I don't need to have kids for them to be my labor, that's not how this works anymore.
- They had latchkey children - no daycare required!
- "Free range" children was a thing and nobody got arrested for it!
- There were such things as "Block Parents", people in the neighborhood who looked out for all the kids. Obviously this was before "stranger danger."
- Everybody looked after everybody else's kids, even in tenement buildings.
- People lived close to where the grew up and generally had relatives nearby to help out when all of the above failed.
Nowadays, most of this is gone. In short, in just a mere 40 to 50 years, the cost of having children has skyrocketed. Add in the cost-of-living expenses have skyrocketed for younger people and you get the result that fewer people are having children and those who are having children are having them much later.
The short answer is cultural fragmentation and soft paternalism.
I would be miles away from home doing whatever and nobody would know. Now parents freak out if their kids leave their sight for more than a few seconds.
One thing that is really interesting is that many of the "free range" children don't follow that same parenting technique even though things are as safe or safer than when I was a child. I think this is mostly from the media putting fear into them that their children are going to be abducted.
I really feel for kids now in the US. How they grow up I would not really consider a childhood. It's just preparation to sit in an office all day until they die of old age.
My sister has kids, and she's a total helicopter parent. I've asked her why, considering how we were raised. She simply said, "That's just how it is now. That's how everyone parents." So yeah, there is certainly a cultural element to this. But I wonder if that cultural change has been created or amplified by cost. In other words, the dumb-ass kid that jumped off a bridge into a shallow creek (it was on a bet, naturally), would his parents have to file for bankruptcy these days because of the high medical costs?
Last week, I let my 7 year old go by herself to a Dollar Tree store by herself while I was with her siblings at another store in the same shopping center. A bit later, I went in to the Dollar Tree after her, and got a real talking to from the cashier about how unsafe it was for me to let her go to the store by herself. She said the world isn't safe any more and I'm putting her at risk. The cashier was an elderly woman! I would think she was raised in a time where kids were allowed to leave the house on their own.
I try to teach my kiddos independence. I send them out on their in ways that I think are safe. But the amount of judgment I get is just crazy. And I fear that one day I'll have child protective services knocking on my door.