My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
Often the kids like to play together, but the parents are the ones that are just... weird and asocial. I hate to bring agism into this, but there definitely seems to be a generational gap with the adults.
Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.
When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.
No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.
Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
That's really rough. We bought into a neighborhood in an older college town, and I think that's helped things a bit for us. Smaller houses and yards, so people hang out around the neighborhood or in parks. Everyone's out walking their dogs all the time, and pretty much everyone is happy to stop and chat. I think it's just about getting lucky and finding places where people prioritize the community rather than having giant houses, giant yards with swingsets, and giant cars so they never need to talk to anyone.
Have you thought maybe its your environment? I think the "nice suburban communities" have always been filled with antisocial people (as someone who grew it in them). People go to the suburbs for quiet and to be left alone.
I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from school and required a car to hang out.
In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more. My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the street.
Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a walk.
We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and without friction.
It’s not a suburb/urban thing (though that could be correlated).
It’s an area thing. I think the biggest thing that leads to it is age stratification in a neighborhood - when every family is in the exact same “place” something weird happens.
But looking at a neighborhood on Halloween might be a great way to check.
While I don't deny there are pockets of abnormality like you suggest, having grown up on a dirt road in rural America and spent most of my adult life in cities, suburbia comes across as the antithesis of community. It was founded on the very promise of insularity. Obviously, that's not everyone's agenda, but it's beyond debate that its defining principle was segregation (followed by uniformity and convenience). I want to be sympathetic but I don't understand how people buy into it without accepting this. We've made some progress as a society, but having visited a lot of suburban neighborhoods all over the U.S., the remnants of the original mindset still come across loud and clear.
I think a key component is that “suburb” has multiple meanings - and which one comes to mind when it’s mentioned depends on where you were raised/lived.
Some suburbs are the stereotypical miles and miles of identical homes with no sidewalks.
Others are actual older rural towns that have been consumed by the nearby metropolis - and these ones feel quite different.
There’s a kind of “suburb” that is usually quite lively - the rural suburb, often a pocket of relatively dense homes in a sea of wheat.
One of my indicators is lemonade stands. If they appear regularly, the area is alive.
That’s tough. We also bought a house in a nice suburban community right outside of NYC and it’s been amazing. We know all the neighbors, exchange gifts during holidays, and a ton of kids come out for Halloween. What I really liked about the neighborhood when house hunting was seeing kids ride their bikes around on the streets unsupervised. I don’t know if it had any correlation, but the vibe felt right.
Why would you know them? If this were 1965, you were going to live in that house the rest of your life, and they were going to live in that house the rest of their lives right next door and so it only made sense to get to know them. But today, both you and they are only here temporarily until it becomes time to move away in 4 years when you job-hop for that raise. Will you even live in the same state afterwards? Maybe at the next place you'll settle down and stay long enough to put forth the effort, but for now you're as much a migrant as any Dust Bowl Okie.
Even just 6 or 7 years ago younger coworkers were adamant that renting was the way to go, because they didn't want to be tied down to a house that they'd have to sell in a hurry when they inevitably moved away for a new job.
Americans are moving less frequently now than they were in 1965:
Overall, when looking at both migration between U.S. states and within them, fewer Americans are moving each year. In 1948, the first year on record with the Census Bureau, more than 20 percent of the population moved in the past year. This had decreased to just 8.7 percent in 2022. While the share of Americans moving across state lines remained more stable, those moving within their state became much fewer, from between 15-17 percent of Americans per year in the 1950s and 1960s to results in the single digits in the new millennium.
Perhaps fewer move. But they definitely perceive it differently, especially the younger demographics. There are fewer young people each year too, as our population ages, so I'm not sure your statistics are particularly relevant to the group we're talking about... unless you were under the impression that all the nonagenarians were party animals or something.
I am probably that sort of parent. Truth is I dread socializing. I enjoy just hanging around with my family in the peace and quiet of my home. Not one to engage in small talk with neighbors, other parents, etc.
My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will take her to the public playground, get her into the local sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).
As a parent who is an introvert married to another introvert, it is definitely a challenge. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed when our kids have friends over, and the desire to avoid that is strong. We have to actively tell ourselves that we have to sacrifice our quiet for our kids social lives. I don’t really enjoy socializing with other parents while my kid plays, either, and my wife hates it even more than I do.
It really takes active effort to make sure our kids have play dates.
> I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book
Just do that and don't feel bad about it. I saw a bunch of parents like that at all my kids different sports and other events and I always respected them for at least showing up. Honestly, it's worse to sit and make forced awkward smalltalk, because you feel you have to, than just relaxing and being yourself.
