When I was very young 6-8, I lived in a low-end, but rather large, apartment complex. It was built at the tail end of the brutalism architectural fad and we had oddities like fully concrete playgrounds built on top of concrete walking surface, surrounded by concrete planters with hard sharp corners.

There was a more conventional playground at an adjacent park and then a neighboring section of townhouses with an open field up at a higher elevation, and then by a strip mall on the other side. The whole area was maybe 2km x 1km.

The entire area was boxed in by 2 high-speed roads and on the other side a crazy intersection. So it formed a kind of "natural" range for us.

It was in the middle of a city so it wasn't too big of a deal for my friends and I to run around all over the complex (there were three different concrete playgrounds and a pool), go over to each other's apartments, run over to the park, play around in the parking garage. Run over to the local computer store. Nobody's parents really seemed to care too much where we went inside of this box so long as we were home by dark.

There was a 7-11 across one of the busy streets with a couple arcade games and they sold comic books and baseball cards, so the braver of us would head over there on occasion and spend our meager allowances on that stuff. It was at about here I learned that different houses had different allowances on our range. Some kids would get in trouble if they came back toting comic books or candy that could have only come from the 7-11, some kids didn't. And so by consensus us kids learned where was the furthest from home we could safely stray.

While most of my friends had a mother at home, I was fully latchkey, both of my parents worked, often till quite late. There was some strangeness in how this was managed:

- During the school year, between getting home from school and dark, I was free to go anywhere in this box I wanted, so long as I called my parents when I got home from school.

- If I was going to a friend's apartment, I had to let them know this. If I was just going to play outside it didn't matter where I went.

- During the summer, my mother would hire a local mother to be my babysitter. Her sons and I were already friends, and their house rules were more or less the same as mine. So really we'd just come home for lunch and she wouldn't see us all day after that. But at least there was a "responsible adult in charge"

- There was an apartment rule that if you wanted to use the pool, and were under 12, you needed a responsible child 12 or older to bring you.

- If my parents decided to go out to a function by themselves at night, they'd hire in a babysitter, usually a local teen, I'd spend most of the evening outside with my friends, but within eyeshot of my house.

- Once it got dark, I had to report back in at home, then I was free to go back outside so long as it was within eyeshot/holler distance from home.

It seemed awesome at the time and I completely enjoyed growing up there. After this, we moved to the country, and strangely it seemed my range shrunk as there simply wasn't really any place to go so it wasn't much worth getting out of the house for. I had a couple friends that were within a couple miles, and on occasion I'd walk to their houses or they would walk to mine, but that was it, for the most part my world shrunk.

I learned much later that there was a darker side to all this childhood freedom.

- A known sex predator lived in our complex. My mother found out years later that many of my play friends had been abused by him. I believe one time he may have tried to get me to come to his apartment as I remember meeting a strange man at the neighboring strip mall who "wanted to buy my bike for $1000, but I had to come back to his apartment to get the money" The police never investigated any of the cases, and I rarely remember ever seeing police in the area.

- The tall apartment buildings were popular spots for suicides. I think I remember at least knowing about 3 or 4 suicides while I lived there. I know that one of the bodies was found by one of my play friends. It was so traumatic that he was pulled out of school and the family moved away.

- The brutalist design and the underground parking garage were extremely dangerous. Several of my play friends ended up in the hospital with broken bones and concussions from falling off of things or getting clipped by cars.

A couple years ago I went back to see my old stomping grounds. Of course it was much smaller as an adult than as an 8 year old.

- All of the playgrounds had been removed.

- A fountain feature had also been removed.

- Many of the concrete planters had also been torn up.

- A high fence had been put up around the pool.

- Some of the "secret" entrances into weird structural parts of the underground garage had been fenced over.

- The walking path to the neighboring strip mall had been removed and replaced with another high-speed road (shrinking the safe play range).

- The path to neighboring neighborhood had been completely removed. Shrinking the range more.

There were other bits of "civilizing" that had occurred, but it seemed like a less interesting place overall.

I don't have any kids, but I'm mixed on allowing them the measure of freedom I had. There were many instances I can think of where we had gotten ourselves into real danger, and only by dumb luck did nobody get hurt. Parents who's kids did end up in the ER very quickly put restrictions on their kids. On the flip side, it was incredibly enriching to have my world be my playground. To see or know about a place I could walk or bike to, and simply go there without any interference.

However, these days, I lament that there's a bus stop outside of my house, that picks up high school kids, and takes them to a school a half-mile down the road. I would definitely let my kid walk to school instead.