The first thing that Stephanie Kanga does when she arrives in the morning at her Collins Street office is go online to find out if her two-year-old son William is OK.

It has only taken her about 10 minutes to drive from the St Kilda Road childcare centre that both her children attend, but he was a little bit tearful at drop off.

So Kanga logs in to a unique "parent portal" app developed by Woodland Education, which owns and operates the creche, and a message tells her young William's tears were fleeting and he is now munching Vegemite on toast.

His relieved mum knows it's true because a staff member in the toddler room has taken a photo of the content little boy on one of the centre's tablets and and sent it to her online.

At 10.36am a photo arrives of William stacking toy animals.  At 11.10am a photo of Victoria, 4, who is colouring a special picture for her mum.

Throughout the morning, in between meetings with clients and the numerous other demands of a high-velocity career in finance, Kanga savours the updates on the app, accessed through her computer or phone.

She is updated instantly when William wets (or dirties) his nappy. She knows they had chicken risotto for lunch, that Victoria shared her favourite book Winnie the Pooh with her group, that William fell asleep at 12.58pm and when Victoria is doing a puzzle, which the app informs her "helps children to sort, categorise and order, use symbols to represent and make meaning, use language in a range of ways".

Kanga gets 19 updates throughout the day. Anything she wants to tell the carers can be messaged instantly, through the app. Even her parents on holiday overseas can log in to discover what the day held for their grandchildren.

For Kanga and her husband, John, who work long hours running their own finance company, this technology helps them feel more connected with their children's day-to-day lives.

"The ability to see what the children are doing in real time, and to be able to communicate with the educators is just phenomenal," she says.

Not having to catch up on the mundane detail of the day leaves her more quality time with the children in the evening, she says, time that is free of distractions such as television.

But Kanga understands that some parents might find this level of scrutiny unnerving.

"You need a bit of balance. Sometimes us oldies – the adults – do like to be in control. But you have to remember they are just little. They need to be allowed to just play, to make mistakes. That's how they learn."

Social researchers sometimes like to call highly involved parents "helicopter parents", a pejorative term to describe those who hover over their children, closely monitoring their every move – particularly their education.

But stereotypes aside, it's true that parents today are raising their children in an era that is substantially different to that of their own parents' generation.

Both parents are more likely to work and spend their days outside the home. Digital media is deeply embedded in everyday routine. Financial pressure and the quicksilver pace of contemporary life means many families are perpetually dogged by a paucity of time.

So frazzled parents turn to TV as a babysitter and the car has become the dominant form of transport in the belief that it saves time. Weekends are gobbled up in a timetable of organised sport.

What are the costs? We know our kids move less. They sit in front of screens for far longer than they used to. Australian children watch, on average, about 2.5 hours of television each day, on top of time spent on computers and electronic games.

And they are fatter – a quarter of Australian children are considered overweight or obese. In fact Australian children are among the most "chauffeured" in the world – a 2012 study from the Heart Foundation found more than 60 per cent of children are driven to and from school, compared with 16 per cent in 1970.

The persistent cultural fear of "stranger danger" means parents are reluctant to let their children walk to school or play alone, even though experts say there is no evidence that abduction levels have increased. And increased traffic and poor urban planning means many suburbs lack decent road crossings or good quality green spaces.

All this means there is little time left for children to meander, explore, or play, says the University of NSW's Professor Paul Tranter, who has written about "child-friendly" cities for the past 20 years.

We are at risk of losing something precious: the unobserved child, Tranter says. The child who walks to school with friends and unearths treasures on the way. The child who plays with gleeful abandon, unmonitored by their parents.

"We need to come to the realisation that we are overprotecting our kids. It might seem like a good idea at the time but unless you get them to take some risks, they're never going to learn. When they play, they learn a hell of a lot," he says.

Tranter and his colleagues established the Sydney Playground Project to investigate the thorny topic of children and risk.

Researchers introduced a whole range of materials including 44-gallon drums, milk crates and tyres into a playground and the children were left to get on with it; building towers, forts, structures unimpeded while teachers steeled themselves for an OHS nightmare.

It never came. Researchers found there was a reduction of fighting and bullying. And in the new playgrounds, the dominant children were no longer the big, physically able kids but the ones with creative ability.

And as they stacked, negotiated and redistributed the objects, they were getting a whole lot of exercise.

Tranter wants parents to reconsider their approach to risk, saying they are responding as individuals rather than collectively.

"If you're driving your kid to school, you're not saving time because you have to spend more time at work earning the money to pay for the cost of the car. The roads become more dangerous and parents trap themselves in a situation where they spend their whole lives driving their kids around."

When Tranter lectures on these issues he often asks his audience to stop and imagine their favourite place when they were a child.

Was it an outdoors environment, he asks. Was it away from the gaze of adults? Was there an element of danger or risk? Could you get there by yourself? Did it involve any nature - animals, insects etc?

The answer is often a resounding "yes". (True in the case of this reporter, whose favourite place was playing in an ivy "nest" in the branches of a backyard tree).

But was there ever a golden era when children swung on ropes across creeks and grooming referred to sartorial elegance? When no one worried their kids were about to get pulled off the street by some pornography addled sociopath?

Six years ago New York columnist Lenore Skenazy was lampooned in the media as America's "worst mom" when she wrote about letting her nine-year-old son travel on the subway alone.

Skenazy went on to write a book in 2010 called Free Range Kids, based on her belief that children today are overprotected and "over-parented", and now hosts a "super nanny"-style television show where she convinces anxious parents to loosen up.

Parents' fears are completely out of touch with reality, she says. "The American stats show that if you left your children on the side of the road, you would have to wait 750,000 years before they were kidnapped by a stranger," Skenazy says.

