In my opinion, "running around unsupervised" is necessary for healthy normal human development. A child should develop the ability to bike around the neighborhood and fall off the bike and get skinned up but still walk the bike back home, bruised and bleeding. A child should be able to wander into the woods and get lost and be forced by their own wits to find their way home. That's how you develop intellect and independence and ability to function. That's how you keep from being 30 years old and not being able to leave mom and dad's home because you frankly aren't capable of anything independent as many in this last generation has proved to be.
So that's why, in my generation and all generations before this, kids were allowed to pedal off on their bikes or wander off on foot for adventures. It's necessary to develop a child into an independent individual.
That has nothing to do with this case, where a child was missing in the morning when everyone got up and it wasn't until dark that anyone at all looked for her. That's a family in chaos and nothing to do with having children able to flex their freedom muscles and pedal around the area or walk and exercise their own independence for awhile.
