I raised some kids and a unquantified "lot of" time is spent teaching them to gradually be independent adults by occasionally making sure they're safe while the

I raised some kids and a unquantified "lot of" time is spent teaching them to gradually be independent adults by occasionally making sure they're safe while they do their own thing. An excellent analogy is I spent some time in a minor leadership position in a boy scout troop and beyond a certain age the kids do all the work, the adults are there to explain "and that's why the wood lot area is fenced off", "and that is the correct archery range safety procedure", "and no that is not a safe way to maintain a campfire" and so on and so forth. As the actual troop leader often said, if the adults are sweating something is not being done correctly; the kids should be doing all the work and the adults are mere safety advisor guests of the kids. Some kids in some subcultures are able to safely with minimal adult supervision, for example, whittle wood sticks into smaller theoretically artistic sticks at age 8 whereas others STILL cannot responsibly whittle at age 24. I spent a lot of time as a dad parenting at a laptop on the deck occasionally saying "no, there's a buried gas line there, dig for fossils over there" and the kids would make their own "discoveries" underground. Its kinda like being in management where some folks (or kids) need near hand-over-hand supervision sometimes, yet others you just kinda check on every day or so. Ideally by the time the kids are adults (16, 18, 21, ..., ?) the parents shouldn't be doing much other than occasional management checkins and providing of advice. There's a big difference between leading and enabling the kids while knowing exactly what they're doing in a safety sense, vs not being involved at all. For example I know next to nothing about welding (well, I know a little but I'm no certified nuclear boiler welder...) so I was quite happy to have one of the boy scout dads who's all certified up in welding teach that badge "in my place". He teaches older apprentices how to weld gas pipelines so he's certainly qualified to teach... All I really did as his partner was make sure everyone stayed hydrated LOL. For little kids a lot of parenting is you just need a parent figure at the park to occasionally say "no" and redirect. "Yeah I see the league has a ball game at the diamond so you can't play there, but no you're not playing baseball in the busiest street in the city get back on the grass now" A better analogy is something like you're claiming if a bank hires a security manager who enforces security policies then the bank is not providing actual "uniformed dude standing at attention" security. Yet some kind of manager role may be the most important time/money the bank can spend WRT security... When they're younger toddlers they need a lot of parenting until they discover lego or whatever, but that's a rather short phase in their lives.