Score One for the Helicopter Parents Has a grandparent mocked your parenting today? Pointed out that you survived a childhood without a five-point-harness car seat, a bike helmet or laws requiring a gate around every pool? The current generation of parents is used to such things. We've been dubbed helicopters and accused of nearly every kind of overparenting. But our concerns about safety turned out to be well-founded. And our efforts to improve the way our children move through the world, with safer playground surfaces, the aforementioned helmets and car seats, and rails and guards on stairs and beds appear to be working. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report this week showing that while accidental injuries remain the leading cause of death for children from 0 to 19 years old, the death rate for children from accidents has dropped nearly 30 percent in the last decade. In the wake of those better car seats and new laws slowing the rate at which teenage drivers take the wheel unsupervised, there has been a 41 percent drop in traffic fatalities. Deaths from drowning, falls and fires are down as well, while suffocation rates, especially for infants, are up, suggesting a need to return to the basics of infant sleep: on their backs, on firm surfaces, away from soft bedding. Hovering isn't the goal, but keeping children safe is. Car seats work only if they're buckled, and helmets work only if they're worn: even with dramatic improvements, more than 9,000 families lost a child to a preventable injury in 2009. Parents don't really want to keep their children in bubble wrap (or maybe they do, but the suffocation risk looms). We want to keep all the fun in childhood, but with a whole lot less mortal danger. And no matter how much our own parents tease, we're going to do everything we can to see how low those numbers can go.