But when we entered the kitchen we got a glimpse of something different: the apparatus of various science experiments covered what would normally have been sparsely adorned counters and niches.  And the kitchen table, which had clearly been the laboratory workspace for these experiments, was only partway to being transformed back into an eating place.

Then we turned toward the living room, which looked more like a museum diorama of a medieval keep.  With the exception of a small area reserved for sitting on the floor and working out engineering dilemmas, it was covered in an elaborate system of tunnels, towers, drawbridges, and dungeons—all made out of boxes and packing tape.

Jamie’s parents, somewhat abashed by this unusual architectural monstrosity (or masterpiece), apologized for the mess, explaining that ever since they had moved into the house they had let Jamie use the moving boxes and any new packages that arrived in the mail to create this fort.  They tried to justify this practice by saying that it saved them money on furniture, that it kept Jamie occupied during their long work hours, etc.  I told them they didn’t need to justify it to me because I thought it was about the coolest thing I had seen since I was a kid making forts in my room.

Dinner was fun, Jamie talked nonstop, and I realized that caterpillars cocooning on the kitchen counter, crinkled carrots being monitored for mold in a jar on the table, and a cardboard box castle in the family room are the tangible evidence of parents with the right instincts to raise a curious, creative, problem-solving, passionate kid.  Oh, and a happy one, too.

Jamie’s a smart kid.  He reads a lot, does well in school, and impresses adults with his vocabulary and insightful questions.  These traits set him apart, for sure, but Jamie has something else—harder to describe—that sets him further apart.  It’s this: he reminds me a little of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Not that I know personally what Da Vinci was like as a kid, but I imagine he had a boundless energy to discover and create.  That’s what Jamie has; he’s a whirlwind of ideas and inspirations.  And the best part is that his parents are letting him follow these inspirations and discover for himself how things work.

Why couldn’t I hit?  I believe it was because I had dozens of opposing players, their parents, and their supporters yelling at me.  Sometimes they yelled the typical, “No batter, no batter, no batter” kind of stuff, but I’m sure there were other jibes—and maybe even a few encouraging words from sympathetic on-lookers—mixed in, too.  It didn’t matter: the pressure was simply too much for my shy eight-year-old self.  So, since I never tried out for a baseball team again, you could say I pretty much sucked in my career as an organized baseball player.

A few years later, my friends and I played pickup wiffle ball almost every day all summer, and I played much, much better.  Unfortunately, though, every game seemed to end the same way, with one of us getting mad and storming off because of a “bad call” or someone trying to cheat (often the player who did the storming off).  I really wanted to play more, but it seemed like we only ever ended up playing a few innings before someone’s feelings got hurt.

One day I realized there was an easy solution to this: Always Tell The Truth.  I knew deep down that I tried to cheat just as much as anyone.  I would want to be safe so much that I would insist I had been safe no matter if I had seen my buddy’s foot come down on home plate before mine.  I would want my hit to be a home run so much that I would say it had cleared the raspberry bushes even if I had seen the red smudges on the ball after I had picked it up.  So, you know what, I thought, if we just always tell the truth, it’ll even out in the end, and we’ll get to play for three hours after dinner instead of one.

So the next day I told my friends that I would always tell the truth when it came to disputable calls.  They were dubious, but I stuck to my word.  If I thought I was safe, I would say so, and if I thought I had really been out, I would say so.  Eventually they figured out that they almost always agreed with my call, and that I really was being honest.  So, one by one, they started to tell the truth, too, and for the rest of the summer we got to play at least twice as much baseball—with only a few tantrums thrown in—than we would have otherwise.

Structured, high-pressure baseball was a failed experience for me.  I don’t think I learned anything other than that I would probably fail when the pressure was on.  On the other hand, in pick-up games in my friends’ backyard, I learned that sometimes sacrificing your own selfish desires and being totally honest gets you what you want in the end—more fun and better friends. 

These lessons have never left me, and, though I have subsequently learned to thrive under pressure, it wasn’t organized baseball that taught me that.  It followed directly from the belief, developed out of moments like my truth-telling baseball epiphany, that I had some neat ideas the world just might benefit from hearing.

It’s become conventional wisdom that organized sports teach kids very valuable lessons.  In my childhood, though, informal pickup games were far more valuable.

