Tech and jobs shrink childhood mobility

Parents cite both new surveillance/communication technologies and changing economic arrangements as drivers of more restrictive supervision: phones and tracking create a different relationship to risk and supervision, while schedules, housing patterns, and peer norms make walking or being home alone less common. Those combined shifts normalize 'helicopter' practices even among parents who are not intensely anxious. — If technological affordances plus economic and peer‑norm dynamics are causing widespread loss of unsupervised childhood mobility, that has downstream effects on civic trust, neighborhood social capital, child development, and urban policy.