What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street

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Having lived in various different places - dense city, suburban town, more rural town, for us it all came down to the city planning, far more than any other factor.

Living in a small but dense NJ town with close town-houses and good sidewalks our kids were free to walk to the neighbors and they knew all the kids on the street. Our neighbours actually positioned kids toys on all the front lawns when selling their house to emphasize the child friendliness of the area.

Because the houses were close - feet between them, with many per block, the density meant every block had plenty of kids, and the walks were short enough to let them out. Smaller city streets kept cars slower too. But being a smaller town the only people around were neighbors keeping everyone feeling safe.

Cities have a density that stops parents wanting to let their kids out - think midtown Manhattan - just too much going on to let a younger child run free.

Conversely, living in more rural CT the house plots are so big it's a schlep to a neighbors, and there are no sidewalks. There are far fewer kids in walking distance because of the plot sizes. Without sidewalks and bigger distances the cars travel far faster too. There's always an F250 traveling 50 in a 25 ready to mow down a whole family without noticing it.

Given a little freedom our kids could easily walk to their neighbours, to the local school to play soccer in the school yard, or on the playground, and they'd meet so many more kids, even relatively young.

Towns need to be designed to be social - older towns are far better for this, the pre-car ones. Find a smaller town build before 1900 and it'll be great to raise a family in.

As a person who prefers walking/biking and also a parent the issue for me is all of the American infrastructure is not designed to be comfortable outside of a car.

I know the about pedestrian deaths declining, etc. I ride my bike for utility 1,000+ miles a year with both kids. It feels like I am going to war just getting groceries, going to the library or doing school. The statistics may not reflect it but my perception is with huge cars and trends in road designs everything _feels_ unsafe and uncomfortable.

Some concrete examples: I regularly encounter drivers rolling through stop signs in F150 trucks not seeing my HUGE cargo bike with a flag and every fluorescent color. I encounter broken crossing buttons at least once a month requiring detours or dangerous crossings. The best routes to not interact with cars are completely barren trails built under electrical transmission infrastructure- in the summer they are brutally hot due to lack of any shade cover. It all just feels bad.

To the articles point though I have met some good people and created some excellent experiences by not using a car. And I work hard to design my life around not needing to use a car. But, our defaults really stink and a lot of it comes down to a lack of human design factors.

This summarizes my feelings well: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/28/if-we-want-a-s...

I am all for walkable neighbourhoods, places where people feel welcome on the streets. Yet there is also the question of: how do we achieve that goal? As the article mentions, there is more to it than eliminating the car. Social structures must be rebuilt. There need to be places where children can seek safety (a friend's house, a store). Adults need to keep an eye on children, even if they are unfamiliar children, to protect them from harm. It's not just the "stranger danger" category that matters here. Kids can be miscreants too.

As much as I agree with people talk about children's lives being too structured, I also fear that too many people take things to the opposite extreme. Structure provides learning opportunities for children. They learn new games. They learn how to interact socially. Sure, that can be done without structure. Sometimes with very undesirable outcomes.

Reigning in cars and structure may provide room for social change, but they are not enough on their own. We also need a framework to facilitate that social change, rather than hoping it will magically happen.

When I was young we lived in a cul-de-sac and after schools, and during the school holidays, children were a permanent fixture out in the street, kicking a ball around or riding their bicycles. There were no closures to cars and the drivers and kids were just cautious of each other. Now I’m the parent and we live in a very similar cul-de-sac there are never any children playing outside. I’d be quite happy for my son to play out in the street, but given there’s nobody out there, it’s understandably not very appealing for him. I don’t think the issue (here at least) is the vehicles, I think it’s a combination of the “stranger danger” mentioned in the article making parents afraid of letting their children out unsupervised and that other thing we all struggle with: screens. When I was a child there was far less to keep you entertained indoors. Now, with phones, games consoles and the internet, the options are endless. The lack of children playing outdoors is something my wife and I frequently lament, but I think the screens shoulder more of the blame than the cars.

In the suburbs kids never stopped playing in the street.

This article is written by someone who lives in a city.

"In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups." - but this isn't true in a suburb.

