I always figured a big part of the "wah wah the world was better when I was ten and a child in the suburbs, everything was safe and economically peachy and the sky was full of cotton candy" tendency, at least among people of good faith, is that the world seemed better when you were ten because YOU WERE TEN and, in most middling/upper families, probably had no idea what your parents' worries and frets and economizations were. Life's lovely when all you have to do is deal with school and add to your lifetime sheaf of skills and contacts; not so much when you have to handle a mortgage and employment and managing an entire family's health, wealth, and welfare.

Also, the postwar suburban environment was designed ground-up out of greenfields to support the raising of children, and worked great for a while (until its insupportability caught up with it; see also all the dead strip malls in the near-ring suburbs of most US metropolises). Lots of uncounted externalities went into making their childhoods more effortless.