Children’s rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are at a low point in America. 

Parents highly restrict their children’s freedom to go outside and play, both directly by limiting their ability to roam outside and indirectly by filling up their schedules with adult-led structured activities.  Most schools have either eliminated recess or severely restrict it, and they also increasingly dole out homework, which eats into children’s precious free time at home.

When I hear about oppressive adults going overboard, I get very angry.  For instance, when I read about the …

“You see, the trouble . . . with always being active and doing things, is that I think it’s quite possible to do all sorts of things and at the same time be completely dead inside. I mean, you’re doing all these things, but are you doing them because you really feel an impulse to do them, or are you doing them mechanically? Because I really do believe that if you’re just living mechanically, then you have to change your life.”
- the character of Andre Gregory from the film, ”My Dinner with Andre” (See clip here.)

Young children are amazing for how they can find wonder in almost any …

Many families these days have decided to essentially “blow off” their neighbors.  Their members walk out of their houses only to get into their cars, and later they drive their cars home and walk inside their houses.  They give zero to their neighborhood and ask for zero in return. 

I’m sure you know families like this.  Perhaps yours is one of these.  Before saying, “No, not us!” ask yourself how many times in the last month you have had a real conversation with a neighbor.  Merely waving or saying “hello” doesn’t count. 

So, why should you take the time to get to know your …

My family and I have been on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean for the past week.  It’s my first cruise, and I’m amazed at how quickly and effectively community develops.  I’ve become cordial with dozens of people.  My four-year-old son Marco has gotten to know about a dozen kids with whom he plays every day either at the swimming pool or at the kids’ daycare area, “Kids Club.” Thanks to those relationships, he has matured socially months in the week he’s been here.

When my wife, my two sons (4 and 7 months), and I are not on land exploring the port at which we’re docked, we’re always …

Young children have always had to deal with a sharp decrease in their free play time as they transitioned over a couple of years from no school to elementary school, which they attend about seven hours a day. 

However, in decades past, schools recognized that children of that age need a lot of play to develop appropriately.  They had ample recess breaks with free play every day during the school day, and they let children leave school behind them every day when they went home.

In recent years, though, elementary schools have become enemies of children’s play.  Many are working to …

Recess beckons well before it actually arrives. Its allure can be heard in children’s lunchtime conversations as they discuss imaginary roles, plans, alliances and teams with an appetite as hungry for play and its unbounded possibility as for food. For some …

Whew!  It’s taken us over two and a half years to find a house to buy, but we finally did it!  In that time, we’ve lived in three different rented houses.  We’ve investigated the blocks around at least 100 different homes for sale, and we’ve toured inside at least 50 of them.

So, what makes our new house on Yale Road, Menlo Park so special?  Is it the house itself?  Absolutely not.  It’s OK for us, but nothing special.  We’ve probably seen a dozen houses we like more. 

Continued on Playborhood Palo Alto / Menlo Park…

As a lower elementary teacher at Lexington Montessori School in Lexington, Massachusetts from 1994 through 2002, I witnessed …

Remember playing in your neighborhood after dinner, until you couldn’t see the ball anymore?  Well, last night, I played a game with my son Marco (3-1/2) and three other boys outside in our neighborhood until the sun went down.  This is something I did countless times as a kid, and I’ve been longing for play like this in our neighborhood in Palo Alto.  I want to tell you about what we did, and about how we got to the point where we could do something like this with our neighbors.

After dinner last night, Marco and I were riding our bikes around the block, and three brothers we know …

Pick-up touch football game isn’t completely gone.  At my son’s elementary school (Hillcrest) in Oakland, it’s been a busy year for recess and after school touch football among the fourth graders.  The year started with lots of excitement about playing football during recess.  Soon I started hearing about some of the issues/problems:  they couldn’t agree on the rules, ‘Jimmy’ hogged the ball all the time, ‘Sammy’ was terrible and no one ever picked him.  I chuckled a little at these traumatic events, but was inwardly so pleased that the boys had to deal, mostly by themselves, with these …

For some children recess provides the most important reason to come to school. With its promise of games of chase and tag, clique-bound conversations, solitary wandering and exploration, pretend and war play, recess provides reliable access to a scarce resource of immense value in the lives of children: spontaneous self-direction. 

But at one school in Massachusetts, recess meant just one thing for many children: time to work and play on their forts.

Continued on Playborhood Berkeley…

Coupled with Playborhood Palo Alto / Menlo Park, this news means we have the areas around the San Francisco Bay Area’s two elite universities covered.  Now, we need to start some Playborhood Local sites between these two Bay Area communities!

Note that, like the Palo Alto / Menlo Park site, this Berkeley site has Neighborhood Reviews.  You can access these individually by clicking on home icons on …

If the larger neighborhood reputation and my online searching give me a pretty decent feeling about the immediate neighborhood around a house, I’ll visit there to look around and talk to neighbors.  After all, for getting a feeling for a neighborhood, there’s no substitute for talking to …