Keeping track of school-aged kids

Twenty years ago, the rule in our house was, "Be home by the time the streetlights come on." During May and June, that time limit might be adjusted to reflect long days with school the next day, but otherwise it worked. My parents liked to know which friends I was with, and if I was at someone's house, they wanted to know whose. That was the extent of it. At the age of ten, I had the run of the neighbourhood within certain very loose limits. My younger sister, five years old at the time, had less freedom - she had to be taken to a friend's house by me or my mother, if the house in question was out of sight of the front porch.

Nowadays, kindergarten teachers frown on having older kids pick up younger ones; it should be an adult picking up children. Play dates are common, free play on the street is uncommon unless your friends happen to live very close - within calling distance of the front porch. Our kids are hemmed in also by the numerous after-school activities and organized sports we put them in. One of the results of all this is rising child obesity rates.

Today at church, a little girl, not quite five, was supposed to be sitting with one family. That's where her mother thought she was. The family lost track of her for a moment, and she went to sit with another family whom she occasionally sits with in church. The first family came back, found her gone, and panicked. There followed a ten-minute search through the entire church, during the praise-and-worship time, while her parents got more and more worried. Now, i think it was poorly handled. Someone should have interrupted the praise-and-worship long enough to ask the congregation if she was actually in the sanctuary, and then the whole search could have been avoided - as well as saving time if she wasn't there, knowing they needed to focus elsewhere. But it made me think about how I'm going to deal with Elizabeth's increasing independence.

We decided on the way home from church that, once she got to school age and provided she was at a school she could walk home from (we're not sure about that yet) we would expect her to come home before going anywhere else, to check in and get permission to go to someone else's house. If she had a particularly good friend whose house was a frequent destination, we could make arrangements so that she could go directly there but phone us the minute she got there to let us know where she was. Reasons for denying permission would include places she had to be within the next two hours, or concerns for her safety (for example, the other kid's parents weren't home but the older brother we didn't trust was supposed to be looking after them.) Us not liking the friend, on its own, is not a good enough reason; it's not our job to choose her friends for her.

Other thoughts on this one? What's the dividing line between reasonably protective, and smotheringly overprotective?