I grew up in New England with parents who had been Red Sox fans all their lives, so a love of baseball was part of my identity from the beginning.  It was cold in pre-Global Warming Maine, so we didn’t have too many opportunities to play, but we did our best.  I would often play with my friends from down the road all afternoon and all evening after dinner—or, if they weren’t around, I’d throw a ball against the garage wall for hours on end by myself.

I gradually built up some good baseball skills with all of this practice.  In third grade, my dad became the assistant coach for the farm team at my school, so I tried out for the team.  I made it, and the coach started me at shortstop, one of the most important positions.

All this doesn’t mean that you should give your kids as much screen time as they want.  In spite of my acceptance of Johnson’s central thesis, I still maintain that parents should severely curtail or eliminate screen time for young children, and ration it for tweens and teenagers.  Here’s why:

Very little kids - e.g. pre-reading age kids - need to get a firm grasp of the physical world before they explore “screen worlds.” More 10-year-olds than ever, I’d conjecture, have a hard time dealing with real people and real world situations.  That’s a big problem.

If left to do whatever they please, many children will not acquire adequate social skills to deal with real people in the real, physical world. After all, the default in most communities is for kids to stay inside and escape into screens.  I’d argue that all kids will end up getting exposed to screen activities whether their parents like it or not, so parents are wise to embargo or at least ration these. 

Our bodies clearly prefer physical exercise to the sedentary lifestyle of a videogame nerd. As kids mature into adults, and then to middle-aged adults, their brains are going to need their bodies to be physically active.  A brain of massive intellectual capacity is of little use if it’s attached to an obese body with diabetes on dialysis.

Anytime too many people start agreeing with each other, I get suspicious.  So, recently, I’ve grown a bit uncomfortable with the fact that many parents agree with my assertion that screen time (TV, videogames, and computers) is bad for kids.

I started to think about all the benefits of screen time.  Steven Johnson has written an entire book making this case entitled, Everything Bad is Good for You. 

Essentially, Johnson’s argument is that a great deal of kids’ screen activities today are quite complex.  Videogames like World of Warcraft or online social networks like MySpace or Facebook demand cognitive skills beyond the reach of most middle-aged adults.  I would add, parenthetically, that the least complex screen medium, television, is falling out of favor among children at a rapid rate.

Second, this article in The Atlantic Monthly contends that suburbs without compact town centers or efficient public transportation links to the city center are falling out of favor, to become, the title suggests, “The Next Slums.” Home prices are dropping rapidly, with many homes remaining unoccupied while waiting to be sold. 

Third, this Wall Street Journal article details the city of Sacramento’s new plan for “smart growth” - i.e. clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop.

In essence, there is currently a movement away from car-dominated communities toward walkable communities.  The Atlantic article discusses how residential developers these days are responding to these trends in demand by building not only lofts and condos in city centers, but also new communities in suburbs that are compact and walkable.  The latter are often dubbed “traditional neighborhood developments” or “new urbanism.”

A few months ago, I wrote a series of articles on one such community called The Waters.  In the article on Kids’ Lives, I describe how the design of that community creates a great environment for children to grow up.  It seems like every child plays outside practically every day with friends.  The community was designed to be walkable - with all sorts of places of interest within a 5-minute walk, and with streets that strongly discourage fast car traffic.

If $5/gallon gasoline convinces even a small percentage - say 10% - of Americans to move to communities like this, I think it’s well worth it.  It’s just a shame that it’s taking an economic crisis for us to consider a lifestyle that’s so much better for our children.

Adults drive cars.  Children don’t.  They walk or ride bikes. 

In suburban areas built mostly for cars, adults in cars dominate.  On the other hand, children suffer.  They usually stay inside or wait to get driven by their parents because: 1) most places of interest are not within walking or biking distance, and 2) the streets are unsafe for young pedestrians or bicyclists.

Fortunately for children, high gasoline prices are making adults less interested in driving their cars, and more interested in walking.

Second, this article in The Atlantic Monthly contends that suburbs without compact town centers or efficient public transportation links to the city center are falling out of favor, to become, the title suggests, “The Next Slums.” Home prices are dropping rapidly, with many homes remaining unoccupied while waiting to be sold. 

Third, this Wall Street Journal article details the city of Sacramento’s new plan for “smart growth” - i.e. clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop.

In essence, there is currently a movement away from car-dominated communities toward walkable communities.  The Atlantic article discusses how residential developers these days are responding to these trends in demand by building not only lofts and condos in city centers, but also new communities in suburbs that are compact and walkable.  The latter are often dubbed “traditional neighborhood developments” or “new urbanism.”

