I encourage you to google it. People get arrested all around the country for letting their kids play in the park across the street, ride their bike around the block, sit in the car alone at the bank, etc.
The fact that "a handful of people" in "several places" over "the last 20 years" becomes "People get arrested all around the country" like it's an epidemic or something is one of many negative, and one of the worst, things about the internet.
That and the fact that "oh and then the charges were dropped and in some cases local laws changed" is inevitably (I think purposefully) left out.
Reason.com went on a year-long bender of self-promotion and half-truthing about 3 years ago when three women were arrested in three states, claiming that "jack-booted big gubmint was comin to take yer kerdz" and plastered people's pictures and stories on fundraising materials and tried to get people to buy their "free range kids" books, as though three incidents in a country of 300 million was an epidemic.
Of course, the most confusing thing about all of this is that a Venn diagram of "people who think that the government is rounding up mothers all over the country" and "people who immediately, vocally, and vociferously criticize the government for NOT protecting the welfare of children" is a perfect circle.
This seems true, and also I think there's some nuance lost in the stats as well.
My personal experience as a parent is that my kids don't get nearly the amount of independence that I did at their age. A reasonable part of this is that I am afraid that my kids will get taken away. My preference is towards the free(r)-range style of parenting, so the ex-post stats don't convey the full effect that the small sample size of reported "big gubmint takeaways" has.
Probably depends on the area and other factors... in my area it was totally normal for kids to walk some half a mile to a mile home in middle school just over a decade ago and I don't think it's changed. I think even elementary school was normal with possibly a smaller distance (not sure how far kids went, but a couple blocks was fine).
Twenty five years ago in my area, a mile to half a mile was routine for elementary school students. By middle school, I would come home to an empty house and go pick up my brother who was in kindergarten. Nowadays, my daughter is in elementary school and I see parents drive their cars up to the bus stop and hover until the bus comes.
The majority of me thinks that parents today need to relax because the chance of your kid being kidnapped or whatever are about the lowest they've ever been. And then another part of me wonders if that's BECAUSE today's parents are paranoid.
Huge exaggeration. Also, free-range parenting is a thing, but even in relatively "helicopter-y" families, the ability to send kids off somewhere w/ a phone to reconnect makes it easy to let kids of a certain age explore and exercise some freedom.
