I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress.

No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).