Neighborhoods that Nurture: Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone

It's easier to create “play-based childhoods” if we can simultaneously create vibrant “community-based childhoods” to support them.

Introduction from Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:

On Monday, reposting his recent Boston Globe essay, Zach extended the narrative of The Anxious Generation back a generation to the mid-1960s, when neighborhood-based communities began to decline. This was part of a larger process of societal “atomization.” Driven by new technologies (e.g., cars, television, air conditioning) and other societal trends (e.g., suburbanization, the decline in neighborhood schools, the decline of religious life), people began to spend a lot more time alone or with just their nuclear families, in their homes and cars. They saw their neighbors less and therefore came to know them and rely upon them less. That set the stage for Act II of The Anxious Generation: The Loss of the Play-Based Childhood.

Zach began his post with the story of Seth Kaplan, an author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University who traveled to 75 different countries before deciding to plant himself and his family in an Orthodox Jewish community in Maryland. Today, we hear from Kaplan himself, a leading expert on strengthening social cohesion at the national level and communal strength at the local level. 

Kaplan expands on Zach’s earlier piece and offers concrete suggestions for reviving the play-based childhood in 21st-century America. He is the author of multiple books, including most recently, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (2023). (A Q&A about the book here)

Kaplan’s work is important for understanding the decline of community and, ultimately, the rise of adolescent mental illness, which is greater in weaker communities. He is helping us think more critically and creatively about how to revive local communities, from neighborhood schools to redesigned libraries to backyard camps.

Kaplan has shown us that it will be much easier to create “play-based childhoods” if we can simultaneously create vibrant “community-based childhoods” to support them. 

— Zach and Jon

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The Anxious Generation has successfully alerted parents and policymakers to the risks of a phone-saturated childhood. The research of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues is inestimably helpful for limiting smartphones for children and school environments. But if we’re going to delay and reduce screen time, we need to give kids something in exchange, and only one of the four norms Jon recommends is focused on promoting play-based options for children. This norm is not getting enough attention. As Jon writes, “If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.”

This fourth norm is likely not getting enough attention because it can feel impossible to solve. How exactly can we promote play-based alternatives and a positive vision for childhood in the 21st century? Just as there is a collective action problem with limiting the use of technology, there is one with promoting play, too. That’s because unsupervised outdoor play also requires collective norms and cooperation.

It is very hard for families to change norms in isolation. “Let Grow,” an organization Jon helped start, has focused on schools as a possible solution, positing that schools can encourage more independent play if they can be convinced it will help students develop. But independent play brings risks. Administrators and teachers have an incentive to keep kids in tightly-controlled environments; bad publicity or lawsuits may result when a kid is injured at school. Similarly, a school district may face backlash for incidents during extracurricular programs it promotes.

At home on the city block, parents who encourage their kids to have unsupervised fun face resistance from many directions. My wife is regularly castigated for leaving our kids in the car while she runs into a store. A neighbor told me that her 11-year-old was denied access to the rides at a nearby public park because he was unsupervised. And a friend recently told me that she worries about “stranger anxiety” when out with her kids in public spaces. She adds, “I am not concerned an adult would kidnap or harm my children. I am anxious someone will report me to the police if my kids appear to be out of my sight.” She feels she has to constantly look over her shoulder to ensure a bystander won’t reprimand or report her for letting her children wander about.

It’s worth noting that many of our current “caution and control” norms were established long before smartphones—laying the conditions for screens to take over childhoods. Kids used to play in the streets, wander neighborhoods, visit classmates, stop at stores, and gain daily life experience in the community. Changes in everything from cars to careers to churches to schools to the built environment to shopping patterns had largely emptied streets of children by the 1990s. With fewer adults around the neighborhood and with those who were left feeling little obligation to keep an eye on their neighbors’ children, parents were already instructing kids to come straight home once school got out rather than hang around the streets or parks, unsupervised.

In 1995, Alan Ehrenhalt wrote a book on three Chicago neighborhoods called The Lost City, observing:

In the 1950s they [residents] considered the streets to be their home, an extension of their property, whereas today [1995] the streets are, for many people, an alien place. A block is not really a community in this neighborhood anymore. Only a house is a community, a tiny outpost dependent on television and air-conditioning, and accessible to other such outposts, even the nearest ones, almost exclusively by automobile.

When we talk about the decline of neighborhoods, we mostly think about it from an economic perspective—places where residents have little money,  houses are mostly dilapidated, and streets unsafe. But there has been a far larger decline of neighborhoods that has little to do with material conditions. We are less likely to have personal connections with neighbors on our street, teachers in our kids’ schools, our local pastor or rabbi, or leaders in our community. Classmates don’t visit each other’s homes as much as they used to. In many neighborhoods, we don’t even have sidewalks, and there are no places or activities where we can develop relationships spontaneously. As a result, many kids may have hundreds of shallow online relationships but no real friends within walking distance.

More broadly, as documented by Robert Putnam, Theda Skocpol, and others, we have seen a great decline in place-based parent groups, mutual aid societies, ethnic clubs, civic organizations, religious congregations, and volunteering in the past two generations. As Putnam warned in 2000 in his book Bowling Alone, “our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities,” citing our declining community involvement, volunteering, religious participation, and levels of trust.

In short, “we have corroded the sense of community in places where we live—in poor neighborhoods and wealthy ones,” as Sam Quinones puts it in The Least of Us, where he connects social corrosion with the stark rise in drug abuse and deaths. While technology can increase the quantity and efficiency of our connections, the relationships and social institutions we depend on so much for our well-being are rooted firmly in physical places.

