There were tons of cars in the 80s and 90s and playing in the street was still very normal. You'd simply move out of the way when a car was coming. You taught your kids that the streets weren't safe, since streets are made for cars to drive over and not for kids to play in and didn't let them do that until they could do it relatively safely.
We see posts here about someone calling the cops on the neighbor kids over and over for simply being outside. That's the dot to connect. It's a societal change toward being batshit crazy, whether helicopter parents who must oversee every moment of their children's lives to make sure they're as safe as possible or obsessively controlling neighbors who think that's the proper way to parent and that any time they see anyone under 18 without a parent they decide it must be child abandonment, or abuse, or runaways, or roving gangs of criminal kids and call the cops over it.
In a lot of places in the US cops will now ask groups of kids why they're playing at a park. Kid's aren't going outside because no one will leave them alone to be kids outside.