The summer holidays stretch before many parents like a problem to be solved. How much freedom should we give the children? Will they be safe? Will they be able to cope on their own? The small, gap-toothed and quietly spoken man in front of me has been yelling at you not to worry for years. Frank Furedi, 61, the most quoted sociologist in the media (there's a research study to prove it), thinks we live in a society in which we're all encouraged to worry too much. And whether it be for the sake or our own health or the safety of our children, very little of it is productive.

Last month, in a well-publicised report for the think-tank Civitas, Furedi was decrying the rise in police checks for adults working with children because they have “succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations”. Later this year an updated edition of his best-known book, Paranoid Parenting (Allen Lane), will be published. It's a demolition of daily campaigns that convince us that children are in danger from disease, obesity, paedophiles and lurking safety hazards.

Furedi is sitting in his double-fronted Victorian house in Faversham, Kent, sipping a Pepsi Max in obvious defiance of all those alarmist fizzy-drink warnings. Yet he is not altogether in tune with his teachings. He's clock-watching so that he's not late to pick up his son Jacob, 12, from cricket. He's telling me how he goes to see the doctor too often; that he has been worried about his prostate since listening to a recent radio programme. And though he and his wife (Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) have tried to be as paranoia-free as possible - Jacob was allowed to go to the park and shops by himself from the age of 7 - he confides that he's not immune to worry. “Occasionally my wife tells me to practise what I preach when I react like a typical paranoid father,” he says. “Our lives and emotions are so heavily invested in our children, we all find it difficult to be practical.”

The State makes parents feel vulnerable

Such self-confessed fallibility is endearing, and surprising too, given Furedi's reputation as an academic rottweiler. A Hungarian émigré and founder of the British Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1970s (disbanded in 1998), he has been accused by environmentalist George Monbiot of heading a group of neo-conservative ex-Trotskyites systematically infiltrating parts of the British Establishment with free-market libertarianism, a claim that Furedi denies. His politics now seem a long way from communism as we know it. He says he's always been deeply suspicious of the State and resents the way it makes everyone, particularly parents, feel more vulnerable than they should.

“Back in my childhood, the expression over-protective parent was used as a criticism, but today it's seen as a responsibility,” says Furedi, Professor of Sociology at Kent University since 1975. He wrote Paranoid Parenting in 2001, prompted by the countless warnings of risk he received from health and local authorities as soon as Jacob, his only child, was born. But the risk of abduction or harm is tiny, he says,certainly less than that of taking a child on a car trip.

He says he has updated Paranoid Parenting because, since he first wrote the book, the “idiotic” (one of his favourite words) has become the norm: safety measures preventing parents from taking photographs of their children at school, or stopping them playing conkers, or from going anywhere near a public bonfire on November 5, are common.

“All these things that are important aspects of kids' lives are being gradually undermined. There's also an increasing mistrust of adults, where they are no longer allies but potential enemies.” Furedi points to our automatic assumption that adult interest in children is suspicious or sexually motivated, something that research has indicated does not exist to the same extent in other countries. It's so pervasive that sometimes he can't help feeling it too.

Furedi says we need a cultural change

“I remember going to the gym with my son when he was 6 or 7 and there was this guy taking a lot of interest in him. I remember saying to myself ‘What the hell's going on here?' But then I had a reality check and realised that he was behaving normally, and if I'd been my father, in his time, he'd have just viewed it as a friendly gesture and welcomed the interest that was being shown.”

What we need, he says, is a cultural change where we regard childhood differently, where adults are allowed to hug children, but also to have responsibility for them; looking after them if they look in trouble, telling them off if they're behaving antisocially. That way children would be less fearful and become more engaged in adult ideas of social responsibility, and adults would tune their emotional radar to real sources of concern, rather than having to rely on criminal record checks.

Furedi denies that he wants to go back in time, but what he says constantly harks to a better past: old-fashioned, let-'em-take-care-of-themselves parenting. His theories seem to have their roots as much in his own extraordinary background, as in the hours of contemplation and self-inquisition that he tells me also lie behind them.

Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, his mother was a concentration camp survivor and his watchmaker father spent the war on the run from the Nazis, first pretending to be a regimental doctor and then spending the last six months of the war in the same hotel as German high command. It would be the last place they would look, he correctly reasoned.

