THE American suburbs include many lovely, leafy communities that are ideal in many ways for family life. With organized activities for children, backyards for playing, abundant schools, safe streets, and businesses that cater to families, the suburbs are highly welcoming to couples raising children. The fact that most families, given the choice, do prefer the suburbs is further evidence that they are.

However, despite these amenities and the enormous population shift to the suburbs in the 20th century, which was in many ways orchestrated by social engineers, the overall landscape of family life in the suburbs is not so rosy. In many ways, the suburbs — admittedly a general term that encompasses various types of communities without the density of the cities — are inimical to family formation. They are not truly designed with the interests of families in mind. The low birthrate and poorer health of the family attest to this.

For one, the suburbs typically require a minimum of two cars per family, clearly a major reason why many families cannot survive on one income. The declining male wage is a big part of this inability to make do on one income, but even if wages in recent decades had kept up with the economy, it would still be difficult for many middle class families to handle the tremendous expense of cars, gas, insurance, maintenance, fees, driveways, etc. Of course, there is always some cost to human travel and every economy depends on human beings moving around, but because of the lack of density in the suburbs, travel is especially expensive and time-consuming.

There are other serious obstacles.

The lack of density and suburban zoning are impediments to the formation of home-based business, which could make it possible for more parents to raise their children themselves. In fact, in many places some home-based enterprises, such as home-based bakeries, are not legal at all and in most communities home businesses are subject to costly regulation. Even if home retail were possible, the lack of pedestrian traffic would be a problem.

The suburbs, as many observers and famous feminists have noted, do not encourage spontaneous human interaction and thus leave mothers and young children in oases of isolation — another factor in the flight of women from the home. I recently attended an exhibit of Korean art in the Josean dynasty. It was ingenious the way the villages were designed to afford both privacy and community life. The American suburbs, by contrast, encourage privacy but not community life.

Organized activities, which can be so time-consuming that some families never spend time alone together, have taken over where spontaneous play and socializing would be. There is no naturally occurring social life, so it needs this artificial stimulation. This is not to say that organized activities are bad. Not at all. But when it is not possible for your children to interact with other children unless they are signed up for an expensive activity 20 minutes away, it is hard  to establish a healthy daily rhythm, another reason, I believe, why women have willingly left. This lack of a naturally-occurring social network is especially hard on women. For a young adult living with his parents while getting a start in life, this lack of spontaneous interaction can also be acutely difficult. The wonders of the family den just don’t cut it. There is no ready escape.

The suburbs took the place of ethnic neighborhoods where the lives of people not only centered on family, but included an extended network of connections and traditions. The Polish neighborhood could observe its distinctive traditions and protect its identity because it had enough density for common events to take place. The feast days of the suburbs, by contrast, have been reduced to Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July. The suburbs are not festive places.

There are no bocce courts for old men; no taverns where a man might stop for some socializing with other men on his walk home from work; no boulevards where people walk up and down in their dress clothes on Sunday; few little shops in walking distance from homes where women might run for a few supplies and have a chance encounter with a friend. Retail is suffocatingly dominated by corporations that have stifled community life and brought untold depression with their visual ugliness, inhuman gigantism and impersonal service. A day of shopping makes one feel like a hamster on his monotonous wheel. No wonder people retreat into virtual worlds. They are exhausted, spent and dispirited. They are snuffed out.

The parks in many suburbs are wonderful, but it is sad to watch your child play alone on the swings or in the sandbox. The suburbs are built for children and yet there are relatively few children, despite pockets of higher fertility in some wealthy communities.

And then there is the famous materialism, which is not a myth but the inevitable result of a culture that values accomplishment over being and quantity over quality. Things constitute identity and signal one’s belonging. They prove that one is industrious and active. The active over the passive virtues are esteemed. A well-designed kitchen can prevent social oblivion. Granite countertops may ensure acceptance. Your children face possible ostracism if they do not have a vast playroom to entertain their guests, who may not be capable of imagining kingdoms and fairylands because they are so overwhelmed with novelty and recreational gimmickry that they have no interior life. The outer world and its demands have snuffed out their imaginations too. But then what are you supposed to do? Your children must have friends. They cannot be hermits.

And so women leave their children to help their children, so that their children have some kind of social life. Although truthfully if they had more children their children would have a naturally occurring social life — but then there wouldn’t be the fancy home. They leave the home in order to afford the home. It is a great paradox.

It is a paradox that makes the long-lost row house, with no garage or family car parked outside, filled with people and their endless irritations; the smells of dinner cooking; and the sound of children playing on the street seem like not such a barbaric place.

— Comments —

Pete Madsen writes:

“…no taverns where a man might stop for some socializing with other men on his walk home from work…”

Walk home from work? That phrase jumped out at me…I can assure you that very few people walk to work at, say, Boeing. Boeing has plants in Everett, in Auburn, in Seattle, and thinks nothing of transferring a worker from one to another. Boeing’s plants in western Washington are located in places where there is literally no one living in walking distance, even assuming that anyone would want to live within walking distance of a Boeing plant.

All right, that’s just one example, but not terribly different from a great many workplaces in today’s world. Fellowship with one’s co-workers comes in different forms nowadays, from the carpool stopping to pick up a six-pack on the way home to common membership in various types of groups, whether community- or work-oriented.

And the tavern, while it is certainly a place where guys come to socialize, is also a place where some guys go on payday to spend the rent money and come home after closing time, and certainly not a feature of the landscape that has diminished with people’s preference to live in the suburbs.

 Laura writes:

I realize very few people walk home from work. That was part of my point. And it is true — people socialize in different ways and the tavern was most definitely not always a good thing.

As I said, I don’t wish to romanticize the denser neighborhoods of the past, where it was more likely someone would walk home from work. But all in all, I think they were more conducive to family life, which is not to say family life has ever been a picnic.

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