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Treating it as an intentional choice is ignoring all the cases of "parent gets investigated or arrested for allowing child outside".

https://people.com/parents/mom-investigated-dcfs-letting-dau...

https://www.parenting.com/blogs/show-and-tell/hayley-parenti...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

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That's "inside-out" helicopter parenting, where someone else is being the helicopter, not the parent. Kudos to Utah and their "free-range parenting" laws: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/well/family/utah-passes-f...

Local business owner was telling me that police showed up at her business with her 9 year old because the 9 year old was "out on her own". He was walking from the local business to their house, about ... 8 blocks from the business. It's a smallish town (40,000 population, but in this 'old town district', maybe 2-3000?). Police brought the kid back to the business and chastised the business owner, intimating that letting her kid walk home unattended was in violation of some law. She asked for the specific law, which pissed off the officer to no end (because there isn't one here).

What's bizarre is that the cop was probably allowed to do the same as a child.

Yeah! Certainly in my day (which wasn't that long ago!) we ... walked everywhere (or rode a bike) as a kid.

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