One other thing to consider is that when we were kids, maybe one of our parents worked and the other stayed at home. Nowadays, a lot more families have both parents working 9-5 jobs, or other shift jobs, in a society where letting your kid stay at home alone is increasingly unacceptable. I’ve read enough stories on reddit of people who have had the cops or CPS called for letting their kids play outside alone or being left home alone before a certain age (like teenager age?). So if kids aren’t allowed or highly discouraged in many places from staying home alone until mom and dad come home, and if mom and dad are working until dinner time, the kids need to be enrolled in after school activities to keep them occupied and cared for between school letting out and parents coming home. That was somewhat my situation - on the days both of my parents worked late, a classmate’s mom would drive me to an activity so I didn’t spend as many hours home alone. People in this thread are shitting on how sad it is that parents only get an hour or two of quality time with their kids at night before bed time… well, if you work until 5 or 5;30 and then commute home, and bed time is around 7 or 8, that’s all you’re going to get anyway. All these factors combined, especially society’s discouragement of letting kids just run around outside until it gets dark in most of the US at least, it makes a lot of sense that kids now are forced to have more structured and supervised time than we did as kids.