"Do you want to protect them from a crime that is so random or so rare, or do you want to protect them from getting overweight and diabetic, which is one in three children in the US."

But this fear has a profound effect. Australian children whose parents are worried about neighbourhood safety spend about two hours a week less playing outside than other children of the same age, according to new research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

When Abbotsford resident Christine Keogh was 12 she used to babysit her five younger siblings, make meals and clean up afterwards: "They'd be calling in DOCS now," she jokes.

Keogh and her husband Martin Walker decided their son, Devlin Walker, could walk the 1.6-kilometre trip to school in Clifton Hill when he was in grade six.

Now their outgoing 12-year-old – who doesn’t have a mobile phone – walks to school with a small band of friends and says the half hour journey is one of the best parts of his day.

The friends walk slowly and chat, pore over magazines, rummage through hard rubbish on the nature strip ("The other day we found some fresh-as '80s jumpers") and stop at the milk bar for sherbert sweets.

"It was a bit weird walking to school on my own for the first day or two, but now it feels normal because I go with all the other kids," he says.

In some ways children today are far more worldly than they used to be – Devlin boasts 1600 followers on Instagram – but in other ways they can't manage the basics in life, like lighting a fire, Keogh says.

"It's my own fault as well. The reality is that there are not more attacks now than when we were young, but there is a preponderance of fear, and fear sells newspapers," she says.

For the Heart Foundation's main spokesperson on active living, Associate Professor Trevor Shilton, walking to school is a no brainer.

But it shouldn't just be up to individual parents, he says. All levels of government need to overhaul their policies to encourage their citizens to emerge from their homes.

"It is a complex problem but we know what the solutions are," Shilton says. "Our kids have had physical activity engineered out of their day and replaced with sitting ... we need governments to provide quality open space suitable for children of all ages, walkable spaces where mums can go with their kids."

In the wake of May's federal budget it was revealed that five Melbourne adventure playgrounds established for children living without a backyard in public high-rise flats would have their funding slashed.

But even well-designed playgrounds can't be a panacea, say Victoria Walks director Ben Rossiter.

"We have some fantastic playgrounds in Victoria but families drive to them," he says.

We need to normalise play in neighbourhoods, to enjoy local adventures in the local playground and build physical activity into everyday life through activities like walking, he says.

Australians may be surprised to learn that we're not the active nation we think we are. Our kids get less physical activity than those in Britain, New Zealand and Canada. The only thing we lead on is organised sport.

A report card released last month by the Heart Foundation gave Australian children a lowly D minus for overall levels of physical activity.

Only one in five Australian children aged five to 17 meet the federal government's physical activity guidelines of an hour of physical activity every day of the week.

Cecile van der Burgh is the co-founder of the Kids in Nature Network, which connects families and their children with opportunities and events to spend time playing outside.

"We get parents who actually ask us how to do nature play, they've lost innate feeling that you can just go outside and play," she says.

Internationally, particularly in Europe, there is a movement towards nature play in educational settings, a "thirst" that van der Burgh says is alive and well in Melbourne.

One of the best examples are a number of "bush kindergartens" that have blossomed in Melbourne in the past three years, following the model of forest kindergartens in European countries such as Germany, where preschool education happens outdoors.

Westgarth Bush Kindergarten takes students to Darebin Parkland weekly come rain or shine, and encourages them to play with the materials they find around them – sticks, mud, leaves and trees.

“Through challenging themselves children learn that muddy puddles are slippery and rocks are hard – they have a lot more capacity than adults give them credit for,” says kindergarten director Doug Fargher.

A decade ago Christine Joy was one of six people in the team who designed the children's garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne.

The gardens contain wetlands, a bamboo forest, a kitchen garden and the highly popular "rill" – a small stream that meanders through the garden where children can paddle.

Now the garden's education co-ordinator, Joy says the team was confronted with a number of options that involved risk: lavender mounds that attracted bees, semi-toxic plants, heavy logs and rock climbing. All were included and the team did a risk-benefit assessment, to reassure teachers there were many advantages to encouraging children to take reasonable risks.

And it is adults who have injured themselves most in the children's garden, bumping heads and falling into the pond, Joy says.

In former industrial areas and in new urban developments we have very little open space and this is pushing us towards "potential disaster" in the future says the the Heart Foundation's open spaces expert, Dr Rob Grenfell.

"If you live in the western suburbs and you have to get your pram over the dual carriageway to get to a park where the swings haven't been modified in 20 years, that's a challenge," Grenfell says.

But around the state there are recent examples of programs set up to slake the "thirst". In Colac, a mother's group for disadvantaged mothers meet in the botanic gardens, rain or shine. In Portarlington, the council has installed two bright blue bollards about 500 metres and one kilometre away from the local primary school, with parents encouraged to drop their children there to continue the rest of the way on foot or scooter. And in Melbourne, local residents of Thornbury's Rossmoyne Street have won accolades for their attempts to make the long street more community and pedestrian friendly, with footpath planter boxes full of free herbs, a garden scarecrow competition and walking Christmas carols.

For Stephanie Kanga and her family, the app at their creche has allowed them to feel closer during the long work day and spend more time in the evenings doing the things they enjoy, like bedtime books.

"I think things are fast-paced, but that's society. This is what digital applications should be used for, not getting us stressed. I've been working at this pace for 18 years and I'll use whatever makes my life easier."

But for Professor Paul Tranter, frenetic parents should also consider emulating their children at play.

"It underscores the importance of just slowing down. This is what we can learn from children, to rediscover joy in our lives."

Miki Perkins is Social Affairs Reporter