It's the phones. No one has anything to talk about anymore because constant scrolling leaves you with nothing to show. And then it's self perpetuating --easier to keep slamming the dopamine button than trying to make conversation with a completely atrophied social muscle.
Every family is dual income now, so every family needs to find something to do with their kids once school lets out. Growing up in the 80's most families around were single income and kept kids at home over the summers. As a result, kids ruled the neighborhoods, bouncing around between houses all day, where there could be some reasonable expectation of peripheral oversight. Now, everyone is min-maxing camp schedule to ensure there is child oversight during working hours, and the neighborhoods are empty.
We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you are left with the realities of every other child friend being wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to oversee and shuttle.
The result is an improvement over the 100% booked compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of independence that I experienced and have come to credit with really advancing my own personal development as a child.
By BLS statistics, 50% of married couples today both work[1], which is the same as it was in 1978, and lower than it was for most of the 80's and 90's[2]. There are some caveats to those statistics. They cover all married couples, including retirees, and there are more retirees today than in the 80s. It also doesn't differentiate between full-time and part-time work.
However, it does show that the majority of families were already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from supporting a family on a single income started much earlier than that.
Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both parents working, and we still got together to play all the time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or dropped off for further ones.
What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park. When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot the swing again.
Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in shaping child socialization.
When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.
But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement
I definitely feel a bit lucky that my kids were big enough to be out of car seats by elementary school, already. That said, I thought most were out of needing car seats by the second or third grade? I'm surprised to hear it is at all common for kids to still be in seats all the way to middle school.
I also can't offer much of a defense of car seats. Obviously, go for safety; but it does feel that people are chasing a tail end of safety that is not really measurable. Modern cars and using seat belts have come a long long way to make vehicles safer.
There is also the interesting contrast with busses on this. Kids don't buckle up or use seat belts in school busses.
This. This is definitely part of the problem.
I can't even offer to take my kid & his friends anywhere, other than walk to the park after they're deposited at my house, because every one of them needs a car seat.
While well intentioned, car seat laws have gotten a bit insane. Minnesota recently implemented some pretty nonsensical ones that are dependent on if they've outgrown their seat.
How are cops supposed to know if they outgrew their seat? It also means that when they move to forward facing or a booster seat depends on the car seat you bought, not their height, (only their) age, or weight.
For older kids, here's the new rule:
"A child at least 9 years old or has outgrown their booster seat AND the child can pass the "5 step test" may be restrained by a regular seatbelt, but they must be in a the back seat if possible under 13."
That's not too bad because they at least have a set age, but you still can't expect a parent to have a set of 4 booster seats ready to go to haul your kids friend's around.
As an addendum, my wife just messaged me about getting our daughter a worse child seat because ours is rated for 50 pounds. In Minnesota's new laws that means she needs to be rear facing until she's 50 pounds. She's a few months away from being 4 years old and she's 33 pounds or so. Her legs are getting incredibly scrunched up and we can't extend her leg room even though our car seat is made for that because there simply isn't room in our car to do so. I saw comments on a Facebook post about it from our county that someone's 7 year old was going to need to go back to rear-facing.
I think a lot of this should have fallen back to liability setting in the laws, then? I feel safe saying cops should not be ticketing people for kids being in the seat wrong. However, I can see your rates going up if you are found to be in violation of some of these rules during an accident?
Sucks, as this isn't as easy as saying it will be your responsibility and fault if the kid is injured. Odds are high this will just make a bad situation worse.
The concept of playdates is amusing to me as an immigrant. In Indian cities where most people live in apartments, the kids just go down and play around with the 10s of kids from the neighborhood. Adults get free time and kids get to socialize and enjoy.
There was a line somewhere about Americans being increasingly unable to handle unstructured socializing.
Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
Totally valid observation, but things definitely changed. Neighbors don't know each other as well, so the grandma keeping an eye out the back window doesn't exist anymore. It was a village watching the kids before, its not that way now.
I suspect they didn't know each other that well back in the day, either. We just tell ourselves that they did. When we've lived in apartment complexes, as an easy example, there were a lot of people we didn't know. We just also got to know a few that we would see on a regular basis, as well.
I think theres probably an uneven distribution on this... I can think back to my childhood in a small town in new england and I can still remember everyone on my block, the block across the street, and every kid's house within a half mile or so. I even remember some of the 4 digit phone numbers (b/c almost everyone had the same area code and city code). When we moved though we didn't know anywhere near that many people.
Agreed on the uneven distribution. I would posit that this is probably even uneven in the communities, as well? Just because you knew everyone in your block doesn't mean they knew each other that well.
