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Shephard 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.
But why? I thought crime rates in America had actually declined significantly since 20-25 years ago. If so, then why would it be more unacceptable today to let children play free than it was twenty years ago; has irrational helicopter parenting grown for other reasons, e.g. status competitions, with no correlation to actual danger levels? (Or is there something subtle I am missing, for example has violence declined in ghettos/low-class areas but the middle and upper areas we are talking about are less safe?)
News media has improved. Once, abductions in small towns were news in that town (and nowhere else) - now it is possible for the abduction to be news everywhere. Without calibration for the change in availability of information, the obvious response is to believe that we are not safer.
Additionally, there have been changes in societies attitudes towards certain crimes. Increasing beliefs that certain crimes were bad (DUI, domestic violence, various sex crimes) has led to increased reporting of those crimes and stronger reaction to those crimes when they are reported in the media. This exacerbates the availability bias discussed above.