In Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place for Play, you’ll find inspiring stories of innovative communities throughout the US and Canada that have successfully created vibrant neighborhood play lives for their children. You’ll also get a comprehensive set of step-by-step solutions to turn around your family and neighborhood cultures, so that your kids can spend less time in front of screens and in adult-supervised activities, and more time engaging in joyful neighborhood play.
Sample Chapter
Chapter 1: A Social Problem
Table of Contents
PART ONE:
What’s the Problem?
Identifying the challenges to free play today
1 A Social Problem
Why the free play problem is a social problem
2 Children and Free Time
What are kids doing instead of free play?
PART TWO:
How are Neighborhoods Solving This Problem?
Profiles of neighborhoods that are making free play a priority
Yale Road: Menlo Park, Calif.
3 An Oasis of Play in an Affluent Suburb 25
My own efforts to create a Playborhood for my three young kids
Lyman Place: South Bronx, N.Y.
4 A Safe Refuge for Play in a Poor Urban Neighborhood
How a community activist has resurrected vibrant childhoods for her neighborhood’s kids
Share-It Square: Portland, Ore.
5 An Intersection Where Kids and Adults Play
How neighbors turned a simple intersection into a community hangout
The Waters: Pike Road, Ala.
6 A New Urbanism Community with a Focus on Family
How the New Urbanism movement is solving the free play problem
The Playscape Revolution: Iowa City, Iowa
7 A Natural Playscape in Every Yard
How a landscape architect is making his innovative yard a model for transforming neighborhoods everywhere
N Street: Davis, Calif.
8 A Retrofit Cohousing Community
How tearing away fences created a “cohousing community” that is more like an extended family
Dibble Avenue: Seattle
9 Frank the Builder Builds Community
How a builder used the tools of his trade and a lot of passion to transform his neighborhood
Iris Way: Palo Alto, Calif.
10 A Neighborhood Summer Camp
How two mothers created a camp for kids on their block to bond, close to home
PART THREE:
How Can I Solve This Problem?
Practical ways to get involved and foster free play in your neighborhood—starting now.
11 Move to a Potential Playborhood
How you can find a new home in a neighborhood with potential for everyday play
12 Create a Neighborhood Hangout
Simple steps to make your yard a magnet for free play
13 Keep Kids’ Lives Simple
Parenting practices to encourage free play in young children
14 Make a Village
How both adults and kids make a Playborhood function
15 Encourage Self-Reliance
Connecting the dots from free play to life skills
16 Let Them Roam with Mobile Phones
How technology can foster increased freedom and exploration in older children
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