While often I went out and played with the one neighbor kid (who lived 2 blocks and pasture away) my age, I also often was driven to visit friends. Kids were simply too spread out. After the one kid, the next closest was about a 2 hour (one way) walk and that was along a somewhat busy high speed "country road" - legal term - meaning no shoulders, and few stop signs. That was in the early 80s.

I "went out to play" but my mom also dropped me off at friends' houses.

...It's because not everyone lives in a quaint neighborhood with other kids. I grew up in a wonderful area but there were mostly older people around us. It was also a busy road. So, I'd have friends over to my house and we would go into the woods and play pioneers and have picnics, or I'd go to one of my friends' houses and we'd do something from that locale (like walk downtown to buy pogs). Once I was about 10 my mom started letting me ride my bike to one friend's house, but mostly people were a little too far apart for an 10 year old to safely navigate the intersections and sidewalk-less stretches.

There are just more cars, driving faster and more dangerously, so I think that's reasonable.

I'm 25 so this was all mid-90's. Same deal for my sister and my brother.

I currently live in a neighborhood and there are 7 kids who live in/near it. They all hang out and shoot hoops and run through all the yards (no walking through the house nekkid). At 8 PM you hear various voices shouting "IT'S 8 PM!!" and the kids scatter home. Somewhat noisy but I like it.

I guess I should qualify this -- I'm looking for the time when kids stopped being allowed to run around themselves.

There are still areas where kids are allowed to run around by themselves. In my town, there are the parents who drive their kids everywhere but more because they have overscheduled those kids so they are left with no choice but to drive them. That ten minute car ride is "family bonding time." Most of the people I'm friends with as well as my children's friends come and go to each to other's houses on their own. My son meets his friends at a local park where they play handball. He walks there and walks home at whatever time I tell him dinner is.

Neighborhoods aren't the same anymore though. When I grew up, we all wandered in and out of each other's homes and yards. Now, people are so interested in their landscaping and coi ponds that many of these parents don't have kid friendly yards anymore. There's no way many of my neighbors would allow Ring Olivio through their yards or kick the can in front of their house. Possessions have more meaning to them. I grew up with money and nice things, but our house was always open to the neighborhood.

regular people (those not living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
ROTFLMAO
ROTFLMAO
ROTFLMAO

... Amy, you made this expat New Yawker's day!

Don't forget it wasn't just the kids initiating their own unaccompanied forays outside the home. When I was sitting around like a bump on a log watching Happy Days re-runs, my mom (and those of my friends) would strongly encourage us to go out and do something until dinner.

The only place I ever got driven to play was the swim club we were members at in the summer.

Play dates are for preschoolers. My kids are 7 and 10, and they go out to play. I will drive them to a friend's house if it is more than a few blocks away. Otherwise they just go back and forth between friends' houses, and our yard is constantly full of kids, none of whom have an appointment to be there. So I don't think the play date (at least for older kids) is common at all for "regular" people, at least not in Wisconsin.

Amy, it's a good question. I started noticing the "superparent" trend in around 1995. It seems to have originated with parents who were born in the mid-1970s, but I wouldn't swear to that.

Thanks - very helpful.

My kids played outside without total supervision in the early 90's and never had a formal playdate (Santa Barbara, CA, UCSB married student housing). We left there in '92 when the youngest was eight. We moved to a rural area where play dates were almost required because of the distances needed to travel to friend's homes. Even there, they played outside with the few neighbors we had.

Older kids still play outside and ride bikes to their friends houses. Of course, it depends alot on where you are...in big cities I would not let my kid wander too far, but where I grew up it is still very common.

Back in the day the only thing that got us out of the woods was the dinner bell! Amazing how we could ever hear my mom's voice from about a mile away...

I know a lady who has three girls and is trying to be a supermom. Except for when she's at work, she is never more than a hundred feet or so away from at least one of her girls. She drives them to and from school even though, for two of them, school is in walking distance. She spends all weekend driving them to various activities; it's not unusual for the three of them to have activities in different towns on the same Saturday, and the mom will burn up a tank of gas in the SUV driving back and forth between towns all day. Letting one of them perhaps ride with a friend's parents is out of the question. Letting any of them maybe not have every minute of their lives scheduled by their mother -- unheard of! Simply not done!

It's destroying her marriage because she never has five minutes for her husband, and he's totally shut out of having any kind of relationship with the kids. And actually, I don't think she enjoys doing all this; she's depressed a lot. But she can't/won't stop doing it. I wonder if those girls aren't going to resent the hell out of her when they get older.

See, I consider overparenting to be a rich person's problem. I could not do what Cousin Dave describes even if I wanted to.

I could not do what Cousin Dave describes even if I wanted to.

Nor could I, nor would I want to. Kids need to have unscheduled time to themselves just to wind down. "Unstructured playtime" if you will. The first time I heard that term, I was all WTF? "Unstructured" playtime? Feh. Kids aren't supposed to have "structured" playtime, are they? Since when? My girls always pretty much did whatever, after their homework was done, before dinner. After dinner, it's helping with the dishes, piano practice (for #1), guitar practice (for #2), folding the laundry, finishing up whatever homework didn't get done, maybe a little tv, then showers and bed. Done. Weekends, they can hang, ride bikes, go to the beach, go downtown, read, whatever strikes their fancy. They know what time to be home for dinner, and they know to call if they want to make other plans. I kinda like it when they're outta my hair!

I think I stopped seeing kids "running the streets," as my mom calls what my brother and I did (and what she and her siblings did before us), in the mid-to late-90's. I graduated high school in 1995 and it seems like the kids I was of an age to babysit had structured, supervised play. My neighborhood didn't change enough in the intervening years to account for why kids were never seen walking alone or in groups anymore.

Hey, I take offense to that... :) I don't over parent, but there's no one to send my son to play with right outside our house, even though there's an elementary school a few blocks away. I rarely see any children outside at all.

The cars flying by are also scary.

Nicole, the sad thing now that I read your comment is that we always played in our yards and went to the local schoolyards. Now, the school yards have organized practices all the time and when they're over, the gates are locked. The police routinely chase any kids out of the yards if they gates happen to be left open and I live in a very low crime area. I used to live around the block from the elementary school and my son and his friends would go to play basketball and would be told they were not allowed because a permit was needed. Then they'd come home, but town zoning laws forbid basketball hoops at the curb so where can they play?

I think it TOTALLY depends on area and parents.
There's a lot of free range kids around here, but one of my daughters friends isn't allowed to walk over to our house. Her father drives her everywhere.
It's really weird.

So Amy - I think the answer is - Which area and what are the parents like?

note: the majority of roads here do not have sidewalks but there are a lot of dead end streets (we back up to the freeway). Speeding cars aren't really a big problem.

Good god almighty.

My parents wouldn't even drive us to school, and we didn't expect them to. Drive me to a friends house?

Quite frankly, I would have been embarrassed.

Of course area is going to play a part. My niece and nephew can roam their neighborhood. I see lots of middle school kids walking around when I am out driving now.

When I was a kid, there was lots of adults around - always - perhaps not my parents, but the neighborhood had a lot of stay at home moms (most the kids where about 7 years older than me). So really, we were never totally unsupervised.

I also think it has something to do with the amount of school work. I was shocked when I heard that my niece was regularly assigned homework in the 1st grade. I didn't regularly have homework till the 8th grade. When they got home from school back then, their mom made them do their homework.

I think it really started when the electronic human leash called the cell phone became more available.

Steve Daniels:
Poor kid is embarrassed! She loves it when she manages to walk somewhere (also know as getting around Dad). Or is that getting around without Dad?

The Former Banker:
Does the 1st grader have actual homework? Or "homework" - read this to your parents? That's what my kid had.

There's adults around, but there aren't many stay-at-home-parents in this area. Supervision is fairly minimal.

I think it started in the late 70s in New York, and continued into the early 80s. The city had gone bankrupt and the years of liberals looking the other way at crime and decay finally reached a breaking point.

This was the era of brilliant liberal ideas like "freeing" the insane from public hospitals - yielding the first wave of half-crazed homeless who mingled on the streets with the druggies.

The subways and peripheral neighborhoods were no longer safe after rush hour. Gangs ruled certain areas of the city. Anyone who went to a Broadway show took a cab or shuttle bus home.

Epitomized by the sensational - but true - stories of joggers being gang-raped in Central Park.

Hollywood was serving up The Poseidon Adventure and Dirty Harry.

So in New York at least there was a kernel of truth to the fear.

BD, the image and perhaps the reality of New York was so bad that they made a dystopia flick about it in the 80's - "Escape From New York".

NYC is actually a pretty nice place to live now, and the playgrounds are full of kids, although they're generally with nannies or moms. I do sometimes see bunches of 12-13 year olds or so hanging out in the park who don't appear to have any adults around. (I notice them because they're usually annoying the crap out of me.) I think for traffic reasons alone you might not want to let your little kids run around alone here.

I grew up in the burbs in the 70's, and from perhaps age 5 or so, we kids ran pretty free. I'm not sure that's the case in many places anymore.

The Former Banker:
Does the 1st grader have actual homework? Or "homework" - read this to your parents? That's what my kid had.

She had to read to an adult for 20 mins 5 days a week (I had something similar). She also had some other things like writing out spelling words and math problems.

Yes - Koch got the city back on financial footing, and then Giuliani cleaned up the crime.

I am still amazed each time I go back.

Here in Indiana, we still don't have play dates, and I don't think we ever will. I'm 24, I was allowed to run around unsupervised throughout most of my childhood, and both my younger brothers were no different.