Even if they thought it was for their kids.
I don’t mind driving, in some cases I even like it. During my COVID lockdown winter I would take an hour long drive just to get out of the house, without the pain of Alberta winter temperatures. But after temporarily living in the Halifax outer suburbs for a few months this year, I’m over it. The commute was long, running to the shops was a time sink if it was anything beyond the typical grocery run, and meeting up with people was a pain.
The suburbs are inherently isolating for a lot of people. I certainly wasn’t the target demographic to be living there, single adult with no kids. I don’t even have a dog. But that got me thinking about my experience as a kid in the suburbs.
The new suburb design is a bit more space maximizing, trees be damned. It’s so close to connecting buildings which would have an efficiency benefit but touching walls is socialism.
I was generally pretty lucky as far as low density suburbs were concerned. Most of the homes were new builds only a couple years old by the time I was born. As a result the demographics of homeowners were heavily skewed to young parents buying their first homes. There was a high number of kids my age for the number of people that particular suburban neighbourhood could house. This is good for young kids that can generally get along with any other kid their age. We didn’t have the numbers to form a sports team, or a field to play anything but we had woods and hills.
Enter the pre and early teen years. In my experience this is when kids narrow in on a personality and start closing in their friend groups. Granted how small that circle becomes varies wildly, some people like breathing other people’s air, others like a small group. I’m the later, so I liked doing things with my close friends. Unfortunately, even though we went to the same school, they weren’t close. Thus enters the main problem.
You can’t go anywhere without a car.
Before the age of 16 you can’t drive, period. Transit is too expensive for the amount of users in the far outreaching suburbs, Express lines are usually scheduled for work commuters and still require driving to get to them. So parents take on the burden of driving their kids to everything that isn’t school. And when they can’t kids stay at home, maybe walk the subdivision? I got to experience a bit of tighter community as a kid, one where the kids could walk to a library or a corner store. It was exciting to have just a couple options when you normally had one. Penny candy hell yeah!
I don’t think the car dependency is good for parents either. If giving your children a full life feels like it prevents you from having one maybe you won’t as many kids. I think we created helicopter parents by accident, but it was an outcome of a way of life that gave a lot of people the feeling that they had to live through their kids. Coupled with moral panics about child abductions in the 1980s, which do happen but are incredibly rare, you don’t want your kids leaving the safety of the quiet suburb if they live in a place dense enough to go anywhere. We create a system of behaviour then complain it ruins kids, forever and forever.
Encountering nice people is more likely than you think.
I will acknowledge that as of time of writing we have a missing children case active in NS. Information made public at this point hasn’t tipped if any outcome is more likely than another. I don’t wish to speculate, because in cases like this wide speculation can ruin peoples lives if it ends up being wrong. See the satanic panic for clear examples of lives being ruined over nothing (a key point if you know nothing about this event in the 1980s was that no one was ever caught doing “Satanic Abuse” anywhere).
A city that is safe for kids old enough to walk and take transit on their own should be the goal. Give them independence, build places they can hang out with their friends. We give kids cellphones really young now anyway, it’s not like you can’t reach them. Parents will even be allowed to do something besides watch their kids 24/7. Societal trust is good.
Margaret Thatcher jump scare. For a counterpoint she once said “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” source BBC. A lonely view of the world that I think sucks.
The partial backtrack
If you want a house in the suburbs with a big lawn and a big garage for all your toys that is fine. I don’t think that’s a crime to want it. But don’t think that it is required for your 2.5 kids, do it for yourself. Kids are adaptable to all kinds of situations, if you let them be. They might even enjoy the freedom.
NS Politics 