Perhaps Jonathan Haidt’s twin concerns about the effects of smartphone use on youth mental health and on civic life are born of the same dynamic: A smartphone fools us into thinking we are “placeless.” As Zach Rausch, Thomas Potrebny, and Jon write,

As young people traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved their social lives largely away from (already weakened) real-world communities and into chaotic virtual online networks full of loosely connected disembodied users, those who made the move most fully found that their sense of self, community, and meaning-in-life collapsed. Those who were more firmly rooted in mixed-age real-world communities of family, neighborhood, and religion had some protection from this transformation.

For many of us, proximity is all we have in common with our neighbors. But we should not underestimate the strength of the bonds that shared geography can create. How can we build trust and develop a sense of community and mutual care with our neighbors? And if we don’t, how likely are we to let our kids roam far and wide? This collective action problem is much larger than that of youth phone use—with roots in how we envision the American dream and design our physical landscape and institutions.

When you live in a neighborhood rich in relationships, everything is different—especially for the kids. My home neighborhood just north of Washington, DC, shows why. Nurtured by an abundance of local institutions unique to the place—civic, religious, and economic—we have deep social ties and a tight web of associations that bind us together and enhance our lives in countless invisible ways. On a personal level, it means more joy. When you stroll down a street and know who is behind each door, regularly greet neighbors when taking a walk or visiting a restaurant, and have loads of relationships you can draw upon when in need, life is experienced differently. Instead of feeling alone—and vulnerable—I feel like I am embedded in a security blanket.

So, let’s circle back around the block to play-based childhoods. Letting children go off on their own is much easier when you know and trust your neighbors and have a relationship with local businesses, congregations, and community groups. My kids regularly play with their neighbors even though the ages do not match. My 11-year-old knows the homes of many of her classmates and walks 5-20 minutes away to reach them on her own. She sometimes goes with a classmate to pick up a pizza or goes alone to buy a few items at the grocery store—both places are several blocks away and a busy street away. No one questions such behavior in our neighborhood because the streets around us are an extension of our home, not an alien place to be avoided. This was once the norm everywhere.

The collective action we need will go beyond getting kids outside (off screens). We will only restore a play-based childhood on a large scale when we recreate a supportive community that calls parents, kids, and neighbors to rediscover the joys of embodied relationships and communal institutions.  

A neighborhood-by-neighborhood solution

Where can we start? Civic leaders, policymakers, philanthropists, and social leaders should be re-envisioning the social landscape around clearly demarcated neighborhoods, with a renewed emphasis on in-person exchange and the development of formal and informal “organizational life.” The social landscape has physical and institutional complementary components. Re-envisioning it means ensuring that every place is a part of a bounded neighborhood with a clear start and end and a commercial center, primary school, parks, civic associations, nonprofits, small businesses, and other physical assets and institutions that promote bonding relationships. Adjusting the tax system to favor local volunteerism and giving, and local zoning to enable mixed-use development would contribute to this dynamic. The goal: foster closer associations among residents, build more allegiance to a place, and develop the overlapping neighborhood-specific institutions essential to flourishing.

To catalyze this process, civic leaders should place far greater emphasis on community schools, which are excellent incubators of social relationships (especially when they deeply involve parents), and the development of “third places”—the churches, coffee shops, gyms, hair salons, bars, bookstores, parks, and community centers that host regular, informal gatherings of residents—neighborhood by neighborhood. Libraries, which were originally created in an age of knowledge scarcity, could be reenvisioned into smaller, more numerous, and intimate neighborhood hubs. In an age of relationship scarcity, these hubs could provide neighbors a “third place” to gather, learn, and collaborate.

Many residential areas today purposely exclude these “third places” by how they are designed and zoned. As a result, homes are far from community centers and coffee shops; parks are nowhere near ice cream stores and restaurants. Ray Oldenburg, who popularized the “third place” concept, writes in The Great Good Place, “A habitat that discourages association, one in which people withdraw to privacy as turtles into their shells, denies community and leaves people lonely in the midst of many.”

Governments, philanthropists, and businesses should develop small grant programs to incentivize neighbors to cooperate to improve their blocks, families to organize various opportunities for kids to play, and nonprofits to invest in programs that strengthen and expand the institutions and activities that bring people together place by place. The goal would be to foster closer cooperation among residents, build more confidence in a neighborhood, and develop the relationships, institutions, and norms that enable families to trust their public spaces and kids to play in them more.

Lastly, every neighborhood needs abundant opportunities beyond school for kids to meet and build relationships with one another. After-school activities that are welcoming and compelling will help youth establish stickier, longer-lasting relationships IRL—“in real life.” Music classes, chess clubs, baking parties, sports leagues, and the like are all useful, especially when grounded in a single or small number of neighborhoods. These do not need to be seen as competing with free play but instead complementing it. That’s because free play in yards and parks is more likely to occur when parents and kids already know each other; an assortment of neighborhood-based organized play encourages an assortment of unorganized play.

And kids don’t need to be the same age to play together. Backyard camps run by a group of teenagers for younger kids not only help parents during school breaks but also offer excellent leadership development opportunities. Opportunities to serve in schools, local institutions, and around a neighborhood can impart the practice of stewardship and interpersonal responsibility that is increasingly lacking in wider society. When retail stores and other organizations make an extra effort to employ and serve teenagers (as our local pizza place does), they—and their parents—are more likely to feel comfortable as employees and patrons. What if all such shops were to put a sign in their front window saying, “We welcome free range kids.” 

If young people are spending more time scrolling through their smartphones than connecting with friends in the real world or participating in activities in their neighborhoods, it’s not because they are lazy or inert. They have been increasingly socialized to act this way. Having had little opportunity to experience the benefits that “real-life” interactions can bring, they’ve accepted the instant but unsatisfying rewards of placeless, virtual life as their horizon of happiness. If we are to change this, we must offer them neighborhoods of possibilities—places filled with the joy of interacting with others.