I've really started to notice who all the articles complaining about cars are written by people who only know what cities are like.

Move to a suburb - it's much nicer, and you'll barely see any cars.

Cars are not the problem it's fearful parents.

When I grew up there were all cars on the streets, and before cars there were horse and carts which had their own dangers. Over the last 150 years the distance that parents have allowed their children to roam has gradually diminished from many miles to essentially be the other room.

I feel this is more a product of our risk obsessed society, everything is about analysing and taking action to reduce risk. You can hear it everywhere, risk reduction, risk based analysis etc.

Edit: and in the interest of full disclosure I'm a father of 3 and know exactly how hard this is. I can't imagine me being comfortable with what I got up to as a child and that's the tragedy.

Well... I see nearly NO KIDS walking around in dense cities, however I see many kids walking around here, in the Alps, where we all live with cars.

So well, no, there is no kids-friendly cities. We are social animals born in nature, cities are as more anti-social as more dense they are, as more alien as more dense they are. It's even worse for teenagers who going around only to consume services in cities because there is essentially nothing else to do. While in nature there are many activities to do without any specific service needs like climbing, riding horses, going out MTB, going sailing/phishing/rafting, skiing and so on.

In dense cities there are too many social issues to have kids playing around, in low density areas there are countless less. So no, as a European having lived most of the life in dense area, not designed for cars, we lost NATURE there, not because of cars but because of density.

The social city WAS the old small village few km long/large with nature around. There is no possible modern social city.

I grew up 2 miles and +300 ft outside of a small city in the 1960s. My near family has 6 acres. There was hundreds of undeveloped land that ended in a state park on one side and a New England dairy farm on the other. My parents rarely drove us around; it was bike or walk.

I wonder what we lost when children stopped hanging out on dairy farms, hiking to an abandoned quarry, hill-topping, sitting in a tree house 30 feet up in a big old pine, discovering edible fruit in abandoned orchards, skinny dipping in a local reservoir, blueberry picking, and sneaking smokes under the powerlines.

There were many things that were not good about growing up at the time, biases, and actions that I grew out of, even if my peers did not, but I do miss the woods.

I live on a cul-de-sac and its great. Kids can play in the street, no concerns with getting run over. It really does make life easier.

Folks should really stop to watch this great video on School Streets in Paris and how making streets surrounding schools can make for a great, fun, safe environment for kids to thrive.

See here on Streetfilms: https://youtu.be/ezPzocuqKPc?si=cb7PGXsS_LDAQb1b

A lot of urban problems can be charged 100% on cars, not this one. Cars are nothing new in America, and even on gated communites with traffic patterns not different from what they were 40 years ago, this dynamic has changed a lot.

The cult of safety and media induced paranoia and fear probably are far more important to explain this. Blaming cars for that is actually a symptom of the role the media fear mongers played on fucking our lives.

One other way that cars are affecting childhood is that car seat requirements keep getting stricter and stricter.

It used to be that parents would offer to run carpools to take kids home from activities. Or if you had a sleepover your friends parents would drive you to a movie.

But now that it’s not unheard of for kids to use car seats until they start middle school, it basically requires that one of THEIR parents show up for pickup and drop off.

This increases the level of necessary parental involvement needed and gets rid of one little way that kids learned to interact with other adults and families.

The real problem is screens of all sorts: gaming and cellphones.

Most kids have unlimited access to internet so it's video games and porn for boys and social and games for girls.

The roads and curbs didn't change here, but the amount of time outside definitely did.

Cars are man's only predator. They deny us the outside.

It's the cars right? Not the speeding driver behind the wheel. Not the person driving home buzzed from the brewery. Or the person on their phone while driving. It's those pesky damn cars.

Our culture not only makes too many excuses for reckless drivers, it actively encourages them.

That said, our neighborhood has kids playing in the street all the time. But we are fortunate enough to be secluded from the major roads (even though there are plenty of roads).

I for one am glad kids don't play in the street any more, I'd hate to have to hear all that noise constantly. Backyards with high fences are much better - they can still play outside if they want to but the noise is far more isolated.