It's also such a recursive problem - there aren't enough kids, so your kids don't have enough kids to play with, so you don't have more kids

I remember almost never sitting inside my house after school. I had two elder siblings and we had probably 30 odd kids in my locality. We would all be out all the time. Safety wasn't an issue because there were some older kids in the group too who could be counted on to keep things in line

Now my daughter has just 3-5 kids of her age in my locality, and because they don't have any older siblings, they always have to be accompanied by adults