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Searching for Kid-Friendly Cities? It’s a Waste of Time

2008-11-13T14:55:00-08:00

I agree with the authors of these lists on one broad point - parents’ decision of where to live is absolutely critical to the quality of lives their children. Unfortunately, these lists are all fundamentally flawed because their level of analysis is way too broad.

Recall the old adage, “All politics is local?” Well, I’ve got another one for you: “The best childhoods are hyper-local.” Not local. Hyper-local.

Think about your best memories from your own childhoods. Most parents would say at least half of them took place in their neighborhoods, or even their blocks.

What mattered to most of us kids were the kids who lived on our block, with the next-door neighbor kids often being the most important. Also, our favorite places were places like the street in front of our house, our friend’s back yard, the vacant lot down the street, or the playground and ball field a couple of blocks over.

So, why aren’t kids’ blocks important to their lives today? As I’ve written about frequently on Playborhood.com, most blocks in America today have scant, if any neighborly activity on a daily basis. So, if neighborhoods are dead, they aren’t going to be important to kids’ lives, which suffer as a result.

If neighborly activity is extremely high everywhere, such as it was pretty much everywhere in the early 20th century, choice of block is not important. No matter where you go, you’ll have a vibrant community life. Conversely, if neighborly activity is close to zero in all blocks of a town, which is true of some suburbs today (check out my favorite, Atherton, CA), the block is not important at all for choosing where to live in that town. No matter where you go, you’re screwed.

However, in a world where blocks are very different in terms of neighborly activity, child-friendliness at the block level is the most important decision attribute for a family with children by far. That’s because there is no variable that can make a more positive contribution to the life of a child than the block that he/she lives in.

Ironically, a public debate between Richard Florida, creator of one of the lists I mentioned in the beginning of this article, and Marc Fisher, a Washington Post columnist illustrate this point very well.

In Who’s Your City?, Florida invokes his ”Trick-or-Treater Index to describe how great Toronto, his new home city, is for kids, relative to the city he moved from, Washington, DC. During Halloweens when he lived in his DC home, “not a single kid came to our door in three years.” By contrast, In Toronto, “our house was mobbed by children of a mosaic of races.” (p. 259)

Fisher [url="http://playborhood.com/site/article/allied_arts_scores_high_on_the_trick_or_treater_index/" href’http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/02/AR2008040203184.html">retorts</a>:

We lived less than 20 blocks apart when he was in Washington, but our experiences were as different as could be on what he calls the “trick or treater index.”

Our block, like many in Northwest [DC], has always been busy on Halloween. Florida’s surely was not. For reasons that always baffled me, this great bard of urban vibrancy, a latter-day Jane Jacobs (the spiritual grandmother of the smart-growth movement), chose to live in about as anti-urban a city setting as could be had: far from a Metro station, way up on a hill, in a beautiful spot right near Rock Creek Park, well away from any of the amenities he preaches about in his books.

In other words, Florida writes about how his Trick-or-Treater Index doomed Washington DC for kid-friendliness, but if he had just moved 20 blocks, his same Index would have made DC look great.

My neighborhood <a ]rated pretty well[/url] in general this Halloween, but even here, there was a huge difference from one block to the next.

It’s obvious. Choosing which city is best for kids is like swatting a fly with a baseball bat. Sure, there are some things that matter to kids that vary across cities like weather, but the things that matter most to kids vary greatly within a city on a block-by-block or neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.

Sorry, city raters. Your work is pretty useless for helping parents choose a place to live where their kids will have good lives. Rating blocks and neighborhoods is where it’s at.

I’ve come across a few lists of the most kid-friendly or child-friendly cities lately. The idea behind most of these is to help families who are searching for a better life for their kids find a city to relocate to.

In his book, Who’s Your City?, Richard Florida publishes his list of the “Best Places for Families With Children”. Business Week just recently published its list of the ”Best Places to Raise Your Kids 2009.” Child Magazine published its ”10 Best Cities for Families.”

In my opinion, these lists are a waste of time for parents at best, and a dangerous distraction at worst.

