If, as the article states, the cost for reducing an early death for a minuscule number of children is depression and anxiety for a much larger percentage of them when they become adults, is it still worth it?

Well if you actually used the evidence instead of an off-the-cuff correlation fallacy you'd notice that the death rate has lowered for unrelated reasons and the kids were safe enough before overly-restrictive parenting became the norm.

Even ignoring that, let's say you're right. Where do you think would be a good balance of that? Surely kids would have even fewer early deaths if we just kept them in a single room except for going out in the backyard for mandatory exercise. Like a dog. And why stop at 18? Surely unnecessary adult deaths could be prevented too by not allowing movement or decision-making for anyone. But who would even want to be alive?

Obviously that's absurd. So the answer isn't only to minimize risk of death and injury. The answer is to find a balance between control and chaos, where safety and freedom are acceptable. I'm of the opinion that we have strayed too far towards control.

You're also falling for that risk management problem I mentioned earlier. Humans have an internal algorithm to manage risk. But like most algorithms, it tends to break down when you feed it values of infinity or zero. When we give anything an infinite value, any finite amount of risk is unacceptable. We'll take zero risk and as a result there can be no good outcome, because life without risk has no potential reward.

An example of that is the stunted emotional development that kids have these days. We responded to obvious risks of early death and discounted less-obvious risks of failure to thrive later in life. It becomes easy to blame individuals for their own shortcomings at that point, even if it was perfectly possible for them to develop normally if we hadn't squelched them.

And I think there is evidence of current and future generations having less opportunities, less wealth, a worse climate, even less sexual encounters than previous generations. I think that's sad. We dream of always giving a better life to our children, and now we're greedily taking that life from them. They will know when they grow up and look around them. They will understand what happened.