I am Gen X and our parents plunked us in front of the TV however there were only 3 channels that often had nothing of interest to kids on. But they also kicked us out of the house all day so we had to find other kids to play with and negotiate with, so got more exercise, had adventures without adults managing every minute of our time. We walked to school by ourselves, no buses picking us up at the door. But the parents didn’t really spend more time with us because they were working… sometimes more than one job and daycare did not exist. Now if you did that as a parent, you would get CPS called on you. Also GenX parents went hard the other way being helicopter parents. I was more of a free range parent so had to find other ones to find kids for my son to do things with like ride bikes to the park or drop off to the movies. There has to be a happy medium.
My 7 year old great niece has already learned how to disable the parental controls on her tablet.