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Nornagest comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong
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Twenty years ago was still a very different time in this regard. (Anecdotally, I notice that people who are in their mid-twenties and older have childhood memories very different from what is considered acceptable nowadays, both informally and legally.) See the "Free Range Kids" blog for numerous stories illustrating the modern mentality and jurisprudence about leaving kids alone and unsupervised.
In any case, even if you can still find some occasional examples of people allowing unsupervised play in some situations, it's definitely unacceptable to simply send the kids out and tell them to be back for dinner, the way it was normally done some decades ago.
That's... seriously counterintuitive to me. I'm certainly not deeply embedded in parenting culture, and my childhood memories date to the early 1990s as well as being unusual in some ways, but I'm skeptical of drawing strong conclusions from an advocacy site. What else are you basing this on?
I would just ask my relatives about parenting standards, but unfortunately they're divided between having very young and adult children. And that's a pretty small and biased sample anyway.
Just common everyday observation of people's attitudes. (I'm not a partisan of the FRK approach; in fact, I have no kids as of yet, and I'm still not quite sure what to think about it.)
One piece of evidence in support: The local Children's Museum does not allow adults to enter if they are not with a child. The adult:child ratio is approximately 1:1.5. Further, I've never been more than ten feet from my son when visiting - and I estimate I'm within one standard deviation of the norm (it's hard to tell, in part because children from 2-8 are there, and the distance-to-child norm varies naturally by age) In short, there is no reasonable likelihood of stranger abduction.
Yet the policy is in place - a response to fear mongering, as far as I can tell.