A few months ago, I wrote a series of articles on one such community called The Waters.  In the article on Kids’ Lives, I describe how the design of that community creates a great environment for children to grow up.  It seems like every child plays outside practically every day with friends.  The community was designed to be walkable - with all sorts of places of interest within a 5-minute walk, and with streets that strongly discourage fast car traffic.

If $5/gallon gasoline convinces even a small percentage - say 10% - of Americans to move to communities like this, I think it’s well worth it.  It’s just a shame that it’s taking an economic crisis for us to consider a lifestyle that’s so much better for our children.

Adults drive cars.  Children don’t.  They walk or ride bikes. 

In suburban areas built mostly for cars, adults in cars dominate.  On the other hand, children suffer.  They usually stay inside or wait to get driven by their parents because: 1) most places of interest are not within walking or biking distance, and 2) the streets are unsafe for young pedestrians or bicyclists.

Fortunately for children, high gasoline prices are making adults less interested in driving their cars, and more interested in walking.

So how is neighbor relations a rational investment of time?  Simply put, close neighbor relations can make your life better, so time you spend on it today should pay off well in the future.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is full of examples of how high “social capital” in local communities creates safer communities and extends the lives of inhabitants. 

So, there is ample evidence that your kids will be safer and you will live longer if your community has high “social capital” - i.e. a sense of social trust and mutual interconnectedness, which is enhanced over time though positive interaction and collaboration in shared interests.

In addition, while I know of no specific scientific evidence to this effect, I’m absolutely sure that kids who with other neighborhood kids are happier, better socially adjusted, etc.

So, since we are all rational people who want our kids to be safe, happy, and socially adjusted, and since we all want to live longer, we should all be active members of our neighborhoods, right?  Well, the fact is that we aren’t.  In fact, fewer and fewer people have any real substantive neighborhood relationships. 

The problem is that the social capital of an active neighborhood is a “public good” because a neighbor can enjoy the benefits of it without “paying” the costs of organizing the neighborhood.  In other words, he or she can be a “free rider.” Economics tells us that there may be a tendency for societies to provide too few public goods (too few from the point of view of overall social welfare).

Years ago, parents and children spent a lot less time cooped up inside their homes than they do today, so having relationships with neighbors was easy.  In a previous entry I show a video of my interview with my father, in which he talks about growing up in a day before television, computers, or air conditioning.

These days, for most great neighborhoods, it takes the heroic, selfless hard work of one or a few neighbors to organize their neighborhood into a real community.  These neighbors organize block parties, neighborhood watch groups, or frequent playdates between local children (however, when playdates are between just two children, the neighborhood at large hardly benefits).

So, if you’re not one of these “neighborhood organizer” types and you live in a neighborhood where neighbors don’t know each other, what can you use for motivation to get out there and meet your neighbors?  Isn’t the rational investment approach - i.e. kids will be happier/safer/more social, and you’ll live longer - enough for you?  In the next article, I’ll describe another way to justify getting involved in your neighborhood, the “serendipity rationale.”

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 neighbors?  After all, most, if not all of us despair that we don’t have enough time to do the things we know we enjoy - get together with our friends, play sports we love, read books that interest us, go to events that interest us, etc.

What does all this have to do with neighbors and neighborhoods?  Well, I contend that there’s nothing in our lives that we Americans pass over “with blinders” more than our neighborhoods.  Our neighborhoods are our immediate environments outside our houses.  Most of us pass through them multiple times a day, barely noticing a thing. 

So what would you gain from opening your mind and senses to your neighborhood? 

You’d Find Things You’d Enjoy:  If we just gave our neighborhoods a chance, we’d surely find things to enjoy.  I recently walked around my block collecting flowers with my 4-year-old son.  I was amazed by all the varieties of flowers.  Now, I actually see all the flowers in our block, and I really enjoy seeing them as I pass them every day.
Moreover, we shouldn’t discount the people in our neighborhoods just because they seem to have different interests than we do.  You’re quite likely to meet at least a couple of people you enjoy talking to.  In any event, your neighbors don’t have to be your best friends.  If you exchange a few words and a real smile with a neighbor once every few days, that’s enough.

