I would have thought this would be obvious but I don’t see a single mention of it. The reason for helicopter parenting and a lack of independent mobile kids is

I would have thought this would be obvious but I don’t see a single mention of it. The reason for helicopter parenting and a lack of independent mobile kids is the disappearance of stay at home moms. When I was a kid in the early 90’s we moved to a new neighbourhood with hundreds of families and kids my age. There were stay at home moms all over the place so everyone collectively felt safe letting kids roam during the day, especially in the afternoon when they got out of school until supper time and all day during the summer break. What changed since then? The cost of housing shot through the roof! Now it’s extremely difficult to afford a house on a single income so stay at home moms are much rarer. This has also led to loneliness and depression for moms staying home with very young children and I believe a big part of that is due to a lack of other moms around to socialize with. So when the kids start school these moms rush back into the workforce and feel much better getting to socialize with other adults. But all of this leads to neighbourhoods having a very different character during the day. With basically no friendly eyes around, the place seems much more dangerous and scary. Of course it also does not help that traffic has gone way up. My neighbourhood also has the (common) issue that there is more than one entrance/exit to main roads so there is a lot of through-traffic and people tend to drive way over the residential speed limits when they’re just passing through. This could be fixed by designing subdivisions as trees rooted at a main road, making through traffic impossible, but you can’t really retrofit a neighbourhood like that.