My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you, but I think we're doing what every generation does... Things aren't as different as they seem. > I never see the ki

My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you, but I think we're doing what every generation does... Things aren't as different as they seem. > I never see the kids in my neighborhood doing that. I've never seen any of them leave the street, and always with the parents on the patio, chatting with each other. The last time I saw a roving band of 9-to-13 year-olds biking around town was probably the early 2000s. I dunno... I see "roving bands of kids on bikes" a lot. Also kids playing unattended in vacant lots/etc. Perhaps it's because I work from home and am therefore in a residential neighborhood when school gets out. I never noticed "roving kids" when I worked downtown and didn't get home until 6-ish. Kids will always be kids. They'll always find ways to get away and be unsupervised. For our generation, most shenanigans happened on the way home from school, anyway. That's still unsupervised time. I feel like kids today interact differently due to omnipresent communication, but they certainly still wander around and get "into trouble" pretty regularly. I think we also forget how much of our time was supervised. Sure, I played with friends down by the creek and out in the woods, but someone usually knew exactly where we were, and we were rarely out of shouting distance. We remember the crazy romps around wherever, but we forget how much of the time a parent was just around the corner. It's really not so different today.