The majority of the world raises their children in densely populated and compact cities. It’s not about partying, it’s about social exposure.
I grew up in a dense city outside the US, and even as a not-particularly-social child, I still had plenty of friends I played with and hung out with, and also had tons of interaction with adults. Meanwhile I’ve seen my cousins grow up in suburbs over the past 10 years, and they interact with maybe 3 non-family members outside of school, because everything is like a 15 minute walk away through winding suburb streets. That kind of isolation is not healthy at all.
At least in NYC, growing up, there were always playgrounds and parks full of kids. And I could go there by myself and meet my friends there. If we got bored of the nearby park we could always go use public transportation and go to a different one. And when I got older I could go to restaurants by myself, or go to museums and shows by myself, etc.
There isn't that much within safe walking distance of a suburban home. Especially now that anchor tenants and the attached malls are starting to thin out. Anecdotally when I went to college, the kids from the suburbs definitely drank and did drugs much more heavily, and I suspect it was because that's all there's left to do if you get bored of video games and whatever little is actually at your fingertips.
Sounds like some paranoid parenting that seems to be in style right now. In Tokyo kids take the subway by themselves as young as age 9. In denser cities the density helps in that other people help socialize/watch your kids and they can bike around to their friends place when they are older. As someone who grew up in a denser area, then moved to a sprawly suburb where you were dependent on your parents for getting you around, and lack of public space made activities revolve around consumerism, I greatly preferred the dense area.
We raised our daughter from 0-5 in big cities, and there is definitely a huge appeal to that. But on the flip side, kids don’t need to “go anywhere.” They just need other kids around. When I grew up, we just roamed the neighborhood causing trouble. That element is missing in most cities today. You can’t just count on having a mess of kids on your block. Parents are the minority, so they have to more consciously get together and schedule activities with other parents.
Absolutely, and America has double problem where denser neighborhoods are seen as unsafe due to crime. And less dense neighborhoods means kids can’t go anywhere without having an adult drive them.
This is insane... High density living provides a whole childhood of activities, both formal and informal.
I grew up in a midsized city, when I was a kid I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere I wanted to go without really any notable restrictions, including parks with sandpits. My parents kept a draw full of bus schedules. The best part is there were literally kids everywhere, so you were never lonely even if you left the house alone. We'd organize pick-up games of soccer or baseball or kickball, etc. I even went ice skating by myself. Sometimes I'd just walk outside during the summer just to see which of the "neighborhood kids" were out. I'd spend hours just exploring the city on foot or bike, so much so that I'd come home with sore legs. All snow storms were followed by sledding in the park. I spent very little time with my parents.
When we got older it was mall and movies, record stores, arcades.
We also had a back yard, shared between six families.
Sometimes my parents would even send me on errands for them.
I had an after school job starting at 16 and I'd never be able to if I had to be driven there, my dad was always home, but without a car. I'd take the bus there.
I was rarely home, it was amazing.
Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas where the only way to get anywhere is a parent driving a kid somewhere. Sounds stifling. My parents would never shuffle me around everywhere. (In fact, I didn't even care for it as an adult, sometimes I just wanted to go for a walk! But leaving required a car, no sidewalks, traffic much too fast for a bike)
I live in an urbanized suburb (SFH, but 5 miles from a city core) and kids are out all the time. We have a few helicopter parents that feel the need to monitor their kids constantly, but for the most part, the parks, buses, restaurants, convenience stores, etc are all full of kids/teens. They don't even really cause trouble either. You'd think a group of teenage boys would be assholes, but nope, they just kind of mind their own business.
Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.
I don't see how much different this is from suburbia, but with even more car intermediated isolation from other people? I hated suburbia as a child, since you were stuck in the house and needed your parents to get you to anywhere.
With rural areas the isolation is even larger if your on a farm that is miles away from any other human beings. You have a nearby forest to explore, but that isn't exclusive to rural areas.
I think what your complaining about is culture, and you're conflating it with the form of housing. It's how you can't let kids go out and find other kids to play with in the local neighborhood like you could in the 70s or earlier because it's illegal and enforced quickly.
I wonder if there's an urban/suburban/rural or political divide when it comes to this.
