This is a problem in how we raise our children these days, I think. In my day, free-roaming childhood was the norm. Nobody had ever heard of a playdate, because children pretty much managed their own social lives and activities.

I mean, obviously, that wasn't all to the good. Societies of children are not automatically benevolent, sometimes far from it. But I never felt boxed into my home and family, because I was usually not home, and my parents didn't keep me on a tight leash. Because typically parents didn't, then.

I'd get home, change into play clothes, disappear until dinner time, and then disappear again until bedtime. (With homework squeezed in somewhere, but I didn't usually have much when I was younger.)

Parents then didn't often complain about having to lug their kids around from structured activity to activity, because ... They usually didn't do that.

Of course, we didn't have online activities or even media entertainment on tap to keep us busy, so we had to find other things to do. (I'm talking about the days before streaming media and even recorded media. If you wanted to see a film, you went to the cinema or you watched TV live.)

For my own entertainment, I mostly read books. By the time I was a teenager, I had even discovered how to read about queer people —on the sly, of course.

Part of that was escapism too, so I'm not saying that things then were necessarily or automatically better than they are today. I don't think that at all. When I realized I was gay, I was severely traumatized, and I had no one to turn to for validation or support. So, I'm not idealizing the past.

But I do think parents could loosen up a bit on their children and give them the freedom to explore the world on their own, more than is common today.