You’d Create Better Habits of Living:  If you have blinders on as you pass through your neighborhood every day, you probably have blinders on most of the time.  It’s pretty difficult, if not impossible, to open our mind and senses sometimes but not at other times. 
Buddhists call the mode of consciousness I’m describing here ”mindfulness." They argue pretty convincingly that mindfulness is very difficult to achieve, so that it must become a way of life, not merely a behavioral choice that can be turned on and off.
Although I can’t prove it in this article, I believe as Andre does that “if you’re just living mechanically, then you have to change your life.” Jim Valvano, former coach of the North Carolina State Wolfpack basketball team, expressed a similar sentiment in a different way at an electrifying speech at the ESPY Awards in 1993.  He advised the audience that they should strive to do three things every day:  laugh, think, and cry (see the video below). 

Your Children Deserve Real Childhoods:  Even if you don’t completely buy what I say above about how you should live your life, I think you’ll agree that your children would benefit from experiencing a rich life in your neighborhood.  As I said at the beginning of this article, young children are naturals at finding wonder in every place and every thing.  If they are constantly stimulated, either in front of screens at home or in structured activities away from home, you have contributed to quashing their natural abilities for mindfulness.
Of course, your kids will be more engaged in your neighborhood if you are.  So, do it for your kids.  In the process, you might resurrect a little of that child-like wonder in yourself.

“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 place and any thing.  Those who do not spend much time engaging in over-stimulating “screen activities” - i.e. television, videogames, and the Internet - do not get bored. 

Starting sometime in childhood, most children unlearn this skill of deeply sensing and experiencing our immediate environments.  Most (all?) of us tend to live hectic lives, children included.  Our calendars fill up with school, work, and myriad outside activities, so that we have very little free time.  And, the free time we do have is often dominated by those over-stimulating screen activities that force us to tune out the environment around us.

Why is it that we’ve gotten to know more people here in one week than we’ve gotten to know in our neighborhood in a year?  Perhaps in the list of reasons below we can find some suggestions to make our neighborhoods into better communities:

We’re trapped into spending time in the immediate community.  Our rooms are small, there is no television to watch other than cable news, we have no Internet connections in our rooms, and unless we’re docked at a port, we can’t leave the ship.  On the ship at sea, there is no cell phone service.
Everything is within short walking distance. The ship may be big, but it’s still only a couple of city blocks long, and inside there are 2000+ people and lots of publicly available attractions.  So, very often when we have nothing in particular to do, we just walk around.
There are few dangers. We have no cars here, which makes walking and hanging out much more carefree.  Also, because outsiders can’t get in here and leave at will, we don’t fear that someone will rob us or abduct our children.

I’m convinced that we can make our neighborhoods more like cruise ships for our children.  I’ll address each of the points above in turn below:

Time: Living in a small home will force kids to go outside, but most important is limiting or eliminating their consumption of “screen activities” - i.e. television, videogames, and the Internet.  As for limiting the distance kids can go, *not* driving them anywhere - i.e. letting them go as far as they can walk or bicycle - works well.  And we adults should turn off our cell phones or ignore them when we’re roaming the neighborhood.
Short Walking Distance: Ideally, you should live in a place where everything that interests your children is within a walkable distance.  Before middle school, this means friends’ houses, schools, and parks.  Ideally, “parks” should include ample natural green space and sports facilities like basketball courts and a swimming pool.  When kids get older, they’ll also want to frequent retail stores, so ones children are most interested in - convenience stores, diners, sporting goods stores, etc. - should be a walk or bike ride away.
Few Dangers: As for minimizing dangers from car traffic, new urbanist communities like The Waters are a great model.  They force car traffic to slow down or to entirely avoid places where people walk.  As for minimizing danger from outsiders, while we can’t seal our neighborhoods off from outsiders, if many adult residents are always outside, engaged in neighborhood activities, malevolent strangers will not be able to roam around anonymously.  So, in other words, you and other adults need to spend time outside to make your neighborhood safer.

What do you all think of cruise ship communities as a model for neighborhoods?  There are other examples, too - Club Med, places in the aftermath of natural disasters or power outages, etc.

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 doing something somewhere on the boat.  In other words, other than sleeping, we don’t spend time in our room. 

If homebuyers intuitively “get” how these attributes might create community, community-seeking homebuyers will want to live in a New Urbanist development like The Waters.

From what I observed, this is exactly what happened.  Many of the first residents of The Waters I spoke with, who moved in two years ago, explained to me that they were looking for a place where residents would have close social bonds with one another, and they believed that the New Urbanist concepts described to them would result in a tight community.