I live in a suburb in California and have never ran into this problem. But we're also unincorporated and don't have cops with nothing better to do than harass some kid walking to school alone.
We're also surrounded by people whose kids are now in their 20s-30s. They don't see our kids running around as a nuisance - they're relatively new empty nesters and the kids seem to evoke nostalgia as they discuss the different things their kids did around the neighborhood when they were young.
Interesting. From when I was 10 to adulthood, I grew up in a super-block style situation in a massive metropolis. Large apartment blocks with a big courtyard area in the middle (a few soccer fields in size). The things I miss from my childhood which it is apparent I won't be able to do here in the Bay Area in America are:
- unsupervised play
- mixed age un-chaperoned interaction
- have my children be raised by a village
I find most people's American suburban life is sort of an isolated existence. People have 3 or 4 people they know on the block. For us, there were numerous homes we could stop by as kids, and we were susceptible to policing from all adults in the vicinity. It was a real community experience - not isolated encounters here and there.
This is the inevitable conclusions of stranger danger and car-based suburbanization.
When people only access the world via car and avoid walking around, they never build familiarity with their own neighborhood. All locations worth stepping out of the car for, are miles away and behind security gates. Low density also means that 1 stranger can actually do damage, unlike dense areas where there are at least a few strangers within earshot.
Suburbanization inevitably caused stranger danger. Once public trust was eroded, only known parents could be trusted to supervise children. The coldness towards strangers goes both ways. 'Strange children' near you were seen as something between an annoyance and a liability. With multi-income households, the only location where children were safe and tolerated, was friends houses or ones with paid strict supervision. So, the kids retreated into indoor activities or found themselves at mandatory hobbies, a term that sounds dystopian even as I type it out.
Social media has virally encroached into every aspect of these children's lives. But, lets not pretend that North American society didn't lay down ground work, fertilizer and all, for this travesty to take place.
People are the river and built infrastructure is the path of least resistance. Once built, the river will meander down that path, irrespective of human effort to affect outcomes counter to the built infrastructure.
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I grew up in a dense Asian city famous for a culture of 'leaving you alone = independence' (in comparison to the rest of the nation). Even then, I knew the faces of every small store owner within 5 minutes of my house and vice-verse, and that's because I walked by them everyday. When everyone leaves home from the same door (the building exit) and walks back in through the same door, you inevitably have small talk and get to know your neighbors.
The public ground was nearby, so all parents would swing by to check-in on kids as they passed by during the day. This meant that the older kids were familiar and parents felt confident in leaving their younger children under their supervision, in return for complete freedom in terms of how the kids spent their time.
North America has no thirds spaces, thinning mom-n-pops stores and a lack of public shared spaces. North America seems to have completely forgotten that it takes a village to raise a child.
My daughter is an only child but has eight cousins (that I know of, most are in her age range) but barely spends time with them. She's not missing out on anything because she has a large circle of friends her age, be it from the public playground when they only started walking, kindergarden or now the first three years in school. It takes some effort as a parent and tbh dumping-the-child-at-her-friends-and-vice-versa but she's got a much better social life than I had at her age and she'll continue that even though she'll move 4hrs away to the country-side this summer. Her best friend actually moved away two years ago, we still make sure they meet up and have sleep-overs and such.
Lots of people here write about the number of cousins, but those are often of a different age, it was the same with my two cousins. Also missing from the article: Kids being pushed into extra-curricula after school, be it soccer or music, those might not necessarily lead to friendships? Lastly, our environment has changed a lot. It's just not safe to let kids run wild outside with all those cars. The number of kids killed by cars didn't sink over the past 40 years because cars got safe, it sunk because kids get basically locked in. In my city (in Austria) we have quite a lot of older and newer building complexes where cars are kept outside, those are much better for kids.
When I was young I lived in a semi-urban area (circa 1990-1996). From about second grade on, I was free to roam to neighborhood, and I did. I spent most of my time playing unsupervised with neighborhood kids, walking to the comic book shop, the book store, the convenience store, the hobby shop, the pool, the playgrounds, the parks, and so on. I never once had any kind of issue.
I wish I could give my kids the same experience, but sadly I live in a much less dense area these days, and there is nothing within a mile or so for them to really do, and no friends. It’s sad.
