Feb 3, 2025
As Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist, recently wrote in the New York Times, “underparenting requires structural change.” Unlike most political pundits, she’s not just talking about economic policies like family leave and subsidized child care. She’s talking about actual physical structures, and the cultural change required to populate them. We need to “build back our tolerance for children in public spaces,” she writes, “and create safe environments where lightly supervised kids can roam freely.”
Calls for such environments increased during the pandemic, as cities nonsensically closed playgrounds, and families found themselves pinched between remote work and remote school. Philadelphia’s Parks & Recreation department moved summer camp to the street, while parents whose kids had previously been too busy to socialize found driveways, garages and cul-de-sacs made great play zones when no one was driving in and out.
While many temporary fixes disappeared once the pandemic was declared over, Queens’s Paseo Park, a 1.3-mile-long corridor in family-heavy Jackson Heights, is finally getting a permanent open streets design to reduce car traffic after people experienced the joys of not having to text to make plans, pay for organized after-school activities, or battle with cars when learning to ride a bike.
Everyone loves to complain about helicopter parenting. Folks to my left want state-provided, kinda-structured free-range play; folks to my right want homeschooling cooperatives. But so many designed solutions for free outdoor play are ready to hand, if communities can just rally around them. People of the USA, I beg you: build parks, good sidewalks, shaded indoor-outdoor spaces — not just fenced yards. These spaces make neighborhoods, which are the real user interface.
via Jarrett Fuller