When my husband, Dustin, suggested that I write last week’s column about people’s tendency to speed through residential streets, making them unsafe for neighborhood children and traditional childhood play, I asked him if he had a hard hat I could wear afterward. It would be a publish-and-duck kind of column, I said.

I was going on experience. Seven years ago, I wrote a similar column, to which the response was unexpected and not in my favor. In fact, back then, someone claimed to have called Child Protective Services on me because it was evident in the column that my children were playing outside while I was busy inside.

But last week’s responses were the opposite. Over and over again, on Facebook and Twitter, readers agreed with the idea that children should be able to play outside, in neighborhood streets, and not one person asked, “Are there any adults watching these kids?”

I’d like to think we as a society have finally come to our senses, that the days of hamstringing parents by telling them that their kids can’t be outside alone, nor can they be inside playing video games either, are over.

But I fear a more likely reason for the overwhelmingly supportive response is that parents are beaten down with news fatigue over recent knee-jerk calls for mothers to be jailed, or worse, for their parenting mistakes. The pendulum had to swing the other way.

From Michelle Gregg — whose 3-year-old son fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, an event that ended with the death of a western lowland silverback gorilla — to Sarah Laveille — who was sentenced to house arrest for leaving her children in a car for 10 minutes, with the windows down, in the shade, and within in her sight the entire time — motherhood has taken a hit this June. And maybe we are sick of it.

“Can we please call this a war on moms?” wrote Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, in her Outrage of the Week blog post.

Add to these, the news stories with the usual pre-summer onslaught of warnings, often plastered on the cover of parenting magazines, about sunburns, chemicals in sunscreen, dangerous playground equipment, the risks of water play, and the potential for dehydration and sun strokes, and it’s no wonder parents are terrified.

I thought this fear mongering stuff had jumped the shark way back when toy catalogs were advertising new, safer inflatable sleds for wintertime “fun.” But, no, we had to go all the way to jailing mothers and calling for their heads before everyone could take a deep breath and realize that we can’t eliminate all risks.

But maybe the responses changed because people started sharing their own parenting disasters, proving that we can’t watch our children all the time. We can’t prevent all injuries. And every parent has her own list of stupid things that happened when she wasn’t looking. Maybe if we get better at sharing these moments, we will once again realize that, for the most part, children are wily little things and we are all just lucky to be doing our best.

Here are mine:

While the rest of the family was watching “American Idol,” 18-month-old Lindell toddled into the bathroom, grabbed a Dixie cup from the trash, and drank dirty water from the toilet. Then, a few weeks later, again while we were watching “American Idol,” he went into the hallway, took apart a Glade pug-in air freshener and ate the potpourri gel. That landed us in the hospital for several hours, during which time each of Lindell’s soiled diapers filled up the ER with the scent of cinnamon apple.

When Owen was 3 years old, we lost him for about a half-hour. He and Ford had been playing hide-and-seek and Owen, always very quiet and therefore a worthy opponent at this game, had fallen asleep in the garage, between the front bumper of the car and Dustin’s stash of gasoline cans. We didn’t find him until just after we called 9-1-1.

More recently, one of my sons was caught hiding under a Dumpster during a game of hide-and-seek — such a risky game, apparently — and Lindell broke his foot playing Ring Around the Rosie. Probably should ban that game, too.

And last, but not least, when Ford was in first grade, he ripped the second leg off all of a neighbor’s decorative lawn flamingoes because “flamingoes aren’t supposed to stand on two legs.”

What are yours?