These first residents have a very special feeling that also contributes to the community spirit at The Waters.  I’ll call this the “pioneer effect” because these residents feel like pioneers.  They came looking for community, but they came before there was any community.  In addition, they all moved in there around the same time.  So, they’re evangelists for The Waters, much like people who bought the first Apple Macintosh computers in the 1980s became evangelists for the Mac.

I experienced this pioneer effect firsthand in my visit at The Waters.  These first residents were intently interested in explaining to me what makes the community spirit at The Waters so great.  They are clearly evangelistic salespeople for their community.  Twice during my late afternoon walk, people I never met before asked me if I was “the guy from Playborhood,” and then took the time and interest to their personal experience at The Waters.

In addition, in the videos about community on The Waters’ site early residents absolutely gush about how great it is there.  Nathan Norris, the head of marketing who managed the creation of these videos, told me he was amazed at how overwhelmingly positive people came across in the videos. 

The word of mouth marketing of these first residents is the best form of marketing because it’s highly distributed and inherently authentic.  As Nathan Norris realizes, it’s The Waters’ greatest asset, and it gives that development a great opportunity to “scale” its strong community spirit from its present first village to the seven villages eventually planned for The Waters.
[I visited The Waters, a fledgling ”New Urbanist” community in Alabama, in early February.  This is the last in a series of four articles about my visit there.  The first three are The Waters: A Very Tight-Knit Community, The Waters: Kids’ Lives, and The Waters: How Town Planning and Architecture Help Create Community.]

Anyone who ever studied elementary economics can understand one of the primary reasons for the success of community spirit at The Waters:  The supply of homes that are marketed for the great community around them is very low, while demand for these homes is very high.  In fact, in the Playborhood survey we found that a large proportion of parents would be willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars, and many even hundreds of thousands of dollars, for a home with better neighborhood play prospects than their current home.

So, if a new development markets itself well as having great community spirit, it can attract lots and lots of families who want this.  These families ”self-select” by buying homes at this development.  Thus, the development ends up with a bunch of community-minded families, and, voila!, a neighborhood with great community spirit is born.

If homebuyers intuitively “get” how these attributes might create community, community-seeking homebuyers will want to live in a New Urbanist development like The Waters.

From what I observed, this is exactly what happened.  Many of the first residents of The Waters I spoke with, who moved in two years ago, explained to me that they were looking for a place where residents would have close social bonds with one another, and they believed that the New Urbanist concepts described to them would result in a tight community.

These first residents have a very special feeling that also contributes to the community spirit at The Waters.  I’ll call this the “pioneer effect” because these residents feel like pioneers.  They came looking for community, but they came before there was any community.  In addition, they all moved in there around the same time.  So, they’re evangelists for The Waters, much like people who bought the first Apple Macintosh computers in the 1980s became evangelists for the Mac.

I experienced this pioneer effect firsthand in my visit at The Waters.  These first residents were intently interested in explaining to me what makes the community spirit at The Waters so great.  They are clearly evangelistic salespeople for their community.  Twice during my late afternoon walk, people I never met before asked me if I was “the guy from Playborhood,” and then took the time and interest to their personal experience at The Waters.

In addition, in the videos about community on The Waters’ site early residents absolutely gush about how great it is there.  Nathan Norris, the head of marketing who managed the creation of these videos, told me he was amazed at how overwhelmingly positive people came across in the videos. 

The word of mouth marketing of these first residents is the best form of marketing because it’s highly distributed and inherently authentic.  As Nathan Norris realizes, it’s The Waters’ greatest asset, and it gives that development a great opportunity to “scale” its strong community spirit from its present first village to the seven villages eventually planned for The Waters.
[I visited The Waters, a fledgling ”New Urbanist” community in Alabama, in early February.  This is the last in a series of four articles about my visit there.  The first three are The Waters: A Very Tight-Knit Community, The Waters: Kids’ Lives, and The Waters: How Town Planning and Architecture Help Create Community.]

Anyone who ever studied elementary economics can understand one of the primary reasons for the success of community spirit at The Waters:  The supply of homes that are marketed for the great community around them is very low, while demand for these homes is very high.  In fact, in the Playborhood survey we found that a large proportion of parents would be willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars, and many even hundreds of thousands of dollars, for a home with better neighborhood play prospects than their current home.

So, if a new development markets itself well as having great community spirit, it can attract lots and lots of families who want this.  These families ”self-select” by buying homes at this development.  Thus, the development ends up with a bunch of community-minded families, and, voila!, a neighborhood with great community spirit is born.