Back to the 80s

I get that it's becoming fashionable to yearn for kids having more freedoms of yesteryear, the latchkey generation, and so forth. But let me point out one thing: being of age now - that freedom meant a lot of young drug and alcohol use, and that stuff ruined a bunch of lives in different degrees. So you obviously have the deaths of despair - OD, suicide, etc - of which every one of my generation knows a few. But even separate from that, there are quite a few folks who spent time in prison, injured themselves in significant ways, had to get sober, or even didn't really hit their potential partially because of too much drug and alcohol use. Maybe there are some strong social benefits to this stuff, but we shouldn't dismiss all the downsides, and the fact that kids are drinking and using fewer drugs is probably, on net, a good thing.