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Anyone else have a neighborhood with no kids? Or did you grow up in a neighborhood with no kids?
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Anonymous
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Assuming your child is in elementary school, how do you help them to spend time with friends after school? Drive them? And how often do they see their friends?
Or if you grew up with no kids in your neighborhood, how often did you see your friends outside of school? |
Anonymous
We have this issue right now. We love our neighborhood and there have always been playmates for our older child, but our younger child has no one in the neighborhood to play with.
We have considered moving due to this, but there is no guarantee,even in a neighborhood full of kids, that there would be a child the right age. Right now we try to plan 2 visits with a friend each week . Would love it to be more, but with work and after school activities, it is hard for us. No doubt about it that our younger child is much lonelier than our older child ever was. |
Anonymous
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I'm not sure if you are exaggerating to make your point, or not (-no- kids? I'm so curious where that is) ...
but if we somehow found ourselves in a neighborhood with zero children, I would immediately put my child in longer-day preschool, or aftercare, or something like that. |
Anonymous
OP here. No, I'm not exaggerating. Our neighborhood is very, very small. |
Anonymous
| There are no children that are my child's age in my neighborhood. The children are all much older than she is. She hangs out with her nanny our dog and does homework. |
Anonymous
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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.. |
Anonymous
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I lived in a neighborhood with no kids and I am not sure if I would have survived it if it wasn't for my siblings.
We live in a neighborhood filled with kids all around the ages of my children and it is truly heaven. There is no need to schedule a play date. As soon as one child is outside playing they all seem to go out and play together. I do worry about them when they are all teenagers though. |
Anonymous
| 18:06, where do you live? |
Anonymous
| Greenbelt |
Anonymous
| My children are 5,6,and 8. We live in a neighborhood that is safe and beautiful, but filled with elderly people. My children have no nearby friends. I work part-time from home, and even though I have no babies, I have to get a sitter whenever I sit down to the computer. In good weather, I shouldn't have to do this. I should be free to get organized for an hour or so in the house while they play with neighbors until toward the evening. It breaks my heart that they are missing out on so many of the things I enjoyed as a kid; social skills, exercise, night games, roller skating, bike riding. None of them are willing to learn to ride a bike, and my oldest (who wants to sell her bike) is developing a weight problem. Sadly, I know this wouldn't be the case if there were kids on our street. Playing with friends is her favorite activity. When we do bring in friends from other neighborhoods, she plays so hard, she turns red and sweats like crazy, having the time of her life! My husband, kids and I love our house, but the neighborhood is so boring I want to move. My husband won't hear of it though, as he worked really hard to get us here. |
Anonymous
| I grew up without a neighborhood--lived on a farm with no neighbors close by. |
Anonymous
| Like the PP, I grew up on a farm and there were no kids nearby - of course, we had all sorts of dangerous farm tools to play with when we weren't actually using them. In the summer, we would occasonally have playdates but probably not more than once a week. It wasn't until we were allowed to ride our bicycles to friends' houses (about 4 miles) that we had a social life outside of school. |
Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
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This was me. We had a neighborhood with kids, but they ALL went to the private school in the neighborhood and I went to public school. (Hint: Its in Kensington).
In any case, none of my friends lived close and my mom had to drive to CC and Bethesda. No one ever wanted to do play dates in Kensington. It was honestly a PIA for my mom until I could drive because she and my dad had to drive us but we only got to see friends during the weekend and sometimes during the week in the summer. When they both worked FT we never got to see friends during the week. |
Anonymous
| We used to live in an "urban" neighborhood where there are lots of babies, but people tend to move out when their kids get mobile. We lasted longer than most, but finally moved to a neighborhood with lots of kids. It has been fine, because dc is in extended day at her school, which she loves, and it is like a play date every day (kids with sahm's beg to be allowed to go). We also do playdates at our house fairly frequently, as well. Now dc is older, we really love having her friends nearby. |