My parents were mostly free-range. (Pretty much in the summer, as long as I did chores, I could range up to 15 miles from my home easily riding my bike around, and they never knew where I was since I never knew where I was going.) This was long before the internet, but pretty much I could explore whatever I wanted to explore topically... except when they happened to stumble across something they didn't like. Like when I bought a paperback adaptation of the movie "Alien" and my mom must have seen the "In space no one can hear you scream" tagline and took it from me.
But I read lots of scifi and played D&D and watched whatever movies my friends could get on their better antennas and the few who had cable... and then whenever VHS finally became big and you could rent movies. (Yeah, it was the dark ages, most of my childhood we didn't have that.)
But my parents were hard in other ways. My mom was more positive, my dad more authoritative, but I was expected to be on good behavior in public, I was expected to get straight A's, and I was pushed into various musical programs... piano, band instruments, choir. I mean, I liked those things, but they also pushed me in those directions. (My dad was a music teacher for part of my childhood.) They had a lot of expectations for me, my father in particular (and he wasn't forgiving or understanding); where they were free range was in what I could do in my spare time once I was up to par with my extracurriculars and my music and what things I could read/watch... pretty much anything, I never told them and they never asked. They also had a curfew for me, as well as rules for when I was with members of the opposite sex. My father also did not show much trust for me; if I ever got caught doing anything wrong, he would use that a way to vindicate his mistrust, and if I was ever in a situation, he was always of the attitude that I must have done something to deserve it or instigate it... which was really frustrating. It was mainly because he was a hellion when he was young (I won't go into some of the crazy shit he got into, and I assume there's lots I never learned about), so he assumed his children were just like him, which wasn't true at all.