Have you ever seen a kid under 14 without parents in New York City—whose parents are in an economic class where they could afford to live in the suburbs if they wanted? I certainly haven’t.
It’s a class/culture issue rather than an urban planning issue. I grew up in a car-dependent suburb in the 1990s, and in the summer I used to spend all day roving around the neighborhood with the neighbor kids. Kids in the same suburb don’t do that today, because parents are more protective, kids are glued to screens, etc.
I grew up in a typical suburban-style neighborhood (a few meandering roads with a lot of cul-de-sacs branching off and some connecting streets, quarter-acre lots, three-to-five bedroom ranches, two-stories, or bi-levels mostly spec-built). There was a park of about one square block, and a gas station at one of the neighborhood entrances. We rode bikes around, got soda or candy at the gas station, played in friends yards or at the park or at driveway basketball goals, nothing super exciting but kids find ways to entertain themselves. They don't need a bunch of "destinations" like adults do. This was all pre-computer, and there was nothing interesting to a kid on TV during the day.
Kids just need unstructured time with other kids, they will make up something to do. It's not really an intrisic problem with suburbia, it's a problem with hovering, overprotective adults.
I'm talking mostly about kids 8-14 or so. Older teens will get more bored and mischevious. Fortunately by that age there's more stuff they can be involved in at school or they can get a job.
I've never bought the "kid-friendly" argument. Kids grow up in cities in the US and around the world, safely and effectively. Do you have statistical evidence to the contrary? If I were to guess, it's not about being "kid-friendly", it's about being "parent-easy".
And kids, in my experience, hate suburbia, especially as they get into early teens and want some independence. It's like living in a giant protective bubble where there's nowhere to go and nothing to do, without having to have someone's parents cart you around.
I agree with most points, except for the urbanization part. I don't know if you refer specifically to the US or a general human behavior. But in Asia, children still go home by themselves, play by themselves and stay at home by themselves. The cities in Asia are much more dense than in the US.
It’s not isolationism, that’s been around forever and this fear for kids thing is more recent.
I’d argue it has a lot to do with the increasingly far-flung suburban housing that most people live in, and how dangerous the roads are.
1. Parents don’t want their kids getting hit by cars.
2. As they get older parents let them walk around the neighborhood —— but there’s nothing there except boring locked houses and front yards that, if you try to play in, you’ll get yelled at or worse.
3. The sprawl means even in these burbs there often aren’t many other kids around.
This terrible sprawl creates the reality that if you want your kids to get to hang out with other kids, or go to school, or go to a friends house, or do ANYTHING, you have to drive them there. And that’s such a time suck it’s not realistic to do all the time. Thus the helicopter parenting shuttling kids from one activity to another and then when exhausted saying “just watch Netflix.”
Yeah, American cities are actively hostile to young families. It doesn’t have to be this way. I lived in Japan for several years and it seems like a much healthier urban environment for children and their parents. But in the US, it’s hard to justify in most cases the cons of living in dense urban area with young kids, even if you as an adult would enjoy it more.
Agreed. in suburbs, cul-de-sac neighborhoods and such, you'll still see kids, but only within that fishbowl. It's the core areas where kids are gone. Traffic is also much nastier there. lots of intersections, vagrants skulking around, more through traffic .. much more of an antisocial vibe in general, hard to put your finger on. I think that's why the difference with europe is so stark. You go visit, and you'll be in the center of some beautiful car free wonderland, and there's kids just hanging around and playing, and sharing that space with everybody else. In the usa, kids only roam free in secluded pockets, far away from the "real" city. And, conversely, they're the only ones out too, maybe some seniors doing their post linner dog walk.
Sad stuff, the collapse of the public realm. Compound living is the only thing we can manage still.
I grew up in a dense city outside the US, and even as a not-particularly-social child, I still had plenty of friends I played with and hung out with, and also had tons of interaction with adults. Meanwhile I’ve seen my cousins grow up in suburbs over the past 10 years, and they interact with maybe 3 non-family members outside of school, because everything is like a 15 minute walk away through winding suburb streets. That kind of isolation is not healthy at all.
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