This extends to a lot of areas outside of physical freedom. There seems to be a lot of pressure kids face to just do well and perform from an absurdly young age

This extends to a lot of areas outside of physical freedom. There seems to be a lot of pressure kids face to just do well and perform from an absurdly young age. I don't think that this starts with the current generation of parents either. I know that growing up there were a lot of children, myself included, who were made to feel worthless if we were incapable of winning at our sport of choice or performing at a top 10 range in the classroom in the subjects of "importance". Science, Math, that kind of stuff. I'm trying my best right now to let my kid manage himself and learn how to ask for help where needed. I want him to go through his own choices, both good and bad, and experience success and failure on his own. I try to teach him that the only value I care about is not being a burden to others. Raising people up is true success instead of winning by pushing others down. Those core beliefs are the only ones I hope I can pass on to him. But I want to do whatever I can to make it come from him and for him to learn it from me through example rather than control. I know that no matter how strict my parents were, it never actually did anything to increase my performance. It never did anything to increase the obedience of my siblings. All of us just went underground over time because we couldn't trust our parents to be reasonable when we talked about our experiences at school and sports. If it wasn't up to their standards they would just make us feel like we weren't living up to their standards. I've heard this being referred to as "ego" parenting or something like that. But part of the reason we could go underground was because of physical freedom. I cycled to school and sports. I took public transport and was free to sort myself out from completely from teenage years. Instead of addressing the bit though about making a safe space for kids and not chasing them underground, it feels like parents have taken the approach of encroaching on their physical space as well to ensure that they do not escape the boundaries of the standards they demand. And now children are giving up on trying to find freedom in physical spaces. How could they when the parents are following them to every event and class that they go to? They can't even go to a mall with friends anymore without having parents around in some form or another. I feel like the desire to go underground in the digital spaces is a natural evolution although I have nothing but my own anecdotal experiences to share to support this. This is a tangential sharing of experience and opinion in relation the article. I leave this as a thinking point because I think physical freedom is being dampened for more than just the reason of fears of safety. There's also a strong desire to control children and have them grow up in our image of "perfection". If we want to reverse this trend, it may take a lot of parents having to get really uncomfortable with themselves and understanding that there's a significant amount of their own ego that needs to be removed. Else the end is going to be a never ending unhealthy war to find ways to control children's spaces every time they find a new one to go underground in.