Similarly, I expect most kids in a classroom to know of each other, but I doubt they all know each other. If that makes sense. Such that, it is easy to think this is also a by product of how much more you can do inside your houses? Back when you would see folks outside more often, it was common for you to know of a lot of people. If you only had a few "shut in" type people, you knew them as the shut in type people. As it becomes more and more of us, it gets tougher.
I dunno about you but I grew up Irish Catholic, had parents who very much lived by "GTFO and come back at dinner", and I never made any real friendships or relationships via church. It was a wholly useless avenue for anything - and this was in several different church communities over the years, too.
IME while church might be a community, it's really a very stifled one.
Right, this is what I am wondering, is the reason people were comfortable doing this the fact that there was a weekly touchpoint with the community? The church visits might be stifled but if they establish a relationship with that large group of people then that might enable more free roaming at other times.
Ha! Probably more than fair for a lot of folks. It also was not uncommon for this to be when parents were cleaning the house. Doing that with a kid around is unreasonably difficult.
some of our common free range play places included walking to the dump and new home construction sites to have dirt clod wars. maybe some structure isnt bad. i turned out fine but looking back it probably would have been cool to get taken to a park
It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were. That just made it worse.
A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.
One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
It depends where in socal of course like anywhere else. In a more urban part like in la there are no busy bodies, you see kids out skateboarding drainage culverts during school hours all the time.
One factor may have to do with birth rates and construction. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all built up within the span of a few years, and populated by young families, in the early 60s. There were kids all over the place. Anybody who wanted to play would just go out and holler, and they'd have a few other kids almost instantly.
Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.
Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.
I had lots of homework 80s-90s. But still managed to get outside, play, do stupid stuff. My house had all the kids playing video games and when we got tired of that we went to play sports.
I physically cringed reading it. The intention is great but if I was his kid those cards would be staying in my backpack. Making a kid stand out like that is risky as fuck for social standing.
But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.
An honest attempt from a social adult to develop a sense of community is far from cringe. Reasonably speaking, its actions like that which can actually make socialization happen. If the old way wasn't working, so try something else.
The older one, yes. The younger one, no. So I do the cringe method of writing my information down.
But I didn't realize that it was "risky as fuck" and making my kids "stand out" so much to have my contact information on some paper to give to their closer friends. I must be way more socially inept than I thought. (I guess my eldest must be too, because she thinks handing a card to a friend is convenient.)
So please, if you have some method that is roughly the same level of convenience but not "risky as fuck", I'm all ears.
Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card around to your friends (and is a borderline disingenuous way of summing it up, business cards have business implications i.e., formal implications it’s kinda in the name of them, kids aren’t business people aren’t used to using them socially like you might and don’t see it as a scrap of paper) if you can’t see that then yes I agree with your conclusion on your social skills.
Hey let me give you my mom’s number or add her on Facebook / instagram (how old are these kids by the way?) is not the same as handing out and having handy your moms/dads business cards.
It just isn’t.
It ain’t rational and yes technically they are ‘both pieces of paper’ but the vibe is simply different.
It ain’t cool. It comes across as desperate and forced and it’s embarrassing as a result.
The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses, that’s unfortunate but I stand by it.
>Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card
It's my general contact information on business card stock.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but when I read the comment, I just assumed they meant "business cards" in the general sense. Like how there are "joke business cards" that say "yes I'm tall, the weather is fine", etc.
Mine are business card size, on business card paper, made on a business card generation website. It simply says my name, my number, and my email.
>The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses
Yes, I think it is wild to say that it is "cringe" and "risky as fuck". The dude just wants his kids to play with some friends. It seems to be working for everyone involved.
I feel way more stupid litigating this over comments on the internet mid-day during the week than I would handing out business cards with my full business information on it, to be honest. Parents get so much flak on the internet for normal ass things, it's crazy. Say a little off-hand comment about how you're trying to get your kids to have a good social life and people come out of the woodworks to call you cringe.
Social risk is real. You have derailed this by applying it to your different situation but have taken on the emotional offense.
Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.
Do you get it now?
It is social risky whether you like it or not and getting angry and offended on other grown adults behalf, again making it about you when it wasn’t when you don’t even do that.
Also it doesn’t work. He was literally complaining that it doesn’t work. We aren’t talking about you.
And he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway! So there we go, does your mom have my number, yes she has all the numbers on the list, well give her my business card because I like to be the nail that gets hammered down.
>Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.
Do you get it now?
You must have skipped over the entire middle of my comment.
