Our experience of Seattle, conservative hotbed that it is, is that everything is as described in the article. We've been discussing moving somewhere else for this exact reason. Doesn't matter if we would let our kid out if there's no one to play with.

Live in the Carolinas. All of the neighborhood kids play together outside every afternoon. The teenagers are all too busy to loiter around because they're so involved in sports.

This is why we moved to the Netherlands. It’s great. Some kids even bike themselves to and from daycare.

Maybe it's yet another Berkeley bubble. Kids' independence is pretty much taken for granted here. Nobody would bat an eye at a 10-year-old wandering around in the grocery store. There's a playground at the marina that is built by and continually remodeled by children (there is some overall supervision there of course).

Reporting from the conservative stronghold of the inner DC suburbs, kids are generally not allowed to wander unsupervised until they are in high school.

In my experience, kids have very little unscheduled/unsupervised time in more liberal areas, but I think that has little to nothing to do with political leanings and much more to do with parental expectations and availability of disposable income and leisure time.

Maybe you should try viewing things outside of a political lens, especially one where the other side is unexplainably but unquestionably wrong by default, and see how things look.

Over parenting and hyper-paranoia are liberal traits in my experience.

Well, I haven't observed that. Research this century has tended to suggest that conservatism is associated with physiological hyper-fixation on negative stimuli. E.g. Carraro L, Castelli L, Macchiella C. The automatic conservative: ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced information. PLoS One. 2011

It might be a correlation to city size. Big cities in the US skew overwhelmingly liberal/left, and big cities are the place where trust between strangers, neighbors etc. tends to be very low.

People probably feel safer to let their kids go outside if the local drug-and-homeless community is small or nonexistent.

I see it as less political, more "crunchy" vs standard- it's just that recently the crunchy crowd has shifted conservative as opposed to liberal.

Yep. It's the liberals who are taking over school boards to restrict book access because their precious little snowflakes might learn something outside the strict bounds of what they are allowed to know and understand. Could you imagine the absolute travesty it would be if little Billy knew that gay people existed and were actually just people?! Preposterous!

I think it might be less about left/right and more about suburban and car culture vs. urban or rural. People living in the suburbs tend to drive everywhere anyway and perceive things outside of the car as dangerous.

I feel like the two things are in a causal loop.