I've got two kids and I've been listening to, and reading, variations on this opinion since the first one popped out. "Parents these days are too protective."

I've got two kids and I've been listening to, and reading, variations on this opinion since the first one popped out. "Parents these days are too protective." "Don't be a helicopter parent." "When I was a kid, we didn't even have car seats or seat belts, and my folks didn't even look at my injuries unless they were gushing blood." After eight years I've decided this is another load of Baby Boomer nostalgia, only this time it's Gen-X and Millennials joining in. My theory is two part: First: this is Baby Boomers finding any way they can to call anyone younger than them lazy and coddled, without any sense of irony that we are the way they raised us. And if you are a Gen-X or Millennial and have bought into this way of thinking: congratulations, you've been gaslit by the grand master gaslighters: Baby Boomers. Second: this is your brain playing tricks on you. The memories you have from around ages 6-11 are the golden age of your childhood. In your memory, they went on forever. Before 6 the memories are fewer and more scattered. The vast swaths of boring time you spent supervised in school, supervised in after-school care, supervised at home playing, mostly didn't stick around. But as you aged, you were given incrementally more freedom, and that novelty made the experiences feel amazing at first and so they stuck around as memories. But, your sense of time is warped. Your brain, lying, tells you that because you have a memory of riding your bike around the neighborhood (or into town), that was obviously what you were allowed to do "when you were a kid" in general. I'm not saying there hasn't been some shift. I won't let my 4 year old ride around the neighborhood unsupervised; perhaps my parents might have let me, but I kinda doubt it, and I don't trust their memories from the 80s any better than my own. Epilogue: * I'm not saying there aren't some overprotective parents who take it to extremes. I just promise you those people also existed back in the day. * Your parents did the best they could. * You are doing the best you can. * Your fellow parents who are doing it differently than you -- more protective or less protective or just differently protective of their kids -- they're also just doing the best they can.