alt Hacker News> It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids. I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
We still roamed pretty free as kids in the 90s. That's long after the decline of childhood mortality and large families - I don't know more than a handful of families from that era who had more than 2 kids.
I was an only kid that roamed pretty free as young as four, wandering the neighbourhood with similarly aged kids.
I chalk that up to the inertia of social behaviour. My parents grew up in a generation where they all had many brothers and sisters, and their parents were one of eight. They learned parenting from their parents, and I learned parenting from mine.
We adjust with each generation, but not completely.