Warm and Fuzzies for Bill and Hillary as Kids

2008-03-27T06:22:01-08:00

Bill writes:

To me, childhood was about friends and discovery. When I think back on it, I think about how wonderful it was to be outside, even if I was getting stung by a bumblebee or dodging a rattlesnake, or handling tarantulas or centipedes or scorpions - and we had lots of them. Sometimes we’d even cut up the centipedes and watch the sections crawl on each other - our own little laboratory experiment. Everything we did became a game. That’s the way it ought to be. (p. 80)

While Bill’s stories don’t reveal any hints of his future as a leader, Hillary shows hints of her future promise. Here’s a story of hers that I like:

In 1956 we organized our own neighborhood Olympics. I went to the dime store and I bought ribbons and we made medals. . . In fact, each contestant had to pay money to enter the neighborhood Olympics. At the end of the Olympics we had a big bag of pennies and nickels and quarters, which we gave to a local charity. I remember that because there was a picture of me in our local newspaper handing the bag of change to a man in a suit. (p. 163)

In her conclusion, Hillary hints that she considers happy, independent kids’ lives to be a vital social priority, so if she became president, maybe she’d do something about it like what I advocate, liberalizing the Fair Housing Act to encourage clustering of families:

We had so much imaginative game-playing time - just unstructured fun time. I had the best, most wonderful childhood: being outside, playing with my friends, being on my own, just loving life. When I was a kid in grade school, it was great. We were so independent, we were given so much freedom. But now it’s impossible to imagine giving that to a child today. It’s one of the great losses as a society. But I’m hopeful that we can regain the joy and experience of free play and neighborhood games that were taken for granted growing up in my generation. That would be one of the best gifts we could give our children. (p. 165)

Wowwwww… Could I possibly cast a vote for this woman? If I had heard her say this on a stump speech before the California primary, she would have had my vote…

Boyyyy, this has been a long and bruising Democratic presidential primary, and it’s far from over! I think we all could use an excuse to feel some warm and fuzzies about Bill and Hillary. After all, Hillary isn’t really a monster, is she? And Bill isn’t really a racist, is he?

If you feel this way, I have a book for you to read: The Games We Played: A Celebration of Childhood and Imagination is a wonderful compilation of childhood stories of famous people. The editor, Steven Cohen, is a former Clinton Administration press aide, so he was able to get Bill and Hillary Clinton to contribute their stories. All these stories - not just Bill and Hillary’s - are a wonderful, nostalgic read.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

2008-03-21T21:54:01-08:00

The kids in Bryson’s world were far more imaginative, irreverent, and, well, just plain “bad” compared to kids of today. Regarding imagination, the character’s name in the title of the book, “The Thunderbolt Kid,” refers to Bryson’s fantasy for himself that he was an alien from another planet who could vaporize “morons.”

Irreverence is Bryson’s vehicle for outrageous humor, as when he describes those vibrating electric football games that many kids had:

“In practice, what happened was that half the players instantly fell over and lay twitching from some extreme gastric disorder; while the others streamed off in as many different directions as there were upright players before eventually clumping in a corner, where they pushed against the unyielding sides like the victims of a nightclub fire at a locked exit. The one exception was the running back who just trembled in place for five or six minutes, then slowly turned on an unopposed glide toward the wrong end zone . . .” (p. 101)

Sometimes, his irreverence would lead him to be a nonconformist, as when he described air raid drills in his elementary school:

“I remember being profoundly amazed that anyone would suppose that a little wooden desk would provide a safe haven in the event of an atomic bomb being dropped on Des Moines. But evidently they all took the matter seriously, for even the teacher, Miss Squat Little Fat Thing, was inserted under her desk, too - or at least as much of her as she could get under, which was perhaps 40 percent. Once I realized that no one was watching, I elected not to take part. I already knew how to get under a desk and was confident that this was not a skill that would ever need refreshing. Anyway, what were the chances that the Soviets would bomb Des Moines? I mean, come on.” (p. 150)

Kids were more “bad” than I see kids being today, but often this “badness” was the by-product of some very creative, independent thinking. For instance, he describes how one of his friends in the “A/V Club” in high school

“...discovered a film-splicing kit and spent hours editing the films for his own amusement, putting goose-stepping Nazis into movies about the Oregon Trail and so on. His finest moment was in a sex-education film when the narrative “Johnny just experienced his first nocturnal emission” was immediately followed by a shot of Naval Academy cadets throwing their hats in the air.” (p. 245)

In short, kids had a lot more freedom and space back in Bryson’s childhood days, and this led to a great deal of fun, and a good measure of learning as well. How wonderful. Does anyone know how I can take my wife and kids back there?

I start a fair number of books, but I finish very few of them. However, I wished The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid would never end. In fact, if I could have transported myself into the world of that book, I would have. It’s that compelling and entertaining.

