One More Thought About My Old Neighborhood

[lydy]

 I was there in the early evening in late July, before school starts.  I saw no kids, not a one.  When I lived there, the street would have thronged with kids playing kickball, touch football, hide and seek, tag, or just rambling about solitary and climbing trees.  I know that this was 40 years ago, before video games...but no kids?   None at all?  On a spectacularly fine July evening, well before even the littles bedtime?  


ETA: Thanks for the additional information about both modern parenting and parenting in the time of COVID.  I feel...not better, exactly, but less sure that it meant anything.  

Comments

[kalmn]

Parents who would like to have their children not die of covid19 are not letting their kids outside to play with their friends. I expect that has something to do with it.

[lydy]

Ah, that is a good point. I'd've thought, what with that housing stock being old and central air looked to still be fairly rare, that there would still have been people sitting on their porches, and kids in the yard. But, maybe not. There also weren't abandoned balls, bicycles, or toys in front yards. But, well, I spent all of 30 minutes there, so who knows.

[mrissa]

Yeah, my mom's neighborhood is basically wall-to-wall kids in ordinary times, and we were there 2-8 p.m. on a partly cloudy Sunday (yesterday) with nary a kid to be seen.

[dewline]

I think my block in Orléans, eastern Ottawa, has maybe two families with a school-age batch of kids out and about regularly for play these days. They're living far enough apart from each other for that to be a Pandemic-safe proposition right now. Also, Google Earth/Maps reveals a lot of backyard pools, which is probably also good for a number of reasons right now.

[petrea_mitchell]

In my neighborhood the kids all seem to be confined to backyards except when going for family walks or bike rides. I'm grateful that I'm good at ignoring extraneous noises because if I work with a window open I hear somebody's kids splashing and shrieking in a wading pool all day.

[hobbitbabe]

So many variables.

Maybe you were part of a baby-boomish generation and a lot of kids lived in the neighbourhood then, whereas now maybe there are more ... oh, people in parts of their lives that don't involve kids of the visible ages ... you know, like groups of housemates living in rental houses, people whose kids have already left home, families with 0-1 kid instead of the 3-5 kids that was common when/where I was growing up.

Partly the way the neighbourhood responds to covid. Lots of times this spring I thought, wow, I see all these people on the sidewalks or in the park but I have no idea whether that is normal since I don't normally walk here. I saw almost no groups of same-size kids until about July, but I saw lots of family groups (kids of different genders and ages, one or two adults) playing games in the park or riding bikes together. Nowadays I often see unsupervised 2-3 kids riding scooters or bikes, but never anyone playing baseball or soccer with coaches. And no day-camp groups at all.

Also, all the structural and emotion-based changes of 40 years meaning that kids don't tend to spend as much unorganized/unsupervised time outdoors. Structural: they're signed up for summer daycare options and sports, partly because there's no parent at home during the day. Or their friends are, so the one family who gets to freerange doesn't have anyone to play with.

[mrissa]

The change in family size changes kid dynamics in a neighborhood a lot even aside from the other factors you're talking about (which I think are all true). In Brooklyn you were seeing loads of strollers, but unless you were in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood, you were probably not seeing very many families with four or five children. Being an only child was much rarer 40 years ago--it was very notable that I was one. It's one of the most common family structures now, and two kids is also incredibly common--I read an article this spring about the decline of the middle child as a thing. And my experiences were already of smaller default families than my mother's were a generation before. In the Baby Boom neighborhood where she grew up, quite often two families' worth of kids playing outside automatically meant enough to start up a baseball game. It never did for me, and it really doesn't for modern kids.

[hobbitbabe]

Oh! So thinking about the street where I grew up, the bigger families meant that even for the people who moved in later and had kids too young for me to play with, they meshed with my younger siblings - and the ones who had lived there from when the houses were new so that the parents were older, they might have youngest kids who were my age. And if that wasn't the case, none of us would have had same-block playmates, so maybe wouldn't have been rolling into the ditches or stalking the mail carrier to get free string or playing football in our front yard, the way we often did.

[catherineldf]

We live across from a playground, down the street from an ice cream shop and next door to several families with young 'uns - the kids are still out there, I promise!

[lydy]

I certainly see kids in my current neighborhood. Not as many, but, yeah. I think there was also a really strong contrast between my old neighborhood and Park Slope, where every fifth person on the street is a toddler, I swear. So many strollers!