An Old Fashioned Capitalist Summer

My kids are mostly free range in the summer.  Other than two weeks in sleepover camp for the older two, they do basically nothing all summer long - well, actually they do quite a bit - but adults have little to do with it.  Today, my 9 y.o. and her friend put together a lemonade stand.  Each cup was “$.50.” However, the sign had very small writing in parentheses in the bottom corner saying “Or $.25 if you prefer.” They hoped that no one would notice the fine print in the bottom corner.  They were equipped with my crystal pitcher (which I reluctantly donated b/c my daughter wanted a “classy operation") and the usual cups and napkins. 

However, this was no regular lemonade stand.  After all, this is the 21st century.  I found this out when I came by to do a surprise Health Department inspection.

• by Suzanne Miller
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My Three Sons

Boy #3 arrived last week on Tuesday, June 16.  He was four weeks early, so he’s small and sleeps almost all the time, but he’s healthy.  My wife Perla’s doing well, too.

His name is Leonardo, but we’ll call him Leo.

His brothers are very curious and excited about their new playmate, as you can see from the photo.

• by Mike Lanza
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Playborhood Signs Go on Sale!!!

Make a statement to your neighbors!  Better yet, make a statement to potential neighbors considering buying or renting a house in your neighborhood!  Tell them that you want your neighborhood to be a Playborhood by posting a Playborhood sign in front of your house.

Press the big button in the right column to buy one (or two or three) today!

• by Mike Lanza

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Video Games That Make You Run, Talk Face-to-Face, and Explore the Environment

I caught a glimpse of the future of mobile phone games this past weekend at the Come Out and Play Festival in New York City last weekend, and I’m very excited. 

I played six “location aware mobile games” that made me run and walk like crazy, talk to dozens of people, and explore nooks and crannies of New York that I never would have seen otherwise.  In other words, playing these games made me more physically fit, more social (face-to-face), and far more aware of the physical environment that surrounded me. 

This is the polar opposite of the effects of today’s video games on children, who play for hours inside their houses without moving anything but their fingers, barely talking to anyone.

• by Mike Lanza
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Making Digital Technology a Part of Outdoor Play

Pretty much all of my colleagues in the movement to advocate outdoor play recommend that parents restrict their children’s digital technology activities.  “Pull the Plug!” is their common refrain.  I agree that large amounts of sedentary, solitary use of digital technology (e.g. hours sitting alone in front of a screen) is bad for kids, and takes away from time that they could be spending outdoors playing. 

However, as Don Tapscott points out in Grown Up Digital, digital technology is like air to children of today.  In other words, it’s such an integral part of children’s lives that they can scarcely live without it.

Thus, we parents need to find a way to embrace digital technology for our children.  I’ve been searching for ways to integrate digital technology with neighborhood play so that they complement each other, rather than compete for children’s time.  I think I’m on to something, but it’s way too early to draw any conclusions.

• by Mike Lanza
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Childhood Summers are Dead.  Let’s Bring Them Back!

To those of us who think of childhood summers as carefree times for neighborhood fun, free of schedules and direct adult authority, children have no summers anymore. 

Sure, school still ends every June and the weather still gets hot (except in San Francisco ; > ), but neighborhoods are no longer filled with children’s yelps and laughter on summer days.  In fact, for the most part, they’re completely dead, as dead as they are during school days in the winter.

Of all the unfortunate aspects of childhood in 21st Century America, this fact depresses me more than anything else.

So for two weeks in June, I’m going to try an experiment that, I hope, will be the first step in bringing back summer for kids.  I’m going to run a summer camp right here, in my neighborhood.

• by Mike Lanza
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Front Porches Make a Comeback - Will Neighborhood Socializing Follow?

Until the last few decades, front porches and stoops were the fertile breeding grounds of American neighborhood life.  When the weather was warm enough, families passed every evening there.  Porches are the subject of fond nostalgic books like The American Porch.  When my father and I recorded a video about his childhood of play, we started on his old front stoop.  This was also the setting of Chaz Palmentieri’s wonderful play and movie, A Bronx Tale.

Porches and stoops are a midway point between a family’s private life and its public life.  While they’re on the private property of the houses they’re attached to, the fact that they’re within eyeshot and earshot of the sidewalk and street invites neighbors to spontaneously drop by.

Thus, I’m heartened to find that porches have made a roaring comeback in recent years among newly constructed houses.  While there’s no hard data on the percent of houses built with porches before 1992, anecdotal evidence from homebuilders suggests that they practically died out in the 1960s and 70s.  In 1992, the US Census states that 42% of all new houses had a porch, and that this number increased to 58% in 2007.  The National Association of Homebuilders reports that its members expect that number to eclipse 70% by 2015.

So, does this trend mean that people will be socializing more with their neighbors in the front of their houses?

• by Mike Lanza
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Life-Size Mazes

Mazes are certainly fun and educational, but what do they have to do with neighborhood play?  Well, it depends on how big they are. 

I’ve found a way to install life-size mazes on my driveway, thanks to the ingenuity of worldwide maze expert Adrian Fisher.  Fisher has designed dozens of mazes around the world using hedges, mirrors, paving, corn fields, and standing panels.  He’s also published many great books on the subject, including my favorite, The Amazing Book of Mazes, which has many more designs than you’ll find on the web.

• by Mike Lanza
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Handle With Care: Safe Sun Products for Kids

This article first appeared on the PlayOutdoors blog.