Author Bill Bryson’s classic is a laugh-out-loud memoir of his boyhood in the 1950s and 60s in Des Moines, Iowa. Like the TV show The Wonder Years, it’s a venerable anthem to that “Golden Age” of childhood in America. Toward the beginning of the book, Bryson writes:

“. . . kids were always outdoors - I knew kids who were pushed out the door at eight in the morning and not allowed back in until five unless they were on fire or actively bleeding - and they were always looking for something to do. If you stood on any corner with a bike - any corner anywhere - more than a hundred children, many of whom you had never seen before, would appear and ask you where you were going.” (p. 36)

Idealism vs. Experience in Parenting

2008-03-03T15:37:00-08:00

Now, obviously, you could argue that the stakes are very, very different between raising your kids and voting for our next President. So, perhaps you could reconcile raising your kids overscheduled to the max and voting for Obama, or, on the other hand, you could waive the Playborhood banner and vote for McCain. However, please bear with my analogy for the moment.

Barack Obama is articulately appealing to voters’ hopes and dreams for the future. He’s found a language of “change” and bipartisanship that has caught on with millions of primary voters. He’s done this in spite of the fact that he has practically no record actually doing it in his career. He has all sorts of grandiose “new” ideas about foreign policy, but he’s hardly had any experience making foreign policy decisions or meeting with foreign leaders.

Playborhood is appealing to our dreams for our children’s futures, and we’re trying to change how kids are raised in America. We’ve inspired thousands (someday, millions!!!) of parents. However, most of us who’ve contributed to Playborhood, most notably myself, don’t have kids over preschool age.

What expertise do we have that would enable us to repudiate most of modern parenthood? What the hell do we know?

Well, we were kids once. Our experience as kids, before the current regime of school-aged parents was in power, was quite different, and far better, than that of kids today. So, we have our own childhoods to inform our vision of what we think a good childhood should be. Certainly, America (or Canada or Europe) of the 21st Century isn’t exactly the same as it was in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s, but I would argue that it’s not as different as people sometimes say it is. Here are some changes that are pointed to as excuses for kids’ overscheduled, play-deprived lives:

Videogames and the Internet: These are new and powerful time sinks for kids, but parents can limit them if they want. (You wouldn’t give your kids alcohol even if they said all their friends were drinking it, would you?)
Safety: I strongly disagree that kids are relatively less safe in their neighborhoods today than they are in their scheduled lives. See this article.
Fewer Stay-at-Home Moms: Yes, there are fewer stay-at-home moms, but this factor is overrated for two reasons: a) kids aren’t playing outside in their neighborhoods even when parents aren’t working on weekends, and b) nannies, when they’re employed to take care of kids, could let kids play outside in their neighborhoods, but they don’t, for the most part. I grew up across the street from five kids whose mother worked every day, but their nanny let them play outside every day. Nannies of today tend to take kids to parks where they hang out with their nanny friends.

So, in sum, I’d say that my “radical” ideas for parenting aren’t actually radical at all - they’re conservative, but adapted, I hope, to new realities of 21st century society.

By the way, don’t get caught up in trying to map parenting philosophies on to the American political continuum of conservative/Republican vs. liberal/Democrat. Is letting kids play in neighborhoods rather than scheduling activities and playdates Republican or Democrat? Isn’t that a silly question?

I do think it’s important, though, to invoke the “conservative” label for Playborhood to show that we’re not wacky idealists coming up with ideas that have never been tried in the real world before. Our idealism is rooted in our very real experiences as kids. (Is Obama’s idealism deeply rooted in something that he and we are very familiar with, or is it really new and untested?) The trick for us is to make that work in 21st Century America, where videogames, the Internet, and working moms have changed the context.

Should we parents of preschoolers be wide-eyed idealists and reject what we see around us for schoo-aged kids - i.e. no neighborhood play, lots of indoor screen time, and packed schedules of activities?

Or, should we just learn from parents of school-aged kids and drop our idealism? Well, that’s analogous to what the Republican Party will try to convince young, idealistic voters to do this November: learn from McCain’s experience and drop notions of Obama-esque idealism.

Creating Future Environmentalists: Let them Play in the Woods!

2008-02-25T07:51:00-08:00

In particular, their findings show that children who participate in “wild” nature before the age of 11 are very likely to have environmental attitudes and exhibit environmental behaviors as adults. “Wild” nature is defined as hiking or playing in the woods, camping, and hunting or fishing.

Children who participate in “domesticated” nature, such as picking flowers or produce, planting trees or seeds, and caring for plants are also likely to exhibit these environmental tendencies as adults, but significantly less so than those who participated in “wild” nature.