>making it about you
It's a conversation on a public forum, I do more or less the same thing, I'm chiming in with my experience, yes.
But this is obviously unproductive. You're right that I'm defensive over it, which is probably a sign for me to step back.
>Also he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway!
Side note, but my kids have friends in other classes and I'm not allowed to see those class lists because my kid isn't in the class. I know, I know, I'm making it about me again. But, perhaps there are similar rules elsewhere.
How is this any different than a post-it note with your home phone number on it? It also solves the problem of trying to not knowing your kid’s friend’s parents’ names.
This is something I think about with my kids when they get to that age. I was calling my friends (on their landlines, using our landline) regularly by then, talking to their parents en route to getting them on the phone, and arranging visits. My kids won't grow up in a world where that's something that happens, and I'm not sure how to support their social independence in a world where (as you say) it seems nigh-on-negligent for them to have their own phones.
it's the only way it works. It took me MONTHS to get a hold of the number of my son's best friend's parents so that now we can organize maybe an afternoon of play every 4-5 weeks.
I thought a prime time for contacting the parents is right after school when picking up the kid. Everyone is there waiting, so it's just natural to chit chat, esp when the kids are friends.
I'd count also those memorable school talent shows/performances and events. Another reach out avenue is volunteering, these have a higher chance to match parents with similar availability at least.
Really? While I don’t do it, the alternative is having a kid come home with a scrawled phone number that may or may not be right along with a vague recollection of the name of the parent I am supposed to be calling. Things are a little less akward in our life but it may be because we are closer to what OP describes as grandparents I suppose.
I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.
It would be one thing if it worked. The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing but also claims they aren't poorly socialized. Blaming every parent but themselves when their parenting resulted in kids that don't seem to try hard enough.
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
I read that as his spouse and he were organizing rather than the kids organizing with friends when they're together at school or camp. That's what my kids do unless it's a birthday party or carpool.
They are under 10 years old and do not have their own phones, nor do their single digit aged friends. They have zero sense of proper scheduling. While we live in a good neighborhood, there are more than a few reckless drivers, and short kids are not always visible to good drivers who are distracted. Finally, if the police saw them and decided to follow, there's a very good chance I'd get a knock on my door and a possible child endangerment charge.
I would do this. Of course I’d have cards made up that say “Hoopy Frood who really knows where his towel is” as a screen for parents with similar sense of humor.
> We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better.
Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize their playdates either.
> When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to want to you remaining time for own rest.
> Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.
Parents just want to watch their Internet content and it's easier to just stick their kids in front of a video game or computer vs having an event that requires parenting.
At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
Oh that rings true and it's so depressive. But I think it has more to do with this notion that everything you do socially is awkward in some degree and could be seeing as bad or hurtful, smartphones didn't help us there with the chance of becoming the next national meme just a tiktok away.
Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.
In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
I think there's something to the notion that everything has to be overproduced now. The technology aspect is part of this (you have more tools to make events 'better', so if you don't you might look bad), and so is the culture of making things safer (and so necessitates more organization, more formalization). People get burned out easily and drop out from it.
When I grew up back in the 80s there was a sense of more stability, I think. People didn't move around as much. American suburbs were more of a monoculture(for better and, mostly, for worse, but it was what it was). That stability and comfort let people be more at ease and more open to things. I think now there's a generally higher level of anxiety and it spills over into the need to plan every social interaction.
Even as someone who grew up in more spontaneous times I find I need more scheduling and such these days.
I wonder how much of this comes down to wage stagnation and the need for not only both parents to work, but to work more hours and sometimes multiple jobs, just to keep from drowning. Especially when childcare is so expensive, it's a situation that can compound and spiral.
Parties and kids aren't mutually exclusive. In fact some of my best memories growing up were from the times my parents took me to some house party where all the parents were talking and drinking and having their own adult fun, while us kids were running wild over the property and neighborhood until real late. Adults are excited, kids are excited, it just works, see you next weekend.
Why do the kids need play dates? When I was a 7, you’d just talk to the kids down the street. I knew several kids within a few blocks of where I lived.
It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.
Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.
Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.
There is a coordinated action problem here, I think. (I have three young kids).
When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.
I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.
If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.
Another aspect of the coordination problem is that when I was a kid all the other children in the neighborhood rode the bus home together, and many of us got home before our parents were back from work, so playing together until dinner time was the natural thing to do.
These days, the school day is longer and more parents drive their kids to and from school, so extra effort is required for kids to get back together.
Kids used to just go outside, find one another, and play. I see that you are attempting to solve the problem with organizing playdates. However, I think that playdates and structured EVERYTHING for kids is a contributing factor to how we got here.
