Indeed. It's strange to me that people try to do things any other way. At the start, you have a tiny person who has no idea how to function in the world and is entirely dependent on others. Somewhere around two decades later, you have someone who needs to be ready to go out into the world on their own and operate independently. How else could you possibly get them from one to the other effectively if not by introducing more freedom and more responsibility over time as they become mature enough to handle them?

Probably the biggest complaint when I've spoken about childhoods with friends of my own generation, and the thing we pretty much all agree we want to avoid with our own generation of children, is strict and arbitrary-seeming rules that remain in place for far too long. Obviously no five-year-old is ready to make their own fully informed decisions about everything. But a fifteen-year-old? Hopefully by then they'll be making most decisions for themselves and relying on their parents more as advisers and a safety net than as figures of authority.