Finally, children who participate in environmental education programs - in school, in scouts, at camp, or in community environmental improvement programs - were found to be no more likely to be environmentalists as adults than those who don’t participate. So, this study indicates that environmental education to children has no impact when these children grow up to be adults unless, of course, it makes them more likely to engage in nature on their own.

So, in summary, it’s direct, independent participation in nature that matters for creating environmental attitudes and behaviors. Environmental education should be viewed, then, only as a means toward that end, not an end in and of itself. If all you do is send your kids to scouts and summer camps, and never let them explore on their own in nature before 11, you’re not likely to be creating environmentalists.

Let them play in the woods!

If you want your children to grow up to be adults who are environmentally conscious in mind and deed, you should let them play in nature on their own. Adult-mediated nature activities like scouting and summer camps have no effect in later life. That’s the conclusion from recent research by Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies of Cornell University.

Learning Through Play: If Rats Get It, Why Can’t Kids?

2008-01-26T23:22:01-08:00

Hooked On Nature’s founder Avery Cleary, for instance, provided a sobering statistic: that the average American child plays for less than half an hour a week outdoors, compared to 44 hours a week on electronic devices. And Dr Stuart Brown, founder of the Institute for Play, put it bluntly when he said “Play has a PR problem” before going on to describe a study of rats which proved that those that “played” (yes, even rats like games it appears) had superior survival instincts than those that did not.

The Play Around The Bay symposium, organized by the Alliance for Childhood, the Habitot Museum and Bay Area Early Childhood Funders, included a stimulating presentation by Playborhood’s very own Mike Lanza and a keynote speech by British playworker Penny Wilson. I missed this one but wish I hadn’t because apparently she spoke about London’s amazing adventure playgrounds (which for some reason I failed to discover when living there with kids for 10 years).

Another Brit, David Hawkins, one-time project manager of Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard project, spoke about working with “bad boys” a category into which he happily included himself (he was expelled from school) as well as his three sons, all of whom described as “drop-outs”. Hawkins’ latest venture is Wild Zones, a program that aims to create public outdoor spaces where children can build shelters, make trails, climb trees or dam creeks. One is shaping up on a former golf course in Santa Clara. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to turn all golf courses into wild zones?” he asked – to which the audience erupted into applause.

Just as it seemed we were going to slump into despair at the thought of all our sofa-bound kids, Patty Donald stood up and struck a high note. “When I look out of my window,” she said, “I don’t see kids’ play failing.” That’s because Donald runs the Berkeley Marina Adventure Playground which must count as one of the most exciting places imaginable for children. I know because I take my two boys there. At the playground kids as young as 7 are given tools – saws, hammer, nails and paint – and let loose, with minimal adult supervision, to create the environment of their dreams. Institutions, including the Discovery Museum and the Exploratorium, send staff to this magical place simply to observe how real “live” kids play. Has it come to this? Adults need to study children playing. A sorry state of affairs.

I missed some of the speakers – and a field trip to the adventure playground – because I had head home. After all, there were two children there who needed to be booted outdoors to play.

On Saturday I left my children home alone (glued to computer and TV screens) to listen to a group of engaging, intelligent adults debate why our children don’t—or can’t—play anymore (and by play they definitely did not mean a couple of hours of Club Penguin or Runescape on their parents’ laptop; we’re talking romping around in the woods or on the neighborhood streets).

“It’s a desperate situation that we have to have a conference about play,” said Rona Renner, executive director and host of radio program Childhood Matters, neatly summing up the irony of the status quo, and opening up a panel session which threw up some fascinating, if sometimes alarming, facts.

First Canadian Local Site Launched!

2008-01-23T15:58:00-08:00

Playbourhood Oakville North was launched today for this suburb southeast of Toronto, Ontario. This site is run by PR consultant and Oakville parent Chris Churchill.

Apparently, our neighbors north of the border are experiencing the same problem of lack of children’s play that we Americans are.

How about you? Would you like to be part of the Playborhood solution for your local area? {encode="info@playborhood.com" title="Contact us"}!

Playborhood Survey IV: School District and Type of Street are Most Important . . . Or Are They?

2007-11-28T11:45:00-08:00

school district (2.71)
type of street (e.g. not busy, cul-de-sac, has sidewalks, etc.) (3.01)
friendly ambiance (3.24)
proximity to a park (3.79)
number of children of your child(ren)’s ages in close proximity (4.59)
proximity to a public elementary school (4.66)
presence of children playing in the neighborhood (4.70)

The top choice, “school district,” does not directly help kids play and have fun. The second, “type of street,” is both a parent-centric safety consideration and a kid-centric play consideration, since it’s a heck of a lot easier to play on a cul-de-sac than on a busy street.

