educationists, lawyers and midwifery experts – “some have travelled from as far as Australia and Canada” – smile their agreement. There is a consensus emerging here, I realise, perhaps an unpopular, underarticulated one, but a consensus none-theless: children are at less risk from their parents than their parents are from the experts and the media.

Smiling from time to time at the direction in which the arguments are travelling is Frank Furedi, Kent’s Professor of Sociology. This crop-haired, Budapest-born 60-year-old, the father of an 11-year-old boy, is a former Trotskyite whose views these days find favour with the libertarian Right. He used to write on race and imperialism but now concentrates on how society fails to assess risk and has, in consequence, become prey to environmentalism, civil litigation and the “therapy culture”. It is six years since he wrote Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts may be Best for your Child. Things, he says, when he follows Professor Douglas to the lectern, have got worse.

Tony Blair is saying that he regrets not intervening in problem families earlier, even from “preconception”. Fathers receive leaflets instructing them on how to cuddle their children. There are plans to make 13-year-olds attend parenting classes.

“Every moron in the Civil Service or Government believes that the problem is the parents,” he says, predicting that new Labour will end up issuing licences granting permission to reproduce. The good news is that educated parents are beginning to reject some of the advice, mothers are lying to their health visitors and there are web-sites on which they raise two fingers to the current orthodoxies. In a mea culpa, he adds: “On a bad day I can be as bad a father as anybody else – I can consult a manual.”

After the session, Furedi and I take a little walk to his office. Paranoid Parenting asserts that the likelihood of child abduction is minimal and that “chaining children to their parents will benefit no one”. It goes on: “It is always useful to recall that our obsession with our children’s safety is likely to be more damaging to them than the risks they encounter in their daily interactions with the world.” How, I ask, would he feel if he were to discover that the McCanns were among the 25,000 people who had bought a copy?

“I’d be very pleased,” he says. “Of all my books, Paranoid Parenting was the one that I had most response to.

“The way I look at it is that as a mother and a father you make judgment calls all the time, and those judgment calls are based on your assessment of your kids and how much you trust them. I think it’s entirely legitimate that the McCanns made the decisions they made.”

But they will be torturing themselves? “Yes, but the logic of that is you get into a car crash and think ‘I shouldn’t have driven the car today’. They made a decision that they were going on holiday with the kids, they would have fun with them and would also have some adult time. That seems to me a well-balanced decision to make.”

But what if the paranoid parenting society that he despises turns out to result in fewer children abducted or murdered? “You cannot hold to hostage every child, every parent, on the worst-case scenario. You are saying that saving one child from being kidnapped makes it worth creating this culture of suspicion and mistrust. We are currently sending out signals that adults are so untrustworthy that the police need to check them all out. That’s what every kid is learning, and that is a far bigger tragedy for the nation than if one child gets kidnapped. Because that’s just one child, but if the whole nation becomes dominated by this dysfunctional, disorienting culture it has all kinds of destructive consequences.”

These consequences, he says, include parents becoming less confident in raising their children. As their authority weakens, so do their bonds with their offspring. Meanwhile, the community becomes frightened to intervene: “I think a lot of the breakdown in sociability in Britain, particularly the phenomenon of young people being out of control – is due to the fact that adults have stopped telling children how to behave because they worry that their motives will be misinterpreted.”

I follow his arguments but am pretty sure that he overstates them. Another conference speaker, Anneke Meyer, a sociologist from Manchester University, has looked into the role of paedophilia in the “climate of fear” and concluded that, despite its prevalence, there is a countervailing “social construct” of the good parent who gives a child “significant freedom” to develop into “an autonomous self”: “Even a fear as big as paedophiles tends to translate into a variety of forms of parenting and restriction rather than simply constant supervision by all parents,” she says.

I suddenly think: why not a GPS in the duffel coat? It would allow physical separation and provide reassurance.

“I’m against them for a number of reasons,” Professor Furedi says. “Number one, they don’t work.” But what about CCTV cameras in nurseries to which parents can log on from their office computers? They work. “But they enslave you to your child’s physical presence. Secondly, this technology breeds mistrust because what you see on the webcam is not necessarily what’s happening. It allows the imagination to fantasise about problems. Thirdly, in later life it creates the situation where you don’t trust your child.

“If you are genuinely paranoid as a parent – and we’re all entitled to be scared – then why not get your kid to become physically self-confident: do sports, run, learn karate? There are so many things that could help to give them the confidence to negotiate difficult situations.”

I am ten weeks away from becoming a parent myself. “Congrats,” he says. Am I going to be bombarded with official advice? More, he says, than I would have had in the past. “Fathers are really being brought into the frame. The interesting thing is that there really is an assumption that fathers are thick and unable to yield to new experiences.”

He believes that the Cleveland abuse scandal of the Eighties has been absorbed into a general assumption of parental abuse. He recalls an NSPCC advert showing a father cuddling a baby, with a strapline which warned that he might be cuddling her now but in a moment he could dash her against the wall.

Are there really leaflets on how I should hug my daughter? He becomes vague. He can find me the reference. And if I get one, should I throw it out along with my Gina Ford, Miriam Stoppard and Penelope Leach books?

“There’s nothing wrong with reading stuff as long as you treat it as advice that’s no better and no worse than anyone else’s advice.”

The phone goes: the Department for Education and Skills wants a word. He says that he will ring them back.

“For some reason, what I do really p****s off the Government. A lot of civil servants and politicians object to what I’m saying but because it has a wider resonance even among their supporters, they can’t entirely rubbish it.”

But if parental anxiety is as pervasive as he says, it must come, surely, from something deeper. Susan Douglas’s view is that it is the product of an antifeminist Zeitgeist. In the Fifties, she says, women were subservient to their husbands; now they are subservient to their children. “Motherhood remains the unfinished business of the women’s movement,” she told us.

Furedi disagrees. Some strands in feminism encouraged paranoia by demonising men as potential paedophiles, he reckons. His theory is that government has become demoralised with welfare reform that, despite high expenditure, has brought meagre returns. “More and more they have adopted the policies of behaviour management rather than classical social policies,” he says. “If the State really wanted to help, not scare, parents, it would set up its own nurseries.”

As for Professor Furedi’s private motives for arguing as he does, we can make our judgments. He admits that his work is political. His father, a watchmaker, took part in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and fled when it failed. “He educated me not to trust the State and to rely on people making solutions for themselves,” he says.

And what was he like as a father? “He was never remote, very tactile and had a good sense of humour. But he never helped me with my homework.”

Professor Furedi, it seems, is a British rarity: he grew up more afraid of the Government than of his father. It may explain a lot.

There is one other thing. He has long been married to Ann, head of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, but their son was not born until he was 48. If he saw through the black propaganda about childrearing, why did he not have Jacob earlier?

Ann, he says, had fertility problems, but I am on to something. “If I’d known how much fun it is and how much easier than I thought it would be, then I’d have wanted to be a dad earlier,” he says. “Children are real fun.”

This is not a view that one hears very often. And certainly not on a gloomy morning in Canterbury.

Should you let your 11-year-old cross a busy main road alone?
FRANK FUREDI
Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and the author of Paranoid Parenting:
I would allow my 11-year-old son to do this – probably even an 8-year-old too – but it depends on whether they are responsible. My own child is streetwise but not every child is. You have to watch them cross the road a few times in a relatively safe environment, checking that they look left and right. It’s much less risky if there are people in the community that you can trust to keep an eye out for them.
SUSAN DOUGLAS
Professor of communications at the University of Michigan, author of The Mommy Myth:
Every parent struggles with when to let their child take the next step. A child who is mature in public places, knowing how to cross roads and so on, might be immature in other situations, like internet chat-rooms. By the time my daughter was 11 we had travelled a lot, so she had the sense to cross a big road by herself. Each parent needs to gauge the maturity of his or her child on an individual basis.

Should you let an 11-year-old take a three-hour train journey alone?
FF: If the child is mature and has an appetite for engaging with the world then it might be permissible – just. You do the preparatory work: hanging around the train with them beforehand, getting them to open the door themselves. Just little things that instil in them a sense that they can deal with unexpected situations. I let my child go shopping at 7 on his own, just down the road to the bakery but that gradually extended. Now he cycles around town on his own but I know he’ll come back when he says.
SD: The first time I let my daughter take the train alone, she was 17. It’s different because the American rail system is so terrible, but the main problem here is the length of time that the child has to draw on his or her resources. On a rational level one knows that the risk of one’s child being attacked by a paedophile is very slim, but on an emotional level today we feel that no one is safe. Any child is prey and it could strike at any moment. Even though I’ve written about this on a rational level, it still makes you incredibly wary.

Should you let an 11-year-old walk half a mile to school unaccompanied?
FF: The best thing is to encourage kids to go in groups to support each other. In my day we would always walk together, and it gave us a sense of power. The child must also want to. I usually wait until they’ve asked three times to do something. Then I think they’re ready. If the child was reluctant to do things by himself, I would never force him, but I would try to devise incentives, often by setting the example. Kids generally want to copy their parents, so if you show an aspiration for independence they will normally follow.
SD: Even when we lived in safe areas I still walked to school with my daughter every day. When I was young, I used to walk to school on the railway tracks, but these days the geographical terrain is very different – there are more buildings, more people, more roads, more things for parents to be worried about. Obviously it’s not a good thing that we parents are all so terrified, and giving your child more freedom does help to make them more responsible. But, realistically, we have to juggle what we think.

Should children of the McCanns’ age be left in a hotel room on their own?
FF: I have done this many times. The chance of something awful happening is so statistically irrelevant: you cannot live your life expecting the worst. Imagine your child is in a public space and gets into a confrontation. The instinct is to intervene: that’s what adults do. But I think often we shouldn’t. It’s good for kids to learn how to manage conflict, to learn about their strengths and weaknesses alone. There is a risk, but it’s a judgment call. Independence makes them more responsible, and consequently safer.

SD: I’ve left my daughter alone in a locked hotel room when she was 10 years old. Before then, we made her come with us. By the time the child is 10 she’s much more able to scream or call the operator. I was always worried about accidents. At home we had these sliding doors on our wardrobe, and when my daughter was 8 one of them fell off on top of her. If I hadn’t been there I’m not sure what would have happened. But I’m not judging, because you’re always juggling the risk with freedom.

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