Who fancies leaving their child on the side of a cliff? I am ready to do it for the sake of humanity and in the interests of research. But I would only do it as long as it meant a guaranteed end to the cult of overprotective parenting.

Cliff-edge-abandonment-as-childcare-option emerged last week thanks to a new, all-party parliamentary group report on what constitutes “a fit and healthy childhood”. The report concluded that “risky play” is occasionally to be recommended for children, especially “playing near potentially dangerous elements such as water, cliffs and exploring alone with the possibility of getting lost”. Hey, parents, leave those kids alone! Clifftop activities are good for your wellbeing, guys! And childcare is expensive.

Setting aside the fact that there is only one piece of health and safety advice we should all pass on to our children – steer clear of all-party parliamentary groups not only in childhood but throughout your life – this actually makes perverse sense. Somehow, in the course of a generation, we’ve lost all the normal rites of childhood. And in attempting to protect children (often because we fear things happening we can’t control), we expose them to very real and obvious dangers we could actually control.

The report cites endless research, a lot of it American in origin, depicting a society where children are increasingly less likely to walk or cycle to school or play outside. Childhood is instead dominated by “a toxic brew of adult fear (stranger danger, traffic density) and school restriction (shortened playtimes, ‘organised’ activity, poor use of space)”. This is a world where childhood has become “passive, sedentary and solitary”.

This isn’t only about the obesity crisis, although that is a key issue highlighted in this report. One in five children is obese by the time they leave primary school. This is probably the one thing that might prompt major changes to the way we view childhood and risk, not least because it is costly. Earlier this year, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said at a conference about childhood obesity that we will “go bankrupt” if we don’t address this issue.

But this is equally about more nebulous influences. Isn’t there a danger that we’re raising a generation of children who are not self-reliant because they’re not used to coping outside in the world on their own? Children who don’t trust themselves in difficult situations because they have never really had to face them? And how well socialised will these children be if their best friend is the screen?

If you add these influences to the fact that fewer teens and twentysomethings are able to set up on their own when they reach adulthood (because they can’t afford to leave home)... Forget the phenomenon of the perpetual student – we risk raising perpetual children. Scarlett, on Channel 4’s Gogglebox, had it right last week: “I’m going to have to think about leaving home. I mean, I’m 24 and it’s OK to be 24 and living at home with your parents. But it’s not OK to be 25 and living at home with your parents.”

I don’t suggest that if Scarlett had been left on a cliff 20 years ago that she would have been able to move out of the family home by now, but a lot of the research suggests we are raising a generation that lacks resilience and self-motivation.

Some kind of desperate measures are needed to push parents out of this false sense of security. Because, as the American authority on children and obesity, Dr Mark Tremblay, puts it: “We have lost the balance between short-term safety and long-term health.”

Which is why the recommendations in the report are so gutting. The conclusion reads as a list of euphemisms for “slightly bad things that have happened that we should probably try to reverse once we have commissioned some more reports”.

There’s a lot made of “play provision” and the lack thereof. As in: there isn’t anywhere to play any more. The report’s solutions to this? A national audit of “lost play provision”. A request that Ofsted considers grading play spaces. And “initiatives designed to enable older children to extend play up through the ages”. (What does this even mean? Roundabouts for 16-year-olds?)

There are some useful bits here too, including recommendations for more pedestrian areas and “play streets” with 15 or 20mph speed limits. But overall, this report is a huge, scaremongering overview that ends in a plea not for action or a national campaign but for more reports.

Thank goodness, then, for the voluntary sector (the sodding “big society”, I suppose), which is the only area actually doing anything meaningful. Up and down the country there are charity initiatives such as Bristol’s Playing Out (which offers advice on how to convert your street into a play zone) and London-based Living Streets, currently promoting October as walk to school month. (A generation ago, 70% of children walked to school. Now it’s 46%.)

Of course, childhood is a time when you should be protected and looked after and some of what has happened in the past few decades is a reaction to our not having looked after children properly in the past. I’m not just thinking about chimney sweeping here – although that wasn’t very nice of us adults – but now we have gone too far in the opposite direction. It’s time to push children again. Not up the chimney this time but, instead, closer to the cliff edge.

Sadly, though, having introduced the possibility of windswept coastal pranks in the beginning, by the end of the report it has backed away and is safely at home playing a family game of Angry Birds over a cup of tea. The tea has been made by an adult, of course. And is lukewarm because of the danger of scalding.

@VivGroskop