In comments, many parents pointed out that the two choices most directly linked to neighborhood play opportunities, “number of children” and “presence of children playing,” were not considerations for them because they had no way of discerning these before buying their houses. The fact that parents indicated that they would be willing to pay big extra $$$ for better play opportunities in another Playborhood Survey question implies that those two choices would rate much higher if they felt they could get that information.
[NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of four articles on the Playborhood Survey. See Playborhood Survey: Who Responded to read about how we solicited responses and who responded. The survey is now closed. If you’d like, you can respond to the same survey questions, for future analysis, here.]

When asked what are the most important child/neighborhood-related considerations in their decision to choose their current home, Playborhood Survey respondents made school district and type of street their top choices.

Parents were asked to rate each choice from “most important” (1) to 7th most important (7). The results are shown below. The numbers indicate the average ranking across all parents.

Playborhood Survey III: Parents Are Willing to Pay for Play

2007-11-25T21:06:00-08:00

Then, they answered the question, “How much additional money would you pay” for this house? The results are shown above. The bottom line of these data is that they would be willing to pay a lot.

Let’s put these numbers in perspective. Recall that 75% of all respondents are from the San Francisco Bay Area. In October 2007 the median price for a house in the Bay Area was $625,000, but the median price for houses of respondent parents is likely to be much higher - perhaps $1 million.

Nonetheless, the median amount of money that a parent would be willing to pay in the survey is about $50,000, so, in rough terms, parents are willing to pay 5% extra for a house in a neighborhood with better play opportunities.

This is a very large figure, especially when one steps back to think about the fact that real estate agents usually have zero or next to zero helpful information about play opportunities for prospective residents of a house. To determine whether a house has good play opportunities for a family’s kids, the parents would want to know things like the ages and exact locations of all kids in the neighborhood, how often kids play outside and what they do, whether kids walk to school, how well-equipped the closest parks are, and whether kids from that neighborhood frequent that park.

Instead of providing detailed information on these questions, they know lots about trivia like termite inspections and kitchen counters.

So. obviously, there is an unmet market need in the residential real estate market for information on play opportunities. In fact, one parent commented, “I think it’s hard to know before you buy a house what the neighborhood is like, specifically how many children and what ages they are.”

Sure, it’s hard to know this, but the fact remains that this is vital information for parents.

I’d like to make one other very important point: If it were possible to get information to prospective buyers on the play opportunities of a house’s neighborhood, the price of houses with good play opportunities would go up by, say, 5% or so.

Thus, as this information becomes available, neighborhoods will have a monetary incentive to provide better play opportunities for kids. In other words, apart from the benefits to kids, some parents may want their kids to have more pickup basketball games or games of tag, and then publicize this fact, because it increases their property values.

This may seem like a crass analysis, but in economics, individual incentives do matter, even if they’re not the only reason people do things. So, for instance, people keep their lawns and front foliage neat and trimmed not only because it makes them feel better when they look at their house, but also because doing so increases their property values.
[NOTE: This is the third in a series of four articles on the Playborhood Survey. See Playborhood Survey: Who Responded to read about how we solicited responses and who responded. The survey is now closed. If you’d like, you can respond to the same survey questions, for future analysis, here.]

In the first article on the Playborhood Survey, we showed that parents want their children to play more. In this article, I’ll show that they’re willing to pay big $$$ for that desire.

81.4% of parents said they would move to a new house in a neighborhood adjacent to their current one that has “significantly better play opportunities for your child(ren)” if the move cost them no money. Of the 18.6% who said they would not move, many commented that the cost of moving outside of money costs is just too high.

First Playborhood Local Site Launched for Palo Alto / Menlo Park (CA)

2007-11-21T06:10:00-08:00

reflections of parents on kids’ play issues
reflections of high school students on kids’ play issues
neighborhood reviews
playground reviews
reviews of kid play-friendly homes for sale

The large interactive map on the header of Playborhood Local sites shows neighborhood boundaries and “pushpins” for each story on the site, showing the specific place each story discusses.

Please {encode="help@playborhood.com" title="contact us"} if you have any interest in helping run a Playborhood Local site for your community. We have a great deal to get you up and running, so all you’ll need is ideas for articles, contacts with lots of local parents and kids, and a few hours a week.
Last night (November 20, 2007), Playborhood launched its first “Playborhood Local” site for Palo Alto and Menlo Park (CA).

Playborhood Local sites feature purely local content about kids’ play for inhabitants of the area, or for those considering moving there. Articles will feature things like: