Comment by lr4444lr
3 days ago
The parental part bears special mention.
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!
I’ll endorse this heavily.
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.
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.
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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.
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>No one knows any neighbors.
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.
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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).
It's a difficult balance.
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 sounds like probably you're an introvert. And that's ok! But surely not every parent of this generation is an introvert...
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context: i’m in my early 30’s and i’m not a parent
the behavior you described of the 25-35 year range is appalling. and those aren’t my kids so that’s saying something.
Call it what it is, antisocial. Baffling to me…why are people so weird?
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.
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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.
[1]Table 2 in https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
[2]https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm
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.
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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.
Whoa what?? I had no idea about this.
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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.
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Is it because of less churchgoing? Church is basically one large standup (and sit down, and stand up, x a few times :-) ) for the community.
Or maybe kidnapping paranoia fueled by years of crime news programs?
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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
I saw a reddit post where a woman was arrested for letting her 10 year old walk a mile alone
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 give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.
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.
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How are you communicating your contact information to your kids friends parents in a non-cringe way?
If handing them a piece of paper with my number is too cringe, I'd be really happy to have a non-cringe, non-standout (?) way of doing that.
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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.
My kids asked for them. They are under 10. (They asked me to write down my number to give to their friends. Business card is just as good.)
We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're getting their own phones at that age.
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.
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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.
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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.
I'll suggest you are thinking of the teenage years where anything involving your parents is mortifying.
That's not really the case with elementary school age kids.
My kids would totally be up for this. I don't have business cards though
It’s surprisingly fast and cheap to print a 100 of them and have them mailed straight to your house.
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.
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.
>The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing
Either you are I are reading it wrong, because I don't see anywhere in their comment where they say their own kids aren't initiating.
What they do say is that other parents are rarely initiating play dates.
Can you quote the part where they "admit that their kids don't initiate socializing"?
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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.
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How old are your kids?
We've got a toddler. Currently bracing for the upcoming shit-show which will be the pre-school and beyond years.
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.
I wonder how the generation of latchkey kids fared.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
According to data nobody has friends anymore, especially men.
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.
Take away all those kid's iPads and on-demand cartoons and I bet the parents start begging for more playdates
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
Families are smaller in general. That means there are less kids to see in most neighborhoods even if they are outside.
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...
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?
As a father of 2 in Canada, I feel the same. Loving the discussion here.
Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.
/s
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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.
As I posted above, my kids literally asked for them. They are both under 10, and don't have their own phones.