If you want a vivid picture of just how free-range life was in 19th century America, I recommend "Two Little Savages" by Ernest Thompson Seton, a fictionalized autobiography of the author's childhood published in 1903. While it's certainly a romanticized picture, and the events in the book represent an unusual amount of freedom for the protagonists, it still documents fantastically a variety of 19th century parenting styles and the nature of the society that has been lost.
If you want to use it to mean “lucky” it should be in the sense of “a purely accidental thing that happened to be good”, not just any good thing that happened.
If I travel to a foreign city on a whim and meet my future spouse there, that might be fortuitous. (It would also be fortuitous if I travel on a whim to a foreign city, get hit by a truck, and end up paraplegic.) If I train for years and finally manage to achieve my dream of running a marathon, that is not fortuitous.
Your link offers the definition “Happening independently of human will or means of foresight; resulting from unavoidable physical causes.”
There are also people who regularly binge drink and don’t become addicts per se... I guess you could call that both fortuitous and fortunate?
Or we can go all out and deny any human agency or choice, in which case I guess everything becomes fortuitous. This makes the word not very useful though.
As a poor white kid when I grew up my parents didn't have the luxury to let me do my own thing because they were often out fishing for a week+ at a time out in the bay area. So I was either waiting in the dock house playing video games for shorter fishing trips or out there on the boat with them for longer excursions.
In other words, whites in that era who practiced 'free range parenting' presumably lived in mostly white communities. If the communities were more mixed at the time, would 'free range parenting' have been as common, even if the affluence and social status of whites was the same?
Another question - what were the parenting techniques like from other races at the time in America? I'm thinking Chinese/Japanese immigrants, Hispanics, Jews, etc. Were well-to-do whites the only ones who largely practiced this style of parenting or were there others?
It wasn't a luxury to be unsupervised... the black people I knew growing up didn't really have a culture of oversupervision to rebel against. We were expected to be able to handle ourselves.
The raising incarceration rates are mostly on black men being arrested more. So obviously, there are less black men available to form families.
All of us neighborhood kids ran around in semi-feral packs and played together, being home before night, and I enjoyed it very much. Yes, there was a lot of work to be done. But kids got to be kids, too, and suffered none of the overscheduled insanity I see around me nowadays.
Slight aside- I honestly think that being able to contribute to the household from a young age was good for our mental health, too. Even if (as an example) hunting grasshoppers for a snack was silly fun together, we were proud to hand over our catch, and it felt good to be appreciated by the adults.