Well, I was born in 1995 and what you say here sounds much more like my childhood than what Valka is describing. I can remember... I dunno... one arranged play date? Plus stuff like being forced to go to the birthday parties of kids I wasn’t friends with. But that’s different.
It can depend on where you live, as there are some neighborhoods that aren't as uptight as others. And things are generally more normal in smaller towns and cities than in larger urban centres.
I'm partly going by what I've read in the news, about parents who were charged with neglecting their children and being found unfit just because they let the kids walk to the playground or school by themselves, or even allowed them to play in the front yard without a parent being right there with them. In some cases the police were called and the kids were actually taken away from their parents, and it took days/weeks/months to convince the "system" that they really were fit parents. Of course it was always some nosy neighbor or nosy passerby who called it in.
People like that would have been kept busy all day, reporting the kids in the neighborhood I lived in back in the early '70s (when my dad and I lived in the city with his girlfriend, who had 4 kids; I played with the two younger ones and their friends). As long as homework and chores were done, we could roam the neighborhood as we pleased. Even when I got into a bike accident with another kid, all that happened was someone ran out of a nearby house, applied a band-aid to my cut knee, and when I told my dad, he figured as long as it was only a superficial cut and someone had already tended to it, his reaction was "be more careful next time" and that was an end to it.
For the most part, there wasn’t much supervision. We played games outside, wandered around forests and did stuff with sticks, played with toy guns, and stuff like that. We stayed inside more than you guys did, but that was because video games were hella fun. And also not how most parents wanted their kids spending time.
To be fair, my parents were (still are) pretty laissez-faire and I’m sure kids drift into the orbits of other kids with laissez-faire parents. So that could have biased my experience. Or maybe if the proportion of helicopter parents goes from ~5% in the 60s to ~25% by the 2000s, it creates the perception of a huge cultural shift, even though it doesn’t match reality for most kids?
As mentioned, it can depend on where you live and if you have the misfortune to have neighbors who mind everyone else's business in addition to their own.
The impression I get from reading some of the news articles about Calgary, for example (it's a major city 90 minutes south of here), is that kids must never have to actually walk to school. They must be driven, and if it's too far for the parents to drive directly to the school, they must at least be driven to the bus stop. There are actually parents out there who think kids younger than 15 or so are too young to go to school by themselves.
