Reply to Do you think it is better to live in a neighborhood full of kids or be sheltered?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We prioritized moving to a cul de sac neighborhood with kids for this reason. However it didn’t work out. The children are almost never outside, don’t play together at all, and the whole neighborhood is very unfriendly / families keep to themselves. It’s sad as I would have loved a close neighborhood with friendly neighbors but you can’t count on that even if you choose a house with that goal in mind.[/quote]

I hear you. We don't live on a cul de sac but did choose our neighborhood in part because when we moved here (without kids) we saw so many families and thought it would be a great place with lots of kids for ours to play with. And when our kids were babies/toddlers, that was pretty true -- lots of activities for little kids and there is a sense of community for parents of very young kids.

What we didn't realize is that although the public schools here are well regarded, a lot of families do private even starting in K, and it's not all the same private but a bunch of different once. Plus some do public but even there, the schools track starting in 4th and kids in the gifted track are totally separate from kids who are not. What this means functionally is that while there are many kids on our street, our kids don't really know or play with them. Most go to different schools or are in a different school pathway. Kids do activities through school or through private travel teams or offerings, and there's minimal overlap. Our 9 year old has a couple girls from our neighborhood in her ballet classes but neither of them go to her school so those friendships don't feel very deep. Everyone is just doing their own thing.

Recently a neighbor invited us to their daughter's 7th birthday party (or son is the same age and while they aren't in the same school now, they were "besties" in preschool). We went and every other family there was from their private school, and they seemed genuinely confused as to why we were there (not the people who invited us, but all the other families). We kept explaining the connection and they'd just look at as blankly and then move on. Which I get -- they are unlikely to see us again. But we have a lot of disjointed social experiences like that with our kids, and it's been hard for them to create a cohesive social life. They each have friends but they are siloed and mostly don't know each other, and there is zero spontaneous get togethers in the neighborhood or the local playground, everything is scheduled and planned.

We thought we were being smart buying in a neighborhood full of families with good schools but it hasn't worked out that way. It's okay, certainly not bad enough to uproot ourselves, but not what we were expecting for our kids.[/quote]

Even though kids may go to different schools, that shouldn't matter, parents should be sending their kids out anyway. The rest of it sounds like it comes down to overscheduling.[/quote]

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