Where do the children play?

Yeah well, we have one kid, and we're too old to have another. He's the only grandchild on both sides of the family. He has no cousins, first or second. That's apparently the new normal in many countries.

Of course he's going to live a sheltered life!

It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids.

I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.

Does that make it sad that it's not like that any more?

Maybe. Maybe not.

If you want to change it, recognise that first, society and our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids. Then, then you'd have to figure out what to do about the excess population: unsustainable exponential growth or mass child deaths. You choose!