Probably for as long as humans have existed, children of certain age and up have been given a lot of leeway, "free range", in terms of what they do during the day. Meaning that they can go out with friends or even on their own, for hours on end, even the entire day, in many cases without the parents having any idea where they are going, and come back home in the evening.
This was still the case almost worldwide up to the 1970's and even largely to the 1980's, and it's still for the most part the case in many countries to this day (even though the introduction of extremely affordable cellphones has somewhat changed this dynamic to some extent in most places.) In fact, in many countries even to this day parents outright encourage their kids to go outside and play. And not just on the front yard of the house.
However, in some countries, quite prominently in the United States, some time in the 1980's and 1990's a moral panic started spreading like wildfire. This moral panic was so deeply and fundamentally ingrained into people's consciousness that since the early 2000's letting children go outside on their own unattended is not only considered unthinkable, but an outright crime.
It has become so bad that people have been arrested and charged with a crime for merely leaving their kids in their car for a couple of minutes. (And not like in an extremely hot summer day. The conditions can be perfectly fine. It's the act of leaving them unattended for just a couple of minutes that's the "crime".) In one recent infamous (but by no means unique) case a mother was arrested and charged for allowing her 10-year-old son to walk alone to some neighbor or whatever the place was, that was just some minutes of walking away. And this was in the middle of rural America, in the middle of nowhere.
Indeed, most people in America and some other countries have been so deeply indoctrinated into this fear that they literally cannot go 10 seconds if they don't know where their kids are. In this modern era of cellphones parents are constantly calling them if they happen to be somewhere else (eg. at a friend's house), and there even exists tracking software that can be installed in the child's smartphone that sends constant reports to the parent's phone. Many parents start literally panicking if they don't get a response from their kids in ten seconds when they try to call them. It's really, really bad.
It's just so ironic that for literally millenia, and to a large extent still today in some countries, kids were given so much more freedom. It was just one of those small risks that one had to take (ie. letting one's own kids go outside unattended for hours on end, trusting that they will come back unharmed). The upside of this is that this taught independence and social skills from a relatively young age.
Unsurprisingly, people today, especially in those countries, are more and more socially stunted, emotionally fragile, and having a hard time being independent and proactive with their own lives (and this is even if they avoid the smart device brain rot.)
There is one much more ironic, and sad, statistic related to this very thing:
Before the moral panic in most parts of the United States (and many of the other countries that have also adopted the panic) kids would walk to school, if it was at a reasonable walking distance.
After the moral panic a lot of parents started driving their kids to school every day (when there was no school bus service available). This practice has become so deeply ingrained into the American culture that you constantly see it eg. in movies and TV series (and a source of drama when the parent for some reason can't make it in time to pick up the kids from school.)
This caused, and still causes, a very significant increase in traffic accidents, sometimes fatal, where children are passengers. The number of children injured or even killed in traffic accidents rose dramatically, and are still much, much higher than before the panic.
So the moral panic has caused this extremely dark and sad irony that the actions done to "protect" children from harm have actually dramatically increased the number of children injured and killed in car accidents. In other words, the exact opposite effect.
But the moral panic, the fear, has been so deeply and fundamentally ingrained into the public consciousness in these countries that it's not going to stop in the foreseeable future. Especially not when cops are arresting parents for simply leaving their kids in a car for a couple of minutes.
Which in itself also has a sad ironic effect: That of causing trauma to those kids because their parents are arrested and they have to go through the hullabaloo of having to go live with someone else for the duration of the arrest. This is extremely likely to be a scary and traumatic event for young children. So, once again, children are being "protected" by causing them mental anguish and trauma.
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