Anyone else have a neighborhood with no kids? Or did you grow up in a neighborhood with no kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We live in a condo, very few kids. DD is 7, but has playdates every weekend, and her friends ride the bus home with her on Fridays (the day I work from home). We also schedule activities together - for example, DD signed up for after school classes with a friend, and she takes skating classes on Saturday with another friend. DD is also an only child, so we are making sure she has lots of time to socialize with other children.

I did not grow up this way - I had tons of friends in the neighborhood and if I stepped outside, I would find them and would play with them, mostly unsupervised, for hours on end. Sadly, the world has changed..

We are lucky enough to have a neighborhood where our kids are able to do this. There are nearly a dozen children between the ages of 6 and 11 and very rarely does someone ring our bell. The kids all just meet up in the street. They have ground rules they must follow, we (the adults) do keep an eye out, but mostly they are unsupervised.

When we moved into the neighborhood there was a teenager on the street. He was the only kid on the street growing up and it was hard on him. He's in his 20's now and often comments on how lucky our kids are because he didn't have these kind of adventures as a kid.

When I was a kid the average age on our street had to be about 70 (there were two 100+ that brought up the average). There were a few kids but they went to public school and we didn't see them much. We did at least one playdate a week, though we didn't call them that. It wasn't such a big deal because I had two sisters close in age and we had built in playmates.

[Anonymous]

I grew up in a city and there weren't any kids in my neighborhood. When I was really young (before you get into asking to play with friends) I probably didn't see other kids that much on the weekend, but I was always good at playing and entertaining myself. As I got to an age where kids get more social (4th gradish) I would just tell my mom that I wanted to play with x friend and she'd drive me or my friend's parent would drive them over to my house. It was totally fine.

[Anonymous]

I grew around a ton of kids and it was amazing, we would ride bikes to the pool everyday and we were always with all the kids playing football, etc.
In jr high we moved to a neighboorhood where there were no kids, it was awful, especially going from one extreme to the other

[Anonymous]

Neighborhood with no kids here. Sucks. Charter school in which kids are driven in from all corners of the universe - and waaaay over scheduled after school so few playdates. Sucks again. When I grew up we lived 3 doors down from a great suburban school and there were kids all over the place- was great. My parents knew what they were doing; we had no idea. Our plan is to move by middle school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Me, too. And I had no siblings. Playdates were non-existent back then. So, I read - alot. and played games where I played both sides of the game (sad, I guess, but I didn't feel that way at the time). I had conversations with my stuffed animals at night (probably not because I was starved for interactions with children my own age, as my 4 yo does this with abandon, and he has plenty of child interaction).

Interestingly, there was recently a study about people who read books form the same type of social bonds/experience, get the same type of pleasure from connections with the characters as humans do when connecting with people in real life. In certain circumstances (like when you're stuck on a farm without kids your own age), this ability to find "friends" in books is absolutely key, and is probably what kept me from being bored all that time.

Another poster who grew up with no kids around. And, an only child. Worse, my mom didn't drive.

Yeah, I had no friends until high school. It was pretty horrible. I also read a ton. I'm a happy, well-adjusted adult, but maybe that's because my life got way better as an adult.