Recently, I heard Fabien Cousteau, grandson to undersea legend Jacques Cousteau, speaking to Oprah about the need to protect our oceans. He told the Queen of Daytime TV, “You wouldn’t let a child open up a cabinet under the sink and start tasting the chemicals down there, so why would you dump those chemicals down the drain and have them end up on your plate, which you then feed to your child?”

His remark got me thinking about the similar irony of what we freely put on our children’s skin. You wouldn’t hand your child a BPA-free Nalgene bottle full of chemical Kool-Aid; and yet many parents unknowingly slather body care products laced with allergens, neurotoxins, and hormone-disrupting chemicals on their children every day. The non-profit, Environmental Working Group analyzed over 1,700 children’s products and found that “on any given day children are exposed to an average of 27 ingredients not found safe for kids by FDA…”

• by Amanda Stuermer, PlayOutdoors.com blogger
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Seven Days of Neighborhood Play

My boys’ neighborhood play lives are quite rich.  They play everyday outside in our neighborhood, usually with other kids. 

I’ve recently started twittering about it (twitter name: “mikelanza").  You can see my twitter feed in the middle column of the Playborhood home page (to the right of where you’re reading if you’re on the home page now).  You can follow this journey blow-by-blow if you “follow” me on Twitter.

This provides a flavor both for our successes in creating a life of neighborhood play and for the day-by-day struggles I encounter to make it even better.  I’m certainly happy with the progress we’ve made thus far, but I’m far from satisfied.  I’d still like to see more independence, more creativity and more participation from neighbor kids.

Below I summarize my “tweets” from a recent week of my boys’ neighborhood play experiences. I provide a bit more polish and detail than I can do in Twitter, which is real-time and has a 140 character limit per message. 

• by Mike Lanza
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To Push Or Not To Push

I was one of those shy kids who cried when I sat on Santa’s lap at the mall.  I hated to be left at the babysitter’s house, I was in a constant state of anxiety about going to and from school on the bus, and I was traumatized on more than one occasion by the inexorable torture of trick-or-treating.  The combination of strangers, costumes, and candy (which—with the exception of Reese’s peanut butter cups—I couldn’t stand) was too much for my introverted, insecure psyche.

But the fact that I remember visiting Santa, going to the babysitter, riding the bus, and trick-or-treating is testament to the fact that my parents didn’t let my fears dictate their actions.  Whether out of necessity (the babysitter), convenience (the bus), or an idea of what all kids should experience (Santa and Halloween), they pushed me to face my fears and get past them.  I still suffer a twinge of revulsion when I see mall Santas, and I never overcame my aversion to costumes, candy, and knocking on strangers’ doors, but I guess it was good to know that I could survive the horrors of being forced outside of my shell.  The big bad world could be entered AND exited without my total annihilation.

• by Matthew Perry
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The Kindergarten Decisions:  Neighborhood Public School or Not?

This fall, my son Marco will start kindergarten at our neighborhood public elementary school, Oak Knoll.  So will our next-door neighbor Jonathan.  So will the girl who lives behind us, Bailey.  So will the kid around the corner, Eli.  So will the kid one block away, Spencer.  So will my good friend’s kid, Emma, who lives three blocks away.

Marco will ride his bike to school most days along with many of those kids.  I fully anticipate that our kids will have a wonderful time playing outside here every day after riding back from school.  All the groundwork we’ve laid in making outdoor play a habit here plus all the attractions we’re adding to our front and back yards (I’ll write more about these in future articles) will help assure that, but there’s no denying that going to the same school and biking to and from there will be great bonding experiences for these kids.

On the other hand, the kid a block down the street, Andrew, will start kindergarten this fall at a private school.  I’m guessing he won’t have much of a relationship with any of those Oak Knoll kids.  He hardly plays with the neighborhood kids now.  Once kindergarten starts, he’ll get busier, so he probably won’t play with them then, either.  His friends will be almost exclusively from his school and not from our neighborhood.

Continued on Playborhood Palo Alto / Menlo Park…

• by Mike Lanza

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Planetizen Reports on Mike’s Front Yard

Planetizen just published an article on my front yard project.  Check it out. 

The project’s going quite well.  We’ll start using it this weekend, and it will be totally completed by the end of May.  The neighbors here have already spent a lot of time there on our new picnic table and benches. 

I anticipate that it’ll generate a lot more press coverage in the coming months.

• by Mike Lanza

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Display Your Play

Why do union members picket the businesses they are striking against?  Why do political protesters gather and march together?  Why do I make sure my kids and I play in the front of our house rather than in the back?

We all do these things at least in part because we’re trying to make an impression on passers by, and ultimately persuade them to join us.  Unions and protesters have learned over the years that this strategy works.  The more often they put bodies out in public, and the more bodies they have out there, the more outsiders they can convert to their cause.

And so it is with play and neighborhoods, I’ve found.  If you don’t care if your kids have more play opportunities with other kids, let them play inside your house and in your back yard.  However, if you want to generate more play activity for your kids, you need your kids to be out front at every opportunity.

• by Mike Lanza
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Pavers - Pretty, but Bad for Kids

When we moved into our current house, I decided that my number one priority for every feature in my front and back yard would be its contribution to my kids’ play life.  Thus, my number one target has become my driveway with pavers - those brick-like rectangular stones that form the surface of many “beautiful” driveways.

What’s wrong with a paver driveway, relative to smooth concrete or asphalt driveway?  Well, I’ll list all the great things that kids do with driveways that pavers make difficult or impossible:

• by Mike Lanza
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