His mother let him take care of himself

Through most of Furedi's childhood, his father was in jail at the hands of the Stalinist regime (“he was a loudmouth, very right-wing and not too diplomatic”) and his overstretched mother let him and his sister more or less take care of themselves. He recalls often catching a train to Budapest and back on his own from the age of 7.

The family fled to Canada, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Furedi was 9. He left home at 16, joined the Army, went to McGill University, got involved in “extreme” politics, of unformed political hue he says. It involved occupying university buildings to try and radicalise political teaching and he found himself blacklisted when he applied for PhD courses. He decided to study in London instead.

His emerging - and to many puzzling - brand of Marxism brought him notoriety among leftwingers when he opposed Arthur Scargill during the 1980s miners' strike because of his refusal to hold a ballot, and he criticised the Anti Nazi League for preventing freedom of speech. Some have called it extreme right-wing libertarianism. Furedi calls it upholding free speech and the rights of individuals above institutions. He prefers to be called a humanist rather than a libertarian.

He vehemently opposes what he calls the “medicalisation” of society, the process by which existential problems, such as shyness, active behaviour, poor schoolwork, are recast as medical problems such as social phobia, ADHD and learning difficulties. This is the result, he says, of “cultural drivers” (by which I think he means short-termist, vote-grabbing politicians).

“There's a fear market, which the pharmaceutical and other industries benefit from,” he says. “I wouldn't trust them any more than the Department of Health's idiotic campaign on child obesity. The idea of what it means to be human is constantly downsized, making us imagine that we are more mentally ill, have more invisible diseases, and are less able to cope with chronic diseases than we imagined. It encourages people to feel less in control of their lives.

“I see the impact of this in quite a devastating way. You go to a nursery and you find every year the number of dyslexic children grows, and you know that it's both real but also principally the result of culture, and not biological causes.”

Furedi claims that, in private, many journalists and academics see the sense in what he says. He seems faintly bemused by why he has attracted such spleen from people like Monbiot. What he says is outspoken but nuanced, he says. Others would say the consistent anti-state agenda behind his academic efforts, and his involvement with the magazine Living Marxism, which regularly caused outrage by appearing to defend the indefensible, certainly haven't helped.

Perhaps it's also down to a natural, intellectual pugnaciousness inherited from his father. There's the curious spring of the fighter in his walk, and a slight, tense withdrawal when he feels challenged. He tells me a revealing story. Since infancy, his father scolded him when he didn't stand up for himself and encouraged him to fight back if he was pushed around. So that's what he did. When he was 17 and living in Montreal, he went on a bus to see his girlfriend. Between getting off the bus and getting to her house, Furedi claims to have got into three fights. “It was a very anti-Semitic area and I got a lot of abuse. But I relished the opportunity to make something of it.”

Shortly after that, he vowed never again to confront problems in that way, or to embarrass his own children into action.

“If I don't exercise I become a bad person”

Now he has other physical outlets. He goes to the gym three times a week, but not to keep fit. “I take physical exercise seriously. If I don't do it, I become very uptight and a bad person. I find it phenomenally relaxing.” He and his wife love climbing and skiing, which, he says, absorb most of their disposable income. But he's definitely not faddy about his food, with lots of fatty meat (”the Hungarian diet”) on the family menu, not much junk because he wants Jacob to understand quality in food, but not too much emphasis on fruit and veg either “because we want to encourage him to eat whatever he wants”.

But it's clearly not easy running against a tide of human anxiety. “I've been to my doctor several times with worries. I would like to be less concerned than I am, but that's me.” And when he tells me about the planning he and his wife do to allow their son as much freedom as possible without isolating him from friends and safety-concerned parents, and about worried parents of schoolmates turning up on the Furedi doorstep to report that they've found Jacob out on his own...well, it all sounds quite pressurised.

Furedi doesn't blame any parent for leading an anxiety-filled, health-conscious life. “It's very difficult for any individual to adopt a parenting style that is fundamentally different from anyone else's. We interact with each other, we are influenced by similar fashions, and I don't suggest that anyone should adopt a childcare strategy that isolates you from the rest of the world. But I can see the day when we are more mature in making choices and don't have to pee in our pants about every new experience.”

We await the revolution.

Child safety in numbers

11.7m under 16s in England and Wales

68 children were abducted by strangers in 2002-03

166 children are killed on the road every year

96 children drowned in 2002

917,498 children were injured in falls in 2002

Source: Times database

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