I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
When I was a kid, we would always hatch a plan on what to do with the rest of the day while we were still at school. As soon as the bell rang, we hurried home to catch something to eat and then it was off to the woods to build that fortress or whatever.
If there was no school, we'd call the house phones of our friends until we had a plan cooked up. And every day without fail we didn't want to go home. So much stuff to do!
Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.
Kids aren't left to their own devices anymore. They are handed a device. It also doesn't help the cops in a lot of places will arrest the parent for letting the kid out.
I see this SO MUCH, I wonder if you're also in California. I find this state particularly difficult to have a social life in. Everyone is "friendly" but nobody wants to be your friend, always chasing something else and never making time (exceptions apply). It's been exhausting to live here and I can't wait to go back to Europe where social life was not nearly as difficult.
People are friendly everywhere, but they mostly already have a full friend group and so are not looking to add more. Thus breaking in as a new comer is hard. However there are always people who need new friends it is just hard to find them.
I moved cities in 2017 and it was an incredible move for me. Better work opportunities, I met my wife, I own a house now, life is great
But I have made zero male friends here. I have some online friends I chat with and game with, but otherwise I'm pretty isolated
No idea how to make new male friends. Any time I meet people, they seem to always have a tight knit group already and are not really interested in spending any time building new friendships
I am sure I'm not the only lonely dude looking for friends but I dunno
A lot of Millennial parents are -- paranoid. We have had neighbors exclaim that they don't want their children saying hi to us or they'll learn to talk to "strangers". Or a neighbor whose little boy played with my daughters for months, but when they moved the mother scowlingly rejected the idea of playdates because part of her goal in getting a bigger house was -- to put it in my words -- insulating him from other children. These tend to be the same parents who micromanage their children in other ways, like very limited diets and excessive summertime clothing, so, again, it seems like some form of paranoia.
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
Why do you think this is? Because it's very true for me too -- not only play dates but also just regular socializing, like hangouts, game nights, happy hours and bar dates, cookouts, holiday, parties, etc. I feel like I'm always the first one to text or call somebody. It makes me question what other people are doing.
That’s interesting to hear, because I feel like all of my friends who have kids have a very conscientious approach towards socializing their kids, setting up play dates, (plus finding other parents they get along with to make new friends with!)
I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for themselves?
During COVID, every kid in the neighborhood was at my house. School was short maybe 1-3 hours then it was play time. I didn’t know all those kids lived in my neighborhood! Kids had no issue coming over.
I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon
Some good answers but also American parents are stretched thin but also perhaps want to be a larger part of their kids lives?
During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.
It is kind of paradoxical because kids would like the opposite honestly. I love my parents, they are great people, but knowing myself as a kid if I was asked if I wanted to spend saturday with my friends or with my parents, I'd pick my friends every single time no hesitation. You don't laugh like you do with your friends with anyone else. You don't get into shenanigans. You don't have to worry about "behavior" or anything like that. No matter how nice and open your parents are, friends are truly liberating.
In my experience, kids want to be with parents. They want to do their own thing when they become pre-teens. But kids up to 8-9 years do genuinely like their parents.
Why so little time? A large part of the daily routine is things they should be doing with you as quality time. You shouldn't be cooking, eating, and dishes alone - that is a couple hours right there per day.
Same, it’s really disappointing how few parents have reached out to play compared to how often I am trying to find one of my kids’ friends who is around to play.
Why are you doing this? Your kids should be able to find their own playmates. If you live on a farm I can see that kids can't get to anyone else's place without your help. The neighbor girl comes over to our house often to play with my daughter often. My son is annoyed that there are so few boys his age in walking distance (but we keep telling him to go visit the ones we know are in the neighborhood). We are lucky that neighbor girl is really outgoing as otherwise my daughter would sit at home complaining there is nobody to play with just like my son does...
7 is marginal. I seem to recall playing in my neighborhood at 7, but very few of my child's friends are out on their own at this age.
The local public school district allows children to self dismiss starting in 3rd grade, which is typically the year they have turned 8 and will turn 9 during the school year. That seems like a potentially reasonable time to allow them to go out unsupervised.
There’s no way to say this without coming across as extremely rude, but…
> I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.
You might want to pause and think about why policing another person’s behavior like this is so fervently important to you. Most of the parents I’ve met wouldn’t push something like this on their kids but would rather treat it like a collaboration. Kids even at age 5 are capable of explaining that they don’t want to do something and nothing in the parent implied use of fiat. We all need to assume more good faith on the part of parents and of our neighbors if we want to have a social fabric and reasonable discussions.
My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.