As long as they were home for lunch and dinner, they would have met all filial requirements.
The pay-off was an encyclopaedic knowledge of the best blackberry bushes, dirt tracks, long grass, climbing trees and steep hill sections within half a day's travel by foot.
Even when children stayed in their backyards the rules were different.
If, back then, a child were, for example, to burn down their parents' shed, requiring the Fire Service to battle its way through the neighbour's section to extinguish the flames sometime after midnight, a reasonably plausible story the following day about an attempt to build a model raft out of matchsticks would just about do the trick.
Little is left of that New Zealand, at least below about 1500m.
Certainly few of the sheds survived.
However, in a curious mimicry of climate change, pockets have survived above a certain altitude, perhaps driven there by a rising tide of paranoia, or maybe it is just that the cold means time moves more slowly.
An added advantage of the phenomenon is that there is snow.
One such oasis is Cardrona, a skifield a little more than half an hour's drive from Wanaka.
Spread over 320ha, the Cardrona skifield provides a neighbourhood playground par excellence.
Here, even parents rediscover some lost vestiges of their bulletproof childhood selves, throwing themselves down gullies with little regard for the consequences.
We need not concern ourselves here with recent reports that snow sports injuries cost the Accident Compensation Corporation more than $15 million last year, with treatment claims more than quadrupling since 2004, when the sport cost New Zealanders $3.7 million.
What point is a no-fault accident compensation scheme if you can't go skiing?Cardrona comes equipped with the full range of terrain (beginner 25%, intermediate 55%, advanced 20%), from that providing a reasonably gentle if inelegant collapse to areas where a full-blown snow-down-the-back-of-your-trousers wipeout is as simple as falling off a log.
On the gentle slopes those with recent hip replacements can get back into the groove alongside toddlers making the first of many falls.
There are intermediate sections where those who have mastered the art of spending most of the time upright can approach a modicum of style.
Then there are the advanced sections.
This year at Cardrona, these include the Heavy Metal Trail, which includes 11m, 14m, and 17m jumps.
These are designed to maximise air time while minimising some of the less helpful implications of the laws of gravity.
There is also a new 160m-long half-pipe with a wall height of 6.4m.
The wall height means it is not only a stunning sculptural installation guaranteed to make et al. and her mates from the Venice Biennale turn blue in the face, but also one of the few half-pipes around the world that conforms to the new Olympic 22ft specifications and the only one in the southern hemisphere built to this standard.
Its main purpose is to provide a boundary for parents' otherwise laissez-faire approach to the slopes.
"You can go wherever you like, but stay out of the half-pipe."
(This largely replaces the instruction of earlier times to be home for lunch.
Lunchtimes at all skifields are best avoided, as everyone else is trying to eat lunch then as well.
Have a big breakfast - porridge is best - and eat lunch at afternoon tea.)
There are several other admonishments parents often feel compelled to share when on the slopes.
These include: "Don't eat the snow".
Depending on the age of the children, this can be a complete waste of breath.
Snow looks delicious and tastes almost as good.
Another is: "Don't go too fast".
These words, or similar, are usually shared shortly after strapping long slippery planks to the child's feet.
It is an exercise in denial, which is of course an important parenting skill but has little to do with preservation.
It is more like small print.
Cardrona provides an even better out clause.
These are the four Kids' Centres - purpose-built centres catering for all ages, from 3 months to 14 years, which are regularly audited by the Education Review Office.
Skiwees (ski) and Lowriders (snowboard) are four-day development programmes for children that come complete with qualified instructors.
The instructors are the saints of Cardrona.
They are due to be canonised shortly for the miracle of maintaining their equanimity while teaching youngsters who are quite sure they are ready to become the next Simon Wi Rutene or Annelise Coberger overnight.
Perhaps best of all, the learners' slopes at Cardrona have Magic Carpet conveyor belt lifts for the little ones, turning on its head the convention of times past when most skifields' learners' areas were serviced by a rope tow designed by the Lord's Resistance Army to amputate below the elbow.
The Magic Carpets (there are two) simply require novices to stand on them.
For the more competent, Cardrona has this year installed a new $6 million chairlift at the Captain's Basin section of the field.
The high-speed detachable quad chairlift takes just three and a-half minutes to make its journey to the top, consigning to history long awkward lift conversations.
It is at the top of the chairlift that the genius of Cardrona is demonstrated most clearly.
They have built the skifield on top of a mountain (as opposed to those near sea level in the shopping malls of Kuwait).
From this point, you can take the Queenstown Return run (a gentle meander) around the back of the field to enjoy stunning views across snowy ranges to Lake Wakatipu.
It is breathtaking - the sort of view that makes you forget you have children, let alone bother with what they might be up to.
The oxygen up here is so rich and restorative that when, at the end of the day, your children tell you they stayed out of the half-pipe, you're even likely to believe them.
Tom McKinlay was assisted in